Arkady Martine

AnnaLinden Weller is an American historian and city planner. Under the name of Arkady Martine, she is also an author of science fiction.

Quotes

• Urban planning is a long history of cities (and their planners) seeing, and deliberately not seeing, the people who live in them. Working in city planning makes me consider the city as an organism, as a machine for living in…
  • On how being a city planner affects her writing in “Questions For Arkady Martine, Author Of 'A Memory Called Empire'” in NPR (2019 Apr 7)

• I hope the first set we meet are kind and smart and savvy, and also mammals who breathe oxygen and have hierarchical structure, because otherwise we’re going to not be able to figure out how to say anything useful and understandable, and if they’re not kind, they may decide they’re better off without us…
  • On her hope if humans should ever encounter extraterrestrials in “Interviews: Arkady Martine” in BookPage (2019 Mar 26)

• I feel as if empire is something that is either taken for granted in space opera—uninterrogated, simply present as a fact of worldbuilding—or it is rendered so evil as to be incomprehensibly bad…
  • On how her writings wrestle with the concept of colonialism in “AN INTERVIEW WITH ARKADY MARTINE” in Stage Horizons (2019 Feb 25)

• Fanfiction lets you share the kind of story you like with other people who take delight in it, too, and lets you participate in making that sort of story for those people…
  • On how fanfiction has affected her life in “AN INTERVIEW WITH ARKADY MARTINE” in Stage Horizons (2019 Feb 25)