Tor Books recently announced a debut space opera from author and historian Arkady Martine. The novel will follow the adventures of a diplomat from a spacefaring port, who has to solve her predecessor’s murder while thwarting the galactic empire that wants to annex her people. But, more importantly, Martine promises that there will “plot-bearing poetry contests” in the book, so we’re looking forward to depictions of zero-G lyrical battles! But please, no spoken word entries…
According to Martine’s twitter thread following the announcement, the novel is “about empire, the colonized mind, and institutional memory”, and was inspired by emperor Constantine IX’s annexation of Bagratuni Ani in 1044 C.E., marking the fall of the Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia following centuries of Byzantine encroachment.
Arkady Martine is a Byzantine historian and speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Ideomancer, Strange Horizons among other publications. The debut was acquired by Tor editor Devi Pillai, and is coming in 2019 from Tor Books.
