Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine have both written novels that focus on empires, imperialism, and colonialism, and how people react to and work within those structures. I asked them to chat with me, and each other, about their decisions and thought-processes.
You have both written work that explicitly deals with (some of) the consequences of imperialism, on a galactic scale. What is it about the concept of empire that made you want to explore it in fiction?
Ann: Honestly, I didn't start out wanting to write about empire. I started out wanting to write a space opera. But I also wanted to do something...not new, exactly (I have strong feelings about the fetishization of "originality" in SFF and the way "originality" is defined but that's another discussion) but something interesting, which meant I needed to think about what it was in space opera that interested me. Which for me meant thinking about what space opera was, and about the history of science fiction in general. And really, empire is absolutely pervasive in SFF's history. And it's not just the subject of critique--H.G. Wells is of course critiquing British Imperialism in War of the Worlds, for instance. But expansionist empire is part of the DNA of science fiction itself--all those brave heroes colonizing new worlds, bringing planets into the Federation. And like, I love those stories! The earliest worldbuilding I did for the Radch had an empire and I absolutely lifted it from all the SFnal empires I was already familiar with. But the more I thought about those stories, the more I wondered what they were saying that maybe I didn't want to say.
When I added in my story's interest in identity, what it might mean to be a single individual (or not) and the idea of ancillaries, that bumped up really hard with conversations about the "colonized mind" and hello, empire again.
Arkady: By contrast, I intended to write about empire from the beginning, and found space opera to be a fertile location to do it in - for many of the same reasons that Ann points out. The history of Anglophone SFF is deeply intertwined with imperialism and colonization narratives; and while I didn’t write a critique, per se, of these narrative patterns - more of an examination or an argument - I was making use of that entire tradition on purpose and with intent. I’m also struck by how much I, too, am interested in the concepts around individuation, the “colonized mind”, personal and cultural identity … and therefore the Teixcalaan books are fundamentally rooted in the question of assimilation, which is an empire question: what is required to join or be absorbed by a (so-called) multicultural/intergalactic empire, when that empire is also an assimilatory and universalizing force? What choices does a person make in that situation? And these ideas play extremely well in an SFFnal space, where ‘identity’ and ‘assimilation’ can be mediated not only by culture but by technology, and also by technologies of culture-making that do not (yet) exist here and now.
As well as the machinery of empire (thanks, Yoon Ha Lee), your books examine the role of the individual within that machine. How did you approach the idea of individual agency interacting with structures that have no care for the (relatively powerless) individual? What did you have to consider when creating Breq and Mahit to make them convincing in those roles?
Ann: I generally approach things on a very granular, pragmatic level. So, I don't ask the overarching question, but the specific. How is this specific person going to respond to this specific situation? I didn't think about making Breq fit the setting or a theme or anything--I made Breq interesting to me, and I gave her things and people to interact with, and thought carefully about how that might go. Obviously a lot of those things and people were drawn from existing models--that's how art works. But I tried to look closely at each one and ask myself, if this person were real, what would they actually be like? Not "what does the story shape expect of this kind of character" but a real person in that situation? And what kind of reaction would be A) true-feeling and B) interesting to me?
I honestly think that's important for anyone writing--whatever choices you make, if they aren't interesting or appealing to you on some level, chances are they won't interest your readers, either. And if you're not digging into what interests you, you're unlikely to ask any questions that make the setting interesting, or tempt readers to ask themselves interesting questions.
Arkady: Mahit is a person I have been, and a lot of people I have known very well: someone who has fallen in love with a culture not their own, and found that culture to be actively destructive to their own identity, safety, and community at the same time. So she is a version of a very common experience, an experience that really interested me, that of having a fascination with a culture in the process of destroying or coopting your own home culture. And therefore I thought she could do some very interesting things in a narrative which was in many ways about identity and assimilation and cooption of culture, and about the extension of culture outside of time - through inheritance, digital or literary or institutional; through conquest; through preservation. But in essence Mahit is a person who is having a very common, very real experience of imperialism, and that makes her a good window for my reader to get to see what the imperial culture-complex of Teixcalaan is doing…
Your works show not just the imperial side of colonising but also the reaction and attitude of those being colonised - and how that’s often not a straightforward reaction. Did you have particular historical examples in mind when exploring those questions?
Arkady: I did. I was thinking a great deal about a particular set of circumstances in the eleventh century when I was writing these books, because of my academic work in Byzantine and Armenian history. And I got fixated on the story of the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Petros Getadarj. It goes like this: in the year 1044 AD, the Byzantine Empire annexed the small Armenian kingdom of Ani. The empire was able to do this for a lot of reasons – political, historical, military – but the precipitating incident involved Petros Getadarj, who was determined to prevent the forced conversion of the Armenians to the Byzantine form of Christianity. He did this by trading the physical sovereignty of Ani to the Byzantine emperor in exchange for promises of spiritual sovereignty. When I started writing A Memory Called Empire, my inciting question was: what’s it like to be that guy? To betray your culture’s freedom in order to save your culture?
And then I thought: oh. It’s much more interesting to write about the person who has to clean up after that guy. And that’s Mahit Dzmare, in a lot of ways.
Ann: My first impulse is to say I didn't, but I'm not sure that's true. I grew up in an Irish-American Catholic family that thought badly of the British Empire. (The sun didn't set on the British Empire because God didn't trust them in the dark.) But of course my family also valorized the groups around the edges of the center of that empire--the Irish of course, and also (my parents were very into a kind of pan-celtism) the Scots and the Welsh. Which is a weirdly ambivalent place to be, isn't it. It's not like being Welsh immunized you from participating in that empire! Or even Irish. So I suspect that when I went to draw the details of my characters interacting with an empire, I already had a sort of ambivalence in place. But I didn't start out saying "I am going to model the Radch on the British Empire." Actually, I was working with Rome as a model--but I filled in the blanks with things I'd seen and heard and read that were more recent than Rome.
Many space operas utilise the idea of an imperial government. Given that the world of today has no empires left (at least, not overtly), why do you think this form of government is so enduring in narrative, and especially in space opera?
Ann: The art we make is largely constructed out of art we've seen and internalized. The empire is a foundational part of the history of SFF, and when we're putting a story together, it's easiest to grab existing pieces, and easiest to make those existing pieces work in a story--we're familiar with those patterns, with those motifs and how they're generally used. And there isn't anything inherently wrong with that. It's how artists art, really.
Sometimes people argue that empires and/or monarchies get used a lot because they're simpler to work with, that you can have a single person be a powerful agent and that's just easier and more dramatic. But I don't think that's true. I think the stereotypical idea of an empire or a monarchy is simpler and easier to work with, because the motif is simpler than the real thing and because we have existing plot structures where it slots in easily. But that's just story motifs, not real governments.
I also think there is a long history of "single character changes the world" stories in SFF and while that's absolutely a thing that can happen, and I love stories like that, as a plot it's become very entrenched, so that "X kills the emperor and establishes a Republic! Hooray!" or even "X becomes Galactic Overlord! Hooray!" or "X vanquishes the pretender to Galactic Overlordship, Hooray!" is such a standard, easy to outline plot and with all the weight of tradition and literary history it feels so right, that when you're looking at a different form of governance it's not so easy to see a single point where your hero can actually change anything in an obviously, traditionally dramatic way. That would need different story templates, and those are super difficult to make and unlikely to get much traction unless it's got something really appealing mixed in, or something very traditional for readers to hang onto.
I am going to go off on a tangent, here--years ago I worked for a tiny nonprofit that presented avant garde music concerts. Like, usually stuff most people would consider just noise. We would be lucky to have a dozen audience members, right? And sometimes my boss (who loved loved loved the music) would insist I give tickets to the local NPR station to give out, because then new people would come and hear the great music and come to more concerts! The ticket winners invariably walked out within ten or fifteen minutes.
But! Twice a year we would do a thing where we would screen a silent movie, and a group of musicians would do free improv as a live soundtrack. And the audience would be a couple hundred people and they would nearly all sit through the whole thing! And enjoy it! My theory was, just listening to burbling and squeaking saxophones, most folks didn't have any way to structure that into "music" because they didn't have the context for it. But a movie? That was a structure they could hang things on and assume that the squeaks and burbles corresponded to so the whole thing would work for them, at least well enough to keep them in their seats and having a decent time. That experience has really influenced how I think about the ways people process art.
Anyway. Sorry, nothing there about empire really.
Arkady: To be extremely academic for a moment, science fiction and fantasy are strongly influenced in some directions by the cultural inheritance of the classical Mediterranean – taken up and promulgated so thoroughly during the soi-disant Enlightenment. Science fiction has sometimes been read as the literature of the Enlightenment myth of progress – and thus it is full of Enlightenment ideas about classical empires, or at least the culturally-received versions thereof. We see, repeatedly and especially in 20th-century Anglophone science fiction, the shorthand of an evil empire, full of decadent bureaucracy. And of course there is, throughout those same books, a tension between the idea of the Roman Empire – the beating heart of classical culture – and ideas of Byzantium, the fallen version of all of that. The valorization of 'classical' culture as being progressive and the bureaucratic 'evil empire' being fundamentally decadent shows up in science fiction as an echo – a reification-after-the-fact of the Enlightenment attempt to reclaim/repurpose 'Greek' heritage from the live possessors of it, i.e. the diaspora Byzantines in Italy. I have perhaps spent a great deal of time thinking about this particular thing.
And in addition, the 'space empire' is extremely Roman even in its most far-future trappings. Or extremely Byzantine, in the fallen-Rome sense.
Essentially, I feel as if empire is something that is either taken for granted in space opera – un-interrogated, simply present as a fact of worldbuilding – or it is rendered so evil as to be incomprehensibly bad (what does the First Order in Star Wars, for example, actually do for any of its citizens?) And empire is nastier than both those options. It is a kind of poison that gets into the groundwater, and it can be very, very pretty while it strangles a culture. I wanted, in the Teixcalaan books, to get as close to that poison and that appeal as I could.
What did you learn about empires (and imperialism) that surprised you, as you created your own?
Arkady: I think I was most surprised by how many readers expected the duology to end with the dissolution of the empire - that I was somehow, all along, writing a fall-of-empire story, or perhaps a revolutionary story. And instead I am writing - or trying to, at least! - about the conditions of life under imperial power, and how that impinges on personal identity and cultural/social power, over time. I think that empires rarely end all at once, but they do change, and they change the people in them - imperial citizens, outsiders, people who are caught between. I’m interested in the constraint, I guess. In the circumscribed space, and how one might move inside it, without an expectation of apocalyptic catharsis. It’s where most of us live, after all. Inside that space.
Ann: Yeah, originally I didn't have a good answer for this, but Arkady, you've struck a chord for me. Every now and then I'll come across a reader comment that's basically, the trilogy ended wrong, why didn't Breq destroy Anaander Mianaai? And I know that's the traditional end to that sort of story, I totally get why readers would expect that of both my books and Arkady's. I mean, I didn't think that was the direction she was going in aMCE, but I get that some readers would think it was.
I'm with Arkady--empires don't end all at once, in a snap, just because the emperor died, or a battle lost, or whatever. Breq doesn't "destroy" Anaander Mianaai because she can't. No one can. If there's going to be a change, it's going to be something slow and likely not terribly action-packed. The kind of thing, as I mentioned above, that we don't have lots of dramatic story templates for so it's not easy to write stories about that process.
Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, both a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a climate and clean energy policy analyst. Under all her names she writes about border politics, narrative and rhetoric, risk communication, and the edges of the world.
She currently works for an environmental and clean energy nonprofit, where she specializes in utility regulation and legislative advocacy for energy grid modernization, climate change mitigation, and resiliency planning. Her debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the 2022 Hugo Award in the same category. Her latest novella, Rose/House, was nominated for the 2024 Hugo for Best Novella and won China’s 2024 Fishing Fortress Science Fiction Award for Best International Novella. Rose/House appeared in international wide release from Tor Publishing Group in March 2025.
Arkady grew up in New York City, and after some time in Turkey, Canada, Sweden, and Baltimore, lives in New Mexico with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. Find Arkady online at www.arkadymartine.net or on Bluesky as @byzantienne.bsky.social.
Ann Leckie is the author of the multi-award winning novel Ancillary Justice. She lives in St Louis.