Ancillary Mercy (Leckie)

[charlie_ego]

4/5. So I read Ancillary Mercy! And I really liked it, because it was awesome! I still think Ancillary Justice is the best, for a number of reasons, not least that AJ's set up in the best vintage SF-style to slowly reveal the worldbuilding, and by the time of AM we already know pretty much the important bits of worldbuilding

Comments

[ricardienne]

Yes! I mean, on the one hand, I suppose that since Radchaai society seems pretty hierarchical and oriented around dependence-relationships, most people already live in some sense under the absolute power of someone -- a Captain, a system governor (? unclear how much power a station governor has for summary executions/brain-reconfiguring/other terrible things), or, ultimately, Anaander Mianaai -- and, for practical purposes are pretty well subjected to someone else -- a superior, the person to whom they're bound as a client, the representative of the government -- whom, in practice, they don't have a lot of appeal against.

On the other hand, I have this theory that, given all this, AIs who aren't accorded personhood actually serve a really important buffering function. It's in relationships with AIs that the fiction that Radchaai citizens are all equal qua citizens is actually true (well, on military ships not quite). And, of course, the constant, "objective" surveillance and nudging by AIs that are programmed to care for *all* Radchaai must go a long way to keeping the abuses of the hierarchy in check. In practice, independent, ruling AIs may still do this, but psychologically, the average non-elite Radchaai no longer has the tiny bit of control over some part of her life that is separate from the many many aspects where she's under the control of others.

Very broadly, I suppose, one of the points that the series makes is that societies rely on most people behaving as we are supposed to and not taking advantage of the system, that you go through life putting a ton of trust in your fellow citizens, because, the reason I'm not mugged whenever I walk down the street is not so much because everyone I encounter in my daily life is refraining from violence out of fear of the consequences as because it wouldn't occur to them to hurt me in that way. And most of Breq's social justice lecturing boils down to pointing out that when there has been an underclass of people (or AIs) who have been treated very badly, there's a tendency to assume that they have to be coerced into accepting the social contract because it's tilted against them, but in fact, if given an equal share of the goods of society they are as able as anyone to take part in that give and take of trust that makes up a society. Which is, indeed, an incredibly optimistic view and very anti-grimdark.

[charlie_ego]

Hmmmm, I see what you mean about trust. I mean, you could make the argument that (for example) men are generally on average stronger than women, but that doesn't actually mean that men and women should have different rights!

And most of Breq's social justice lecturing boils down to pointing out that when there has been an underclass of people (or AIs) who have been treated very badly, there's a tendency to assume that they have to be coerced into accepting the social contract because it's tilted against them, but in fact, if given an equal share of the goods of society they are as able as anyone to take part in that give and take of trust that makes up a society.

Yeah, I do think that is incredibly optimistic! I almost felt like there was a bait and switch: AJ was way more on the grimdark side of things, and then we get this happy optimistic view of human (citizen) nature. I think I got a bit of whiplash with AS (which is partially in consequence my least favorite of the three).

[ricardienne]

Hmmm. I think it's actually there in AJ, too. There's a consistent pattern of oppressed groups being extremely generous and peaceable and long-suffering and of violence/conflict coming entirely from the side of the oppressor groups. Which -- well, you can justify it in every particular instance as a necessary defense mechanism (especially since in each case you have the marginalized group having to confront the Radchaai/Breq, namely a group with still more power), but in the aggregate is more than a bit problematic! (I recently also read NK Jemisin's new novel, which takes the polar opposite tack and suggests that the only way to rectify a system built on oppression is to completely and utterly destroy it (not metaphorical, but as in, apocalyptic earth-cracking, all-of-civilization-annihilating destruction.) And that kind of (justified) destructive anger really doesn't get any place in Leckie's books -- except in Breq.

It's just that in AJ, there is no power to stop the bad violent grimdark side, whereas in the second two, Breq suddenly has power to put behind the generous, trusting, noble side. In practice, that means that there are fewer neat and tidy fixes in AJ, which is more satisfying, in a way. (I think that if Queter and Sirix had been developed more as characters in AS, it would have helped a lot, and I'm still mad that Leckie loaded Sirix with about a billion different, complex motivations, then kept her a minor character, gave her a bizarre and barely-comprehensible role as a traitor (see: a billion complex motivations and not enough space to develop them) and sort of dumped her offstage in the beginning of AM.)

[charlie_ego]

Yeeeeah, I'd forgotten that AJ was like that too, since as you say it turns out grimdark since the oppressed groups don't get a say. But I agree that it is... a very optimistic reading of humanity as a whole.

Huh, did you like the Jemisin? I read 100K Kingdoms and remember thinking the bad guys were really unbelievably puppy-killing bad, but it's possible I'd like her newer stuff better?

[ricardienne]

I really liked Jemisin's Dreamblood series (I liked 1000 pretty well, too, although I see your point about the evil empire being unbelievably evil. It worked okay for me in the context of the "things people become accustomed to doing when to people they don't consider human" theme, I think -- back to that common concern of Leckie and Jemisin.)

Overall, I did like the new one (although Jemisin always seems to write the same type of super-powerful, tortured male love interest and I am just never that into the as characters). It was at least as heavy-handed on the social justice themes as Leckie, but, on the other hand, they were more explicitly central to the whole book and the whole of what Jemisin seems to be trying to do with it. On a craft level, there's a neat interlocking of three different stories set at different times (but their sequence and relationship only gradually becomes explicit); one of them is written in the 2nd person present, which is a choice that I would never have said was a good idea, but actually is done really really well and works!

[ricardienne]

ETA Re: the optimism/social justice-ness

I mean, again, in-universe I can buy it as characterization of Breq, because she's been built, basically, with Radchaai ideology programmed into her: namely, that all citizens are good people worthy of protection, equal rights, services, opportunities, respect, and a share of the community; that there are no significant differences between Radchaai; that differences in power and status are used for the benefit of everyone. And, of course, she's Justice of Toren. (And, actually, Justice of Toren probably never spent much time around Radchaai who weren't military and involved in the process of conquering non-Radchaai. So she doesn't necessarily have a lot of experience with how things actually are in the empire) So it makes sense to me that she would have this incredibly strong, semi-naive insistence on social justice and believe implicitly that it can be effected. In this weird way, I suppose, AIs actually uphold the values that Radchaai claim to base their society on better than the Radchaai do. Which makes sense and is a clever point, in a way.

But politically, the fact that the oppressed people are always virtuous and good is really dangerous, because it naturalizes the idea that oppressed people deserve justice *because* they are virtuous, and that, therefore, people who aren't sufficiently virtuous don't deserve justice... Which. Well. Leckie really could have tackled this faulty assumption, really should have, and she didn't.