It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all.

If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea.

Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.

Translator Dlique was saying, very earnestly, “Eggs are so inadequate, don't you think? I mean, they ought to be able to become anything, but instead you always get a chicken. Or a duck. Or whatever they're programmed to be. You never get anything interesting, like regret, or the middle of the night last week.

Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

The Romans have provided a lot of writers with a model for various interstellar empires, of course, and no wonder. The Roman Empire is a really good example of a large empire that, in one form or another, functioned for quite a long time over a very large area. And over all that time, there was all sorts of exciting drama - civil wars and assassinations and revolts and bits breaking off and being forced back in ... But I didn't want my future - however fanciful it was - to be entirely European. The Radchaai aren't meant to be Romans in Space.