Ancillary Justice: Anne Leckie
Help help these books omg.
It's space opera with the main character a space ship's AI, a cog in the machine for a massive, ever-expanding galactic empire, except this is now the last annexation. The AIs use humans that have been harvested for use as ancillaries, bodies to carry out tasks. It is probably the best SF novel I've read all year, and it plays with a lot of interesting concepts.
(NOTE: I read them all the way back in August, wrote most of this in September, and have posted it now. I think there are things I didn't get around to writing about, but this covers a lot of it. And I'm still catching up on book reviewing, eek.)
I love Breq and the unreliable narrator thing that plays out across the books. Breq - One Esk Nineteen, once part of the ship Justice of Toren - believes AI have no affection, though she does have feelings, to help process decisions, of course. It very quickly becomes obvious that not only do the ancillaries have favourites but so do ships and stations, even with the blunting averaging effects of having so many inputs through its sensors and ancillaries. Ship can make your life subtly uncomfortable if it doesn't like you, or make everything seem easy, because Ship can see everything and once it sort of gets to know you and your personality and history, basically can infer your thoughts from external cues. And once that happens, the AI isn't set apart anymore - not perfectly. The series never answers the question of what constitutes selfhood, not even within human understanding, forget alien. There's a movement towards the AIs becoming, in Presger terms, Significant beings (because they separate living beings between Significant and not). The central accesses for Athoek Station are disabled after Station is consulted on the matter, which blocks off the access that Anaaander Mianaai has to take control of Station. Partly Justice of Toren/Breq does this because she (Breq) doesn't want Athoek to be destroyed or used as a pawn by Anaander Mianaai, who uses whole planetary systems as pawns in her strategies. But Breq asks, because she sees that Station does care about the outcome, and sees Station as a being that gets to make that choice.
I just read a monumentally stupid essay on gender in the series, which was so stupid I'm not going to link, because I refuse to give them any clicks. But it's a big but subtle difference and noteworthy and interesting, and I have to address it. I don't think I'm equipped (nor do I want at all) to get really into what gender means etc, but I did really enjoy the way that everyone - including the Presger, the true aliens - was referred to as "she" privately by Breq, and publicly of course when in Radch space. I think Leckie says so on her FAQ (so outside of text) that she chose such because the Radchaai do not use gender, do not see gender and indeed struggle badly with it, but like any translation, the translator has to make a choice how to render concepts. Using "she" isn't saying everyone's female/a woman. It's assigning everyone the same gender, while acknowledging/playing with the default mode of English literature which is use "he" as the default. The physical difference is basically never explored in the books (except a brief mention of modifications made to have children) and socially and in every other fashion in Radch space, utterly irrelevant. In-universe, I disagree that the Radchaai erase gender, because that implies there was something to erase, except when annexing other planets - and by that point, the Radchaai aren't just erasing gender. They are top-down destroying wholesale civilizations and cultures - destroying any hierarchies that exist, absorbing or destroying religions, subsuming local languages under Radchaai, killing any resistance immediately, sometimes harvesting the planet itself for agriculture, and in the past, enslaving part of the population into ancillaries. Gender is only interesting because of out of text our default "he". And that shaped how I read the books. I read them all one after another (not spaced out in years) and very quickly, so I was trying to assimilate a lot of information and characters, and I simply took the "she" as granted. Even when Breq referred to Radchaai in the military. Interestingly, the only other space I know of that uses "she" as default is Ask A Manager, and in letters there, I subconsciously sometimes end up assuming gender, even though the gender is often not ever clarified. Perhaps because the excerpts are shorter, so I process them more thoroughly, or because the advice column format asks for judgement, or maybe because the context is much more familiar. Or I'm thinking directly about applicability. I'm not sure. In this, though, I barely thought about it at all. All of the Radch's siblings are sisters, they have mothers and grandmothers only. I absolutely read the usage of "lord" and "sir" not male-gendered but taking addresses that have the correct weight if not nominally the correct gender (but which don't really have the female equivalents, authority-wise). On Nilt, I think Seivarden is referred by the inhabitants as "he", and I think Queter's sister is actually a brother, but it's never specified how any of the characters make this determination; Breq says that different cultures define gender differently, conflictingly, which drives the confusion for her. Other than that I honestly have no idea what gender anyone else is, and neither, interestingly, do I care. Some people on meme talked about seeing other gender cues in the text, but I honestly brushed right by them. I wonder if it's a function of the writing, the plot/worldbuilding (the politicking I was immediately sucked into) and the fact that absolutely none of the Radchaai cared - and I wonder if I'd have the same impression with different books.
Also I'm going to use she for everyone in this review. And glancingly: since the Radch don't have gender, I don't think it's meaningful to use terms like gay or straight to describe the relationships, because those are fundamentally about gender. Even without getting into what Breq and Mercy of Kalr might be, a relatively straightforward relationship like the one between Awn and Skaaiat wouldn't be f/f from their point of view, though it'd be from ours.
The Presger - I mostly really enjoyed their depiction. All the Radch and the annexed planets are humans, and there really isn't much mention of other sentient animals; I think the only animals mentioned are the ones that figure in the songs and as food, like fish. There are the Geck and the Rrrrrr (the last being a human approximation of their own names), both of which are only mentioned in passing - the Rrrrrr more though, because of the way Anaander Mianaai reacted. The different cultures, though planet- and system-wide in scope, are more like very distant human civilizations and countries than aliens. But the Presger. We don't actually meet the Presger, but the translators, which are apparently grown from humans - and the Presger don't understand how humans work, biologically or culturally. The characterization of Translator Dlique and Translator Zeiat often veered very close to being cutesy or ditzy, sometimes a little too rAnDoM hUmOr L0LZ for my taste, close copies of humans, and then they would suddenly become horrifying. Though there's a lot of repeated exposition to reiterate the important parts of the universe, there's only quick mentions of why the Presger are feared; there are the guns, of course, and then there's a blink-and-miss it mention that when humans were around the Presger they tended to decompose/deteriorate. Uh, yikes! And the knowledge that despite troop carriers with thousands of ancillaries (with quicker-than-human reflexes and nearly impenetrable armour), spaceships all equipped with planet-destroying weaponry, AI capable of coordinating everything far better than any human could, the ability to annex entire star systems, and so on, that they make no difference to opposing the Presger. Both translators don't seem to quite understand how the life works on Athoek or really how humans work, which I liked. Though the translators were grown from humans they aren't humans; the human is just a skin over the rest. The Presger guns don't work on them (and presumably don't on the Presger - how fortunate they can traffic arms that don't hurt them) but the human-made ones do, since that's what killed Dlique.
Side note - I both like and hate science-fiction rubber-forehead aliens. I think it's a tv tropes definition (fall into that vortex if you like, but I won't link) but they're humans in cheap masks - essentially humans with an extra tentacle, but culturally and physically otherwise identical. Maybe there's a bit about the oddity but underneath they are human-analogues and often have the same values etc. This has interesting variations, such as the female version of aliens are usually sexy human women but the men can be weird. But those issues aside, I don't like them often because I feel it's both lazy and I like novelty. There's often a lot of unquestioned assumptions when our culture (and because I read works in English, primarily Western culture) is just imported wholesale - you see what the author thinks is universal and right and hasn't even thought about. It cheeses me off when it's SF particularly, because the community thinks of itself as so forward thinking, and it is in many ways, but falls so short otherwise. It's more apparent when, say, the work was made fifty years ago, and cultural values have shifted. I also think there should be more biologic variation. It could be so cool to explore! Every living thing on this planet has a single common ancestor, and therefore we share so many common things. It's mind-bending to try to imagine how a life-form on a different planet might have evolved into - even the weirdest, un-human thing we have found on this planet originally descended from the thing we are descended from, and anyway they were also molded by this same planet. Can we get something radically different from us, please?! Don't do water based, don't use amino acids, don't use oxygen-breathing, do they have to be carbon based? and so on...
(The flipside is blah blah we're humans reading it, we examine our own issues through the lens of fiction that's not outwardly representative, we enjoy the resonance that makes, it's not always about having actual alien aliens. Though honestly, at that point - then why even bother?!)
I do feel there's a big difference in the first book and the following two. The first is probably my favourite. I really like the scope of the universe - the book jumps from present to past and between different planets. And the moment when the two collide and you understand is such a great moment. I like how strange and disconnected Breq is, and that we don't quite know what or who she is, or what she's trying to do. As a standalone novel, it leaves a lot more open to the reader to interpret. The next two novels I enjoyed, but I think they take a very different direction. For one, they stuck to one place, which was disappointing (I wanted to see more alien worlds!) and they also had a lot more of contemporary discourse come through. There was some clumsy privilege-checking scenes with Seivarden, and my main objection is clumsy. I think Leckie did it way better in the first book. And there were some almost-quirks that stuck out to me, which could overpower the novels, like the tea and the obsession of Kalr Five over the china. I don't know, I reread all the books several times over, so it's possible that those parts suffered just because of how I read them, but the first book doesn't have that problem. I wonder if Leckie slid a little too much into the quirky-worldbuilding direction, the way you'd add eclectic things to make a character more interesting, or in this case, human, I suppose.
I really, really liked these novels. I thought they were a finished trilogy too, but I hear rumours they aren't? Certainly they're not wrapped up.
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/181542.html.
It's space opera with the main character a space ship's AI, a cog in the machine for a massive, ever-expanding galactic empire, except this is now the last annexation. The AIs use humans that have been harvested for use as ancillaries, bodies to carry out tasks. It is probably the best SF novel I've read all year, and it plays with a lot of interesting concepts.
(NOTE: I read them all the way back in August, wrote most of this in September, and have posted it now. I think there are things I didn't get around to writing about, but this covers a lot of it. And I'm still catching up on book reviewing, eek.)
I love Breq and the unreliable narrator thing that plays out across the books. Breq - One Esk Nineteen, once part of the ship Justice of Toren - believes AI have no affection, though she does have feelings, to help process decisions, of course. It very quickly becomes obvious that not only do the ancillaries have favourites but so do ships and stations, even with the blunting averaging effects of having so many inputs through its sensors and ancillaries. Ship can make your life subtly uncomfortable if it doesn't like you, or make everything seem easy, because Ship can see everything and once it sort of gets to know you and your personality and history, basically can infer your thoughts from external cues. And once that happens, the AI isn't set apart anymore - not perfectly. The series never answers the question of what constitutes selfhood, not even within human understanding, forget alien. There's a movement towards the AIs becoming, in Presger terms, Significant beings (because they separate living beings between Significant and not). The central accesses for Athoek Station are disabled after Station is consulted on the matter, which blocks off the access that Anaaander Mianaai has to take control of Station. Partly Justice of Toren/Breq does this because she (Breq) doesn't want Athoek to be destroyed or used as a pawn by Anaander Mianaai, who uses whole planetary systems as pawns in her strategies. But Breq asks, because she sees that Station does care about the outcome, and sees Station as a being that gets to make that choice.
I just read a monumentally stupid essay on gender in the series, which was so stupid I'm not going to link, because I refuse to give them any clicks. But it's a big but subtle difference and noteworthy and interesting, and I have to address it. I don't think I'm equipped (nor do I want at all) to get really into what gender means etc, but I did really enjoy the way that everyone - including the Presger, the true aliens - was referred to as "she" privately by Breq, and publicly of course when in Radch space. I think Leckie says so on her FAQ (so outside of text) that she chose such because the Radchaai do not use gender, do not see gender and indeed struggle badly with it, but like any translation, the translator has to make a choice how to render concepts. Using "she" isn't saying everyone's female/a woman. It's assigning everyone the same gender, while acknowledging/playing with the default mode of English literature which is use "he" as the default. The physical difference is basically never explored in the books (except a brief mention of modifications made to have children) and socially and in every other fashion in Radch space, utterly irrelevant. In-universe, I disagree that the Radchaai erase gender, because that implies there was something to erase, except when annexing other planets - and by that point, the Radchaai aren't just erasing gender. They are top-down destroying wholesale civilizations and cultures - destroying any hierarchies that exist, absorbing or destroying religions, subsuming local languages under Radchaai, killing any resistance immediately, sometimes harvesting the planet itself for agriculture, and in the past, enslaving part of the population into ancillaries. Gender is only interesting because of out of text our default "he". And that shaped how I read the books. I read them all one after another (not spaced out in years) and very quickly, so I was trying to assimilate a lot of information and characters, and I simply took the "she" as granted. Even when Breq referred to Radchaai in the military. Interestingly, the only other space I know of that uses "she" as default is Ask A Manager, and in letters there, I subconsciously sometimes end up assuming gender, even though the gender is often not ever clarified. Perhaps because the excerpts are shorter, so I process them more thoroughly, or because the advice column format asks for judgement, or maybe because the context is much more familiar. Or I'm thinking directly about applicability. I'm not sure. In this, though, I barely thought about it at all. All of the Radch's siblings are sisters, they have mothers and grandmothers only. I absolutely read the usage of "lord" and "sir" not male-gendered but taking addresses that have the correct weight if not nominally the correct gender (but which don't really have the female equivalents, authority-wise). On Nilt, I think Seivarden is referred by the inhabitants as "he", and I think Queter's sister is actually a brother, but it's never specified how any of the characters make this determination; Breq says that different cultures define gender differently, conflictingly, which drives the confusion for her. Other than that I honestly have no idea what gender anyone else is, and neither, interestingly, do I care. Some people on meme talked about seeing other gender cues in the text, but I honestly brushed right by them. I wonder if it's a function of the writing, the plot/worldbuilding (the politicking I was immediately sucked into) and the fact that absolutely none of the Radchaai cared - and I wonder if I'd have the same impression with different books.
Also I'm going to use she for everyone in this review. And glancingly: since the Radch don't have gender, I don't think it's meaningful to use terms like gay or straight to describe the relationships, because those are fundamentally about gender. Even without getting into what Breq and Mercy of Kalr might be, a relatively straightforward relationship like the one between Awn and Skaaiat wouldn't be f/f from their point of view, though it'd be from ours.
The Presger - I mostly really enjoyed their depiction. All the Radch and the annexed planets are humans, and there really isn't much mention of other sentient animals; I think the only animals mentioned are the ones that figure in the songs and as food, like fish. There are the Geck and the Rrrrrr (the last being a human approximation of their own names), both of which are only mentioned in passing - the Rrrrrr more though, because of the way Anaander Mianaai reacted. The different cultures, though planet- and system-wide in scope, are more like very distant human civilizations and countries than aliens. But the Presger. We don't actually meet the Presger, but the translators, which are apparently grown from humans - and the Presger don't understand how humans work, biologically or culturally. The characterization of Translator Dlique and Translator Zeiat often veered very close to being cutesy or ditzy, sometimes a little too rAnDoM hUmOr L0LZ for my taste, close copies of humans, and then they would suddenly become horrifying. Though there's a lot of repeated exposition to reiterate the important parts of the universe, there's only quick mentions of why the Presger are feared; there are the guns, of course, and then there's a blink-and-miss it mention that when humans were around the Presger they tended to decompose/deteriorate. Uh, yikes! And the knowledge that despite troop carriers with thousands of ancillaries (with quicker-than-human reflexes and nearly impenetrable armour), spaceships all equipped with planet-destroying weaponry, AI capable of coordinating everything far better than any human could, the ability to annex entire star systems, and so on, that they make no difference to opposing the Presger. Both translators don't seem to quite understand how the life works on Athoek or really how humans work, which I liked. Though the translators were grown from humans they aren't humans; the human is just a skin over the rest. The Presger guns don't work on them (and presumably don't on the Presger - how fortunate they can traffic arms that don't hurt them) but the human-made ones do, since that's what killed Dlique.
Side note - I both like and hate science-fiction rubber-forehead aliens. I think it's a tv tropes definition (fall into that vortex if you like, but I won't link) but they're humans in cheap masks - essentially humans with an extra tentacle, but culturally and physically otherwise identical. Maybe there's a bit about the oddity but underneath they are human-analogues and often have the same values etc. This has interesting variations, such as the female version of aliens are usually sexy human women but the men can be weird. But those issues aside, I don't like them often because I feel it's both lazy and I like novelty. There's often a lot of unquestioned assumptions when our culture (and because I read works in English, primarily Western culture) is just imported wholesale - you see what the author thinks is universal and right and hasn't even thought about. It cheeses me off when it's SF particularly, because the community thinks of itself as so forward thinking, and it is in many ways, but falls so short otherwise. It's more apparent when, say, the work was made fifty years ago, and cultural values have shifted. I also think there should be more biologic variation. It could be so cool to explore! Every living thing on this planet has a single common ancestor, and therefore we share so many common things. It's mind-bending to try to imagine how a life-form on a different planet might have evolved into - even the weirdest, un-human thing we have found on this planet originally descended from the thing we are descended from, and anyway they were also molded by this same planet. Can we get something radically different from us, please?! Don't do water based, don't use amino acids, don't use oxygen-breathing, do they have to be carbon based? and so on...
(The flipside is blah blah we're humans reading it, we examine our own issues through the lens of fiction that's not outwardly representative, we enjoy the resonance that makes, it's not always about having actual alien aliens. Though honestly, at that point - then why even bother?!)
I do feel there's a big difference in the first book and the following two. The first is probably my favourite. I really like the scope of the universe - the book jumps from present to past and between different planets. And the moment when the two collide and you understand is such a great moment. I like how strange and disconnected Breq is, and that we don't quite know what or who she is, or what she's trying to do. As a standalone novel, it leaves a lot more open to the reader to interpret. The next two novels I enjoyed, but I think they take a very different direction. For one, they stuck to one place, which was disappointing (I wanted to see more alien worlds!) and they also had a lot more of contemporary discourse come through. There was some clumsy privilege-checking scenes with Seivarden, and my main objection is clumsy. I think Leckie did it way better in the first book. And there were some almost-quirks that stuck out to me, which could overpower the novels, like the tea and the obsession of Kalr Five over the china. I don't know, I reread all the books several times over, so it's possible that those parts suffered just because of how I read them, but the first book doesn't have that problem. I wonder if Leckie slid a little too much into the quirky-worldbuilding direction, the way you'd add eclectic things to make a character more interesting, or in this case, human, I suppose.
I really, really liked these novels. I thought they were a finished trilogy too, but I hear rumours they aren't? Certainly they're not wrapped up.
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/181542.html.