Earlier this year, A Memory Called Empire author Arkady Martine appeared in conversation with Amal El-Mohtar, co-author of This Is How You Lose the Time War, as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival. Now, you can watch their conversation at your leisure: El-Mohtar has posted the video of their discussion to YouTube.
A Memory Called Empire, the first book in Martine’s Teixcalaan series, was published last year to widespread acclaim; it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and was nominated for the Locus and Nebula Awards. Ann Leckie called it “all around brilliant space opera,” and Charlie Jane Anders said “This book has everything I love.” The sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, will be out in March of 2021.
This Is How You Lose the Time War, which El-Mohtar co-wrote with Max Gladstone, is a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning epistolatory novella about time agents in a complicated relationship over (through? around?) the years. Reviewing it for Tor.com, Linda H. Codega called it “one extended, synthetic, fantastic love letter to genre.”
In this festival conversation, they discuss the genesis of Empire (the first novel Martine ever wrote!), how scholarship connects to fiction writing, the role of a city as a narrative center, and much, much more.
