The Sword and Laser discussion

what cultures do you see reflected in Teixcalaanli?

I see the obvious Mesoamerican. but also Roman. one lightning has a very Julius Cesar vibe. what do you guy think?

Byzantine - the author is an expert on this
A bit of Aztec

I was almost there. Eastern Roman empire not western. I'm not as familiar with the eastern other than it lasted longer. capital was Constaninople and of course Emperor Justinian converted to Christianity.

other than the obvious name. what other Aztec elements are there. is it just stylistic. there are a few references to a "handball" game which I imagine like the Aztec "game of death" the one with the stone hoop. but I not sure if a am reaching here and mind imitation is making a leap.

She's discussed in interviews that it's clearly based on a mixture of Aztec and Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire (she was a Byzantine scholar herself before leaving academia).

Besides the Aztec-style names, if I remember right, I'd say that the religion and dress are definitely more Aztec, and once you hit the end, you'll really see it. :D

Lee wrote: "and of course Emperor Justinian converted to Christianity."

Typo? Anyway, historical inaccuracies bug me. It was Constantine that converted to Christianity. Justinian was one of the Emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantium if you prefer. Or do you mean someone else?

Justinian ‘the Great’ was the Byzantine Emperor who reconquered some of the Western Roman provinces. Afaik he was always a Christian and hence never converted as such.
There was also Julian ‘the Apostate’ who de-converted from Christianity and was the last non-Christian emperor.

The Teixcalaanli remind me of the Romans/Byzantines with a kind of Aztec aesthetic overlaid on top, and there are some parts that feel vaguely Eastern (albeit I don’t know that much about the history or culture of China or Japan, so it’s just a vague feel based on things like the way the water gardens are described).

I’m about 2/3 of the way through, looking forward to seeing how it ends...

I kind of picked up the eastern vibe too Ruth. the poetry contest in particular seemed japanese to me. but I had nothing concrete to back up that feeling and did not mention it because you guys can be brutal in a passive aggressive sort of way.

just trying to start a conversation here if I wanted to know what the author says I'd Google her. but I was asking the group.

congrats John you the smartest ass in the room today. you got a lot of competition with this lot. got me good, you feel better! typos are kind of my thing. you have to accept who you are... because other are obviously not going to. I am starting to see why only like 10 people post thoughtful comment here and even less start conversations. I also see why Terpkristen was so defensive sounding about her pick in the last podcast. which I enjoyed very much.

thanks for being kind Ruth. I don't mind being corrected or educated. that's why I'm here. I appreciate your approach.

I wish now that I had left post-it notes for the poetry. I remember it really standing out to me both for the prominence it played within the capital and how much detail Martine went into. I cant remember the last time I saw scansion referenced that much in a modern SF book.

I'm not sure if there were any easter eggs buried in the poetry or if it was just used to flesh out the teixcalaanli culture but cool nonetheless.

I know Martine based it on Byzantine court poetry, so she may be adapting some of the original poems to her purposes (thank goodness the originals are probably in the public domain by now.)

While large parts did really make me think of Byzantium (a fascinating subject), the Ambassador visiting from the tiny barbarian republic to the semi-divine emperor and then having to decide how to avoid prostrating herself in front of the Emperor...that felt very much like a Greek at a Persian Court and brought me back to some heavy discussions from my university days doing seminars on Ethnicity in the Ancient World.

William wrote: "While large parts did really make me think of Byzantium (a fascinating subject), the Ambassador visiting from the tiny barbarian republic to the semi-divine emperor and then having to decide how to..."

thanks for sharing William! that's exactly the type of comment i expected when i started the tread.

the Teixcalaanli culture is the most important/interesting part of the book to me. I pick up on things that trigger synapsis in my primitive brain. I wonder if this book has an affect on someone without a university education. Imagine what effect it has on someone with the full weight of a proper education that I foolishly rejected in pursuit of family. what "reflections" (best word for it i could come up with) did the sword and laser members who I respect see. then i take a few days thinking of the best way to ask that question. Trying to start the conversation without invoking "spoilers" i thought that was possible discussing the culture itself not the event in the book. then i get smacked for my effort.

sorry if I sound defensive. I really am not trying to be disrespectful. we all have to make decisions in life and if I would have accepted the football scholarship to UGA I probably would have loss my then girlfriend now wife. I had a girl I wanted to marry and not only a good job but a trade to enter. Since I still have both 14 years latter i don't usually regret that choice. but yesterday made me regret it i was not reacting to the comment i was more acting to that feeling. i post from my phone on break from work in a hurry so i make grammatic errors a lot. I will try harder to proof read my comments but since the errors keep happing i have to accept that. i am only telling y'all this since i have not been kicked out yet i think y'all deserve a explanation for my behavior.

David H. wrote: "I know Martine based it on Byzantine court poetry, so she may be adapting some of the original poems to her purposes (thank goodness the originals are probably in the public domain by now.)"

I will try a different tact. how would Mahit Dzmare ask? please tell the barbarian how important poetry was to the Byzantine empire. I know (there I go again talking about what I think I know ) setting myself up to be smacked again. i have a vague impression that the ancient Greeks had poetry contest that were as popular as the Olympics. did the Byzantine carry over the tradition in some form.

There's a fair amount of Chinese in the language, particularly in the writing system but also the names. Obviously, Martine has opted to render the names in English rather than Teixcalaanli, which is actually quite clever as it both stops her from having to construct an entire language's worth of nouns and hammers home that in the Teixcalaanli language, there's no real distinction between, say, the character for "seagrass" when it's used to indicate the plant versus when it's used in someone's name. Which is to some extent also true in English (the name "Reed" obviously springs to mind here), but a written language based on logograms rather than alphabetic letters represents that connection much more directly.

Oh, and the obsession with classical poetry is also straight-up Chinese. The Chinese imperial examinations were extremely similar to the Teixcalaanli ones, also being based on memorising poems, and concepts and turns of phrase from classical Chinese poetry continue to inform all the East Asian cultures today (for instance, Japanese emperors' regnal names were taken from classical Chinese poems right up until the most recent one).

I guess something that really attracted me to this book was that I couldn't guess which historical civilisation she'd based it on. I'd leaned pretty heavily in the direction of the Aztecs, who I know very little about, though as soon as I found out about the Chinese and Byzantine connection it made more sense . It is something I often find frustrating in fantasy and science fiction when you can immediately guess what a culture is based on. Game of Thrones is the example that springs to mind, The Iron Isle are the Danes, the Dothrakie the Huns/Mongols, at least to my interpretation. It was interesting to focus on one culture, and to find it had such depth.

Max wrote: "There's a fair amount of Chinese in the language, particularly in the writing system but also the names. Obviously, Martine has opted to render the names in English rather than Teixcalaanli, which ..."

Thanks for posting this, I was definitely getting a Chinese cultural vibe and couldn't quite put my finger on why.

"Teixcalaanli expressionlessness" reminded me of Japan, but I didn't attend university or study Byzantine culture, so it could be from somewhere else. Apologies if I misquoted the book since I listened to the audiobook.

I also found myself wondering if this was supposed to be our distant future or an entirely different universe considering that the Empire's History didn't seem to mention coming from another planet & I don't remember anything about where stationers originally came from, They refer to each as human. Is Teixcalaan supposed to be Earth?

I had the same question Ian. the Teixcalaanli planet is very earth like. I thought it was because of the plant names but either way seems to be a galaxy not so far away.

I may be misremembering, but I thought there was a passing reference to common plants and plants native to Teixcalaan.

I was reading this assuming that it's the distant future and Earth is either forgotten or irrelevant (a la Asimov).

Either way I get the feeling that, at least in this volume, the "how we got there" aspect of the setting is not so important, rather things are the way they are to allow the story to play out and get us to ask big questions, more Le Guin than Asimov really.

Max wrote: "There's a fair amount of Chinese in the language, particularly in the writing system but also the names. Obviously, Martine has opted to render the names in English rather than Teixcalaanli, which ..."

Yes. My take is that the empire is more Chinese and Byzantine with an Aztec gloss. The poetry and their syllabary are very Chinese. I didn't see many Aztec influences beyond the names and blood rituals.

Seems pretty explicitly Aztec to me. I don’t know where I read it, but I think Martine said she based a lot of the culture and language on the Aztec.

And as we’ve all seen demonstrated lately with the worldwide protests, language IS culture.

Possible spoilers in my predictions for the next book ....

(view spoiler)[
And who are these aliens on the horizon....

Voracious Europeans conquering all in their path... Not looking good for the Aztecs (or anyone else in the vicinity).

(hide spoiler)]

Iain wrote: "Possible spoilers in my predictions for the next book .... ."

Good point, I was thinking (view spoiler)[ that a little known reason that the little Greek city states weren't steamrollered into the Persian Empire was that the Persians were having border issues in the east and needed to redeploy. Those pesky Hellenic barbarians with strange ideas like "republics" were really small fry, though they were in a really strategic location on the nautical route between the Black Sea and Mediterranean.

So I was thinking that those republican stationers positioned between those key star gates were pretty lucky that an exotic empire has turned up to redeploy the imperial forces away from them, so long as they keep quiet they'll be seen as just small fry, though they may prove useful in future.

What would be really interesting (though probably won't happen) is if a Teixcalaanli noble put pressure on the stationers to put together a combined force from the stations (say ten thousand strong) to assist in the conflict. This stationer force then gets cut off deep in enemy territory (perhaps a gate collapses) and has to make their way back the hard way. If you want to know how it turns out, look up Xenophon's Anabasis, history is often stranger than fiction.
(hide spoiler)]...

Very interesting points ! I hadn’t thought of the comparison between the Stationers and the Ancient Greek city states, with the Teixcalaanli empire as the Persians, but now you mention it, it makes a lot of sense. I know that Martine’s speciality is the Byzantine period, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d studied the Persian Wars at some point as well.

Ruth wrote: "Very interesting points ! I hadn’t thought of the comparison between the Stationers and the Ancient Greek city states, with the Teixcalaanli empire as the Persians, but now you mention it, it makes..."

The thing that jumped out at me was the scene where (view spoiler)[ Mahit gets to meet the Emperor and is expected to perform proskynesis (a Greek word meaning to drop ones forehead to the floor, bent over their knees). A person meeting the Persian Emperor would have to perform this. While most people nowadays have an idea that the Greeks were a bunch of proto-American democrats, they were actually a really diverse bunch with just about every constitution under the sun including monarchy and things that look suspiciously like what we might call fascism (my former lecturers are screaming "anachronism" at me, but I reply "semantics").

One of the few things they agreed on was that you do not prostrate yourself before another mortal. This was a really big deal. When Alexander the Great started asking people to perform proskynesis for him, that's when the ancient writers basically see him as loosing it.

So when I read the passage in which Mahit meets the Emperor and it says "A Teixcalaanlitzlim would have dropped forehead to the floor, bent over their knees in full proskynesis"..."Stationers didn’t bow, not to pilots nor to the governing Council, no matter how long their imago-lines were." you can see why I immediately went to the Greek/Persian comparison. (hide spoiler)]

To be clear I really don't think it's as simple as Teixcalaan=Persians. I think Ms Martine has been informed by many different cultures, taken some really interesting bits, and then added her own special sauce to make things really interesting.

William wrote: "Ruth wrote: "Very interesting points ! I hadn’t thought of the comparison between the Stationers and the Ancient Greek city states, with the Teixcalaanli empire as the Persians, but now you mention..."

Yes! Proskynesis! It’s been a long time since I’ve used that word. Many years ago I studied Ancient Greek history and Alexander the Great, and although I’ve forgotten most of it, it’s nice to be reminded.

There’s a forthcoming book by Kate Elliott which is billed as ‘genderbent Alexander the Great in space’ which I’m looking forward to: Unconquerable Sun