Kalpa Imperial is an imaginative work of fantasy from an Argentinian writer, translated into English by the Queen Herself, Ursula K. Le Guin. The stories are a multifaceted journey through the Eternal Imperium, a vast polity centered around a Golden Throne, and the succession of good and bad rulers. Each tale is told by a nameless storyteller, a popular historian.

The heart of the book is the chapter "Portrait of the Empress", which reveals how a girl who came from nothing claimed the imperial throne by truly thinking, seeing the world as it is, and not just gluing bits of others men thoughts together to make a world as we wish it to be, as most people live. That chapter is a shining gem, and many others have gorgeous dream like quality.

But the individual pieces don't quite cohere to the level of mythos, getting lost in a forest of symbols and signifiers. Maybe there's a thesis about history, power, domination, and the lure of the center in this book and I'm too inert to pick it up, or maybe it's just a metatextual game. Either way, this is very good and worth expanding my horizons for, but didn't quite hit home.