Tag: Book (Fiction)

Eternal Sky Trilogy, Elizabeth Bear

My main present this Christmas was a Kindle – I’ve finally entered the 21st Century 😉 And as part of the present I got three new ebooks to start me off, I chose Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky trilogy which I’ve had on my to-buy list for a while. The three books are Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars and Steles of the Sky and they are fantasy, set in a world that is not our own with a strong Asian flavour.

The series opens in the aftermath of a battle. Temur, who is one of the protagonists of the story, is one of the defeated side and lucky to be alive – surviving mostly because he looked dead already. The battle was part of a civil war: Temur’s people are very Mongol-like and this is a succession war that breaks out after the Khagan has died between his successors (much like after Genghis Khan’s death in the real world). Temur is now one of the few claimants left alive. At first he’s not concerned with that, he joins with some of the refugees and seems almost content to settle into anonymity. But it becomes clear that there is more going on than first meets the eye. Edene, the girl Temur is falling in love with, is stolen away from the refugee camp by blood ghosts called up from the dead of the battle by a sorcerer allied with the other side of the civil war. He sets off to rescue her and along the way discovers the sorcerer’s schemes will have a wider impact than just on his own family and his own country, and resolves to stop him.

And so far, that sounds very bog standard epic fantasy – chosen one (male) goes off to rescue girl, take back throne and stop the evil sorcerer. But that’s really not what this series is like. For starters, it’s much more of an ensemble cast than the paragraph above makes it sound and a lot of the ensemble are women. For instance rescuing Edene might be Temur’s initial motivation to set off – but Edene isn’t just a pretty damsel in distress who waits in the fortress for Temur’s arrival. She takes action herself to escape, and she’s very definitely the hero of her own story – even tho at first she is playing into the antagonist’s schemes. Another member of the cast is Hrahima, a female Cho-tse – a sentient tiger (which is a bit like calling a human a sentient monkey). The antagonist is also not just one evil man with minions although I suspect he’d like to think he is – but the “minions” are people who again are the heroes of their own stories.

The other primary protagonist (alongside Temur & Edene) is the wizard Samarkar – she is a Once-Princess of Rasa who has chosen to become part of an order of wizards where the price for power is sterilisation. For men this is a relatively easy operation, but for women it’s at the limits of the medical technology of the day – so we first meet Samarkar as she is discovering she will live and recover from the operation. And it’s only after you pay the price that you discover if you will gain power – one of the other supporting cast is a wizard who never gained her power (but nonetheless she’s still respected as one of the best theoreticians of the order). She meets (and rescues) Temur near the beginning of his journey to find Edene. The wizards are very curious about the world in a scientific way – knowledge is power, knowing how things work lets you figure out how to manipulate them. When Temur swears a blood-vow Samarkar realises no-one has recorded the progress of one of these through from the very start, and so she decides to travel with Temur. Quickly she moves to be a participant rather than merely an observer, as she & Temur become first friends and then more.

As I said at the beginning of this review this is Asian flavoured fantasy. By that I mean it uses the cultures and mythology of various parts of Asia as the underpinnings of the story in the same way that a lot of fantasy uses a sort of medieval European “lords, ladies, castles, knights, damsels” bedrock as its foundation. But it’s not an indistinct mishmash of pseudo-Asian culture – there are several countries in the world and they have distinct cultures which are recognisably riffing off distinct cultures in our world. For instance as I’ve already mentioned Temur’s people are akin to the Mongols – I recognised a China analogue (of the right era) and a very obvious analogue of the Islamic Caliphate (in the same way that pseudo-Euro fantasy often has a religion that is Christianity-in-all-but-name here we have an Islam). I think the Rasa might be Tibetan analogues but I don’t know enough about Tibet’s history to be sure.

The world, however, is not just a thinly veiled version of our own. It’s not just that magic works, the sky is also very different. What sky you see reflects the ruler of the land you’re in. When a regime changes so does the sky, when you cross a country’s borders the sky changes, Although there are mentions of this being over-ruled sometime by the ideology of the people (rather than their ruler) if it’s deep-seated enough. It’s not necessarily just a change in colour or something petty like that – the sun might rise in a different direction, or be much much brighter. And the night sky will also change. In the land ruled by the Khagan of Temur’s people you see a moon for every potential heir to the throne – as each is born a new moon is also born. As any of them die then their moon dies with them. Which means in the first part of the first book Temur is able to track the progress of the civil war even after he’s left for dead on the battlefield – by counting moons. And obviously so can the other side …

I’ve often read defences of the lack of women with agency in epic fantasy that boil down to “well, it’s a medieval world, women aren’t able to do anything in that sort of society”. And this series demonstrates very well just how much bollocks that is. The vast majority of the societies in the world of the Eternal Sky are patriarchal and the roles women are permitted to fulfil are limited and mostly decorative. In theory. But in practice the women in this story drive a lot of the plot along whether they act openly in their own interests or more indirectly. Even the slave-poetess who is literally inside a box for large chunks of the time she’s present in the story is not just sitting there waiting to be done to, she’s doing.

A criticism I’d make is that the antagonists are from the Islamic analogue culture, and that doesn’t sit well with me. I think I can see why it ended up like that – the whole set up is a sort of mirror of the standard Euro-fantasy with the Asian cultures occupying the role that Western cultures normally do. There’s even mentions in passing of exotic white skinned people from the West in the same way one might find mentions of exotic people from the East. And if you reflect around the centre then the Caliphate will end up playing the same role in both cases. I just don’t like that it plays into the current political demonisation of the Muslim world.

I thoroughly recommend the books (other than that one criticism) – I’ve talked about them all at once because I read them back to back and finished all three within four days, they were very engrossing 🙂 I think they’ll also reward re-reading, and there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t mention in this review about themes & patterns that might well be even clearer on a re-read.

“Grail” Elizabeth Bear

Grail is the final book in Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder trilogy. I’ve posted about the previous two here and here. The first time I read the book I read the first couple of pages, then double checked I had the right book – the start is completely different from what I was expecting! (I should’ve been a bit more trusting, it’s clear by halfway down page 3 that it’s the right book …)

As with Chill it’s a bit hard to talk about the plot of this one without spoilers for the plot of the previous ones. The overall structure of the trilogy is that book one is about beginning (resuming) the journey, book two is making the journey and now book three is arrival. Well, one of the overall structures 🙂 So in Grail the generation ship Jacob’s Ladder arrives at the destination planet they picked out, only to discover that in the meantime humanity has spread and overtaken them. There’s a colony on the planet already, and it’s not clear if they’ll be welcome. Both from the perspective of the amount of resources needed to absorb a sudden increase in population, and from the perspective of how much both cultures have changed since their common origin many centuries ago. The story isn’t just about the meeting and interaction of these two cultures – the antagonists from books 1 & 2 are still present and have their own answers to the question of whether the population of Jacob’s Ladder should settle on this new planet.

Bear again uses the narrative trick I mentioned when I talked about Carnival several months ago (post). Both cultures have things that are familiar to us and things that are not, and the things that the current point of view character regards as Other are often the familiar things. But the stuff they take for granted is often the things that feel alien to us. Of course in this case it’s also a chance for Bear to remind us that these characters we’ve got comfortable with across the last two books would look and feel very very alien if we were actually to meet them.

I find myself unsatisfied with the ending. I can see how it grows organically out of the story so far, and I can see how it mirrors the ending of the first book of the trilogy (a choice made in extremis to save the population by changing them into something else, perhaps against their will). I can even see how it fits in with a central idea of the trilogy – sometimes all the choices suck, but you still have to choose and accept the consequences of that choice. And all three books have endings that involve finding a way to shift the paradigm to improve your choices (however this doesn’t contradict my previous sentence!). I just find it unsatisfying, somehow. I guess perhaps I’d prefer to imagine the two cultures co-existing uneasily and having to deal with each other, than a solution that avoids that?

There’s also a narrative thread that felt like it went nowhere much. The existence of other intelligences than the human ones in this book felt like it was only present to highlight how both human cultures had blindspots and a somewhat hubristic approach to their place in the greater universe. This is as opposed to book 2 where I felt the alien life form gave a sense of a wider and more wondrous universe outside the confines of the Jacob’s Ladder.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, don’t be fooled by the last couple of paragraphs!

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“Chill” Elizabeth Bear

Chill is the second book in the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy by Elizabeth Bear – the first one was Dust (post). I read this on the plane back from Egypt immediately after finishing Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword (post) which definitely influenced the thoughts I was having while reading it.

It’s pretty much impossible to talk about the plot of Chill in any way at all without spoilers for the end of Dust – but given these are four or five years old now I shan’t put a spoiler cut, just don’t read the rest of this paragraph if it bothers you 🙂 At the end of Dust the generation ship, Jacob’s Ladder, has started moving again. Now that the immediate danger of exploding stars is over the occupants of the ship need to deal with questions like where their destination is. The plot of this book reminds me in some ways of Sherri S. Tepper’s general plot – there’s an Awful Truth waiting for our protagonists about the foundations of their world & society. There are also the remnants of some of the antagonists from last book to deal with, and the repercussions of the decision Perceval et al took at the end of Dust in order to save the lives of the Mean population of the ship.

So one of the themes of the book is consequences, and grief. Living with the result of a decision you or someone else made, because even if it was the best choice there’s always a price to pay. Which also ties into the theme of identity that I picked out in my micro-review last time I read this (post on Livejournal). Where you are now, who you are now, depends on the choices you made and the prices you were willing to pay – and the choices available depend on who you are and where you came from. I think everyone in the story has done things they’d rather not’ve done. Either because who they’ve become changes the choice they would make if they faced that now, or because there were no good choices and now they must live with the consequences of the lesser of two evils.

The ideas about identity were interesting to read straight after Ancillary Sword. Bear and Leckie both explore the idea of putting a different personality into a body, replacing the one that grew there. But they seem to come to different conclusions about how it would work, or more accurately I think they start with different premises about how minds and bodies function. Leckie’s ships have personalities not just in the ship, but distributed throughout ancillaries – human bodies with the mind replaced by the ship’s mind. And the ancilliaries are to a large extent interchangeable – if the ancillary-making process “takes” then each unit is a part of the whole mind. Even the failure that we see leaves a fragment of the mind that isn’t a part of the whole, the original person is still gone. So the premise seems to be that body and mind are separate and putting a mind into a new body doesn’t alter the mind. (I keep saying “seems to” because I think there are hints in the books that whilst the Radch might think it works like that it actually doesn’t but I don’t know yet if Leckie’s going anywhere with that). Bear believes the mind and body to be much more closely intertwined (and I’m inclined to agree). So the multiple cases in the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy where we have a mind put into a new body the resulting person is no longer quite the person they were in their original body. Who you are, determined not just by the choices you’ve made but also by the meat your mind wears.

I seem to’ve ended up only really talking about what’s underneath the surface (in part because it’s a re-read not a first time read), but it also has a good surface. I’d be hard pushed to pick whether this series or the Promethean Age books are my favourites of Bear’s work.

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“Ancillary Sword” Ann Leckie

Ancillary Sword is the sequel to Ann Leckie’s debut novel (Ancillary Justice – post – which won all the awards this year). I really loved the first book so was looking forward eagerly to the second one, and it didn’t disappoint. I read it on the flights to & from Egypt last November, so I devoured it in a couple of large gulps rather than with pauses for thought. Due to that, and wanting to avoid spoilers for both this book and the first one, this post is just going to touch on some general points rather than go into any details.

One thing that struck me is how easy it was to get back into the lack of gender identification of Leckie’s protagonist’s point of view. In the first book it was something I was paying attention to in particular, as it was one of the things everyone was talking about in connection with the book. But it was easy to just roll with it this time round. I’m not sure if there were fewer places where Leckie was deliberately setting out to disconcert the reader (with “she” closely followed by a description that made it clear it was a man being referenced); or if I was just expecting it and so less disconcerted by it. I did default to imagining all the characters as women (due to the “she” pronouns used throughout) unless it was mentioned someone in particular was a man, which does give the book a different flavour to other books.

Generally this book didn’t seem to concentrate on the gender stuff, instead it took the theme of identity and what it means to be a person (rather than a thing) from the last book and put that even more at the centre. We have Breq, an ancillary/former ship (and our point of view) pretending to be a “real person”. We have her ship’s crew pretending to be ancillaries, as a point of pride that they are keeping up an old transition. We have a failed conversion to ancillary, leaving the character in question neither one nor the other. And there’s a lot of tension about who thinks who is a person (including their ownself) which dovetails in with more usual racism, classism and xenophobia, using the prejudices that are alien to the reader to illuminate the ones that are more familiar.

The Empire of the Radch in this book feels very like the British Empire – in particular it made me think of the way the British ruled India, and the way they talked about their Indian subjects. We watched an episode of a series about First World War soldiers from the various Empires (The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire), and it was talking about the theories of “Martial Races” that the British Empire had. So some tribes/ethnic groups/political divisions/arbitrary divisions of Indians were thought to be suitable for infantry, some for officers, some not for the army at all. All depending on whether they were stereotyped as clever, or courageous, or peaceful, or whatever. And this concept resonates strongly with the way the Radch tea plantation owners treat their slavesemployees.

A good book, and good continuation of the series. I think there’s a lot of stuff here that will reward a re-read too – perhaps when the next one comes out I’ll read the first two again.

“Dust” Elizabeth Bear

I bought Elizabeth Bear’s “Dust” about 3 years ago when I read it for an online book club (which has since vanished without trace so I can’t even link to it). I did write about it on my own livejournal so I can link to that first impression. This is another of the backlog of book posts that I’m catching up on (the last one! I’m nearly up to date!) so again I think this’ll be less in depth than I would’ve written had I got to it quicker.

The book at first seems to exist in the space between science fiction and fantasy. The opening scene could almost come out of a pseudo-historical medievaloid fantasy – there’s a Lady, there are knights, a housekeeper, a named sword, and our point of view character is an upstairs maid. But look at it more closely and you see the science fiction – nanotech chains, references to extruded material, beam weapons. The literal blue blood for the Family (the Exalt, the aristocracy of this world) could go in either camp at this point. Reading on it becomes more clear that this is science fiction – the story is set on a generation ship, a spaceship travelling at slower than light speed where the crew are awake and expecting their voyage to take several generations to complete. But something has gone wrong, and the ship isn’t travelling any more and hasn’t been for centuries. A lot (most?) of the crew are Means – they don’t have nanotech symbionts and their lifespans are what we would consider normal. The Exalt are effectively immortal, and so the older ones were alive before the disaster. You might naively think that would make it easier to keep society together and work on fixing the ship. But the Family are split into factions and in many cases more concerned with their internal political games than worrying about anything else. This isn’t helped by the fact that the ship’s AI is also fragmented. With a crisis looming the status quo can’t continue, so at least the AI is trying to regroup and gather itselves together. Of course, it isn’t that easy – each fragmentary personality wants to be the last one standing and will fight with whatever tools it has to achieve that goal.

The first scene also introduces us to the two primary protagonists, who are certainly intended to be tools of one (or more) of these fragments. There is Rien, through whose eyes we see the scene. She’s a teenager, an orphan, a maid, a Mean who turns out to have a rather more Exalted heritage than she imagined (pun fully intended). We also see Sir Perceval, a Knight from Engine captured by the Lady Arianne Conn of Rule who has mutilated her and will kill her. Perceval is also a young woman, but fully Exalt and aware of her heritage, and happens to be Rien’s half-sister. Their story is of a pattern that’s more from the fantasy side of the dividing line – they escape and go on a quest across the world. Both are Chosen Ones in their own way, and together they must try to save their world. No matter what the cost.

It’s another book that feels like it would reward going through with a fine tooth comb and noting all the little details. As with the Promethean Age books names are very important, although in these books knowing someone’s name doesn’t give you power over them per se – this series is after all on the science fiction side of the line. But names, their meanings and the choices behind the names reveal things about the person or object once you’re paying attention (whether that’s you-the-reader or a character in the story). Choice is again a theme. In this story there’s a lot about the horror of having your ability to choose taken away, or your choices coerced. And about how even when you’re suffering the knowledge that you freely chose to pay this price for something you consider worth it can bring a certain strength and endurance.

A good book, I definitely enjoyed it as much the second time around as the first 🙂

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“One-Eyed Jack” Elizabeth Bear

I mentioned at the end of my post about Elizabeth Bear’s Hell and Earth that the next of the Promethean Age books was out – and in fact in between writing that post and it going live I bought One-Eyed Jack and started to read it. This book takes place after Blood and Iron (and possibly after Whiskey and Water, I’m not sure if this is what the common antagonist character did before showing up in Whiskey and Water or after (if there was an after for him, which is ambiguous)). It is more in the nature of a linked story in the same universe, rather than a sequel per se.

It’s set in Las Vegas (mostly), and the protagonists are not so much people as archetypes and personifications of places. Which doesn’t sound like it would work, but it really does. The titular character, One-Eyed Jack is the genius or avatar of Las Vegas along with his partner the Suicide King. And the story opens on the Hoover Dam, with the first skirmish in what the Los Angeles avatars hope will be a takeover of Las Vegas using the Dam as their bridgehead. It is vital for the water supply of LA after all, so is a point for them to establish their influence. Amongst the rest of the cast are the ghosts of a pair of late 19th Century folk heroes, a vampire who calls himself Tribute (but who you’ll recognise early on if you know any cultural icons from the 20th Century US), and a handful of pairs of spies/assassins who are archetypes from different TV shows. Of course the takeover attempt from LA isn’t all that’s going on – there are several other power struggles which are also coming to a head at this point, and over the course of the book the links between these become clear.

There was a certain amount of mental whiplash reading this so soon after reading Hell and Earth. All four of the other Promethean Age books are grounded in a mythos I know – so the interesting thing was seeing what Bear was doing with them and exploring her versions of these stories I already have a sort of shape for. This book flipped that on its head – here the anchor point for me were the elements of Bear’s Promethean Age I recognised, and the newer stuff was the mythos. I don’t think that would be the case for someone who lives in the US, or for someone who watches more fiction TV than I do. But it still works as a story, and as a cast of characters, for me – I know enough through cultural osmosis to have an idea who the people are. Which is a part of the point of the book – like me you might never’ve been to Vegas or to LA, but you’ll have enough of an idea of the cities to recognise the personifications as personifications. Like me, you might not’ve watched the various spy shows, but you’ll still recognise the character types and possibly even the specific shows referenced. I’m fairly confident the Englishman and the woman in the leather jumpsuit are from The Avengers, for instance, despite not having watched a single episode of that.

Names and the naming of things are once again important in this story in ways that range from the One-Eyed Jack using sympathetic magic to call up ghosts of his more famous namesakes, to the way the assassins are nameless for most of the story. Another common theme for the Promethean Age novels that shows up is the power of story with the characters at times trusting that if they “play to genre” they’ll survive something implausibly (the hero never dies in a spy story!), and at times deliberating flouting genre conventions in order to throw the antagonists off the scent.

One thing that has struck me as I’ve been writing this up & thinking about the book, is that the mental whiplash I mentioned above is almost a part of the point. The stories & characters in the other Promethean Age books are much more familiar to me, because I’m British – the Stratford Man duology are set in my cultural past with my cultural mythology playing a part. The other two (Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water) are set in a part of the New World that’s full of immigrants from the Old World, whether recent or not. So the stories are the stories from “home”, and some – like Arthur, like the Fae – are a part of my cultural heritage and have continuity with the Stratford Man stories. Of course there’s other elements mixed in – not all the immigrants who come to New York and the rest of the North-East US are European after all and they change to fit their new context as stories always do. And then we come to this book – it’s set in the West and the people who came here came from the East coast, it’s one step more removed from Europe. And the stories they build their identities on are the stories of the Wild West – of Cowboys and Indians, of brave pioneers, of lawless towns and railroads bringing civilisation, of the American Dream and the gold rush. And into that mix is dropped Hollywood glamour, sinful Vegas – not the staid old-fashioned elements of Faerie courts. With a health dollop of Cold War paranoia. Basically it’s more deeply rooted in US culture, so it’s not surprising I recognise things more from an outside perspective, I am an outsider to it.

A good book, that kept me thinking about it after I finished reading it.

“Labyrinth” Kat Richardson

“Labyrinth” is book 5 of Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series, and I read it a couple of months ago now. I nearly decided not to write a blog post about it as it had been so long since I read it – this summer has been pretty hectic & I’ve been generating posts to write quicker than I can write them! (Which is a nice problem to have 🙂 ). But I do want to make a few remarks for my own benefit even if I’m not sure how interesting or coherent they’ll be for anyone else. And it’s incredibly hard to say anything without spoilers for the previous books.

I thought when I started the series that these would be a never ending series of PI thrillers. That book 1 would be the origin story where Harper Blaine gets her ability to see and interact with the supernatural and then there’d be a bad-guy-of-the-book or mystery-of-the-book for each succeeding instalment. Instead it’s become clear that there’s an overarching story here, and I found out (after I read this book but before I wrote about it) that the ninth and final book has been published this summer. So that’s reshaped how I think about the series a bit, and I think probably gives them more re-read value (and I’m annoyed now that I missed out on book 3 as it’s more like missing a chapter of a novel rather than just an episode). I think I’ll stick to using the library for now – but I should put them on the list to be bought & revisited later.

Plot wise, Harper is back on home ground here and we revisit some of the people and plot threads from book 1 but now Harper knows so much more than she did. It’s become clear that what happened to Harper wasn’t an accident, and that a lot of the people that seemed coincidentally linked to her in the first story actually had agendas of their own. Harper is also being changed by her increasingly deep connection to the Grey, and not in good ways. Over the last 4 books she’s gradually opened up and made more friends & connections* and now the Grey is starting to take some of that away. I don’t think this is going to turn out to be a tragedy overall, the tone so far hasn’t felt like the sort of story where Harper could become evil and take over the world muahahahaha. But with 4 books left there’s definitely time for these disturbing seeds to grow and it to get darker before pulling back at the end.

*Amusing that her lack of connection to the world around her was something I was concerned was a bad sign for the series in book 1. Nope, it was a plot point.

On a different note, after I read book 4 I wondered if the Egyptian vampires were a real legend – the author’s note in this book says that they are not. I’m impressed that Richardson has made her creation feel so truthy – there wasn’t anything that jumped out and made me think that couldn’t be an Egyptian legend.

Hopefully the library has book 6! 🙂

“Hell and Earth” Elizabeth Bear

Hell and Earth is the second half of the story begun in Ink and Steel (post). I have unfortunately left this too long between reading and writing up (3 weeks? maybe more) so this will be briefer notes than originally intended.

This pair of books are very much two halves of a larger story – although there’s some degree of resolution at the end of Ink and Steel (and it’s not a cliff hanger), most of the plotlines don’t come to fruition until this book. But this half of the story feels more like Kit Marlowe’s story (where the first half was more Will Shakespeare’s or perhaps more balanced between the two). Over the course of Ink and Steel Bear set up her world where the land of mortals (England as ruled by Elizabeth I) is linked to the court of the Daoine Sidhe (as ruled by the Mebd). Now Elizabeth is dying, as all mortals inevitably must, which threatens the Fae due to this linkage as well as potentially plunging the mortal world into the chaos of a succession crisis. But that’s almost the B-plot, the main thrust of the story is Kit discovering what was done to him in his youth that’s left him with PTSD and symbols carved into his flesh. It wasn’t just petty sadism on the part of his tormentor, but is another way in which Kit is a tool that has been shaped to fit a long term plan to alter the stories that shape the world.

Mortality is a thread that runs through the whole book – it even opens with the discovery of Edmund Spenser dead in his home. But it’s not just mortality that keeps cropping up it’s also the aftermath and the grieving, and how the people left behind cope. Not just Elizabeth and whether & how the country and the Fae are going to survive the turmoil of her passing away. But also on a more intimate level – Will is dying, slowly but surely, as all mortals will. But Kit is not entirely mortal any more and beginning to live with the realisation that all that he loved in the mortal realm will inevitably fade away.

As with Ink and Steel (and Bear’s books in general) one of the things I like best about this world she has created is the sense of reality, even tho the plot and premise are fantastical. The characters react plausibly to the situation(s) they’re in, I have a strong sense of personality for them all. Even if I might not predict what’s going to happen next it doesn’t feel forced, rather grows organically out of the characters & their interactions.

I wish I’d either taken a few notes or written this up sooner, as I’m sure I had more to say. It’s a series that continues to feel like it would reward paying close attention and taking notes, whilst still being a lot of fun to read on a surface level. There’s another book in the series just recently come out, which I’ve not picked up a copy of yet – I need to rectify this soon! 🙂

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“Ancillary Justice” Ann Leckie

I picked up Ancillary Justice when I saw it in the bookshop the other week. It’s the debut novel by Ann Leckie, and it’s gathering awards left, right & centre. I’ve seen quite a few reviews in the various blogs I read and I don’t think I’ve seen one that didn’t like it.

The story is set in the far future, when humans have colonised many many worlds across the galaxy. The narrative has two threads in alternating chapters – one is the “now” of the story and the other tells us the back story. The protagonist, Breq, was once an AI for a ship called Justice of Toren. Justice of Toren‘s mind and persona didn’t just reside in the ship as a computer, but were also distributed across several (hundreds) of once-human bodies called ancillaries. When the story begins one of these ancillaries, calling herself Breq, is a long way from home and acting on her own. The backstory chapters reveal the world Breq came from, and what happened to get from Justice of Toren to Breq on her own. And the “present-day” plot is about what Breq is going to do about it. The action takes place on various worlds in the Radch’s galaxy spanning empire, involving military action, intrigue & politics. To avoid spoilers, I shan’t talk much more about the plot.

I liked the different cultures in this world. Leckie has done a good job of creating both a diversity of cultures, and cultures that aren’t just carbon copies of historical cultures with -in-space appended. The one we see from the inside is the Radch, the large empire of many worlds who created Justice of Toren. There’s something of the Romans about them, there’s something of the Chinese, there’s something of the British Empire. But these are resonances and flavours, the Radch is also uniquely itself.

Gender is the thing that most of the stuff I’d read about this book talked about. But it isn’t gender itself that’s a theme of the book, it’s our cultural assumptions about gender and our cultural need to know someone’s gender. The Radch language doesn’t mark gender. I think it’s clear that the humans (as opposed to AIs) are like people in our culture – most people have a gender, most people identify as either male or female. But there is no linguistic or social need to distinguish the genders. Justice of Toren/Breq hasn’t got a gender (and the ancillary bodies are of both sexes), and has no reason to care about the gender of others – which causes Breq problems speaking foreign languages in the “now” strand of the story as she tries to read unfamiliar cues without the backing of memory & resources that she had as Justice of Toren.

What Leckie has done with this is clever: she’s chosen to keep us in the Radch language perspective, and not mark gender except when Breq is speaking another language. Throughout the book the Radch pronoun is translated as “she”, and other gendered words use the feminine form (like “sister” or “neice”). Which means we get sentences like “She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain.”. Why I think it’s particularly clever is that by using feminine pronouns throughout the reader frequently has their mental images shifted by a later piece of information. It makes one’s cultural assumptions around gender suddenly snap into focus. Why has learning this character is actually male changed how you see things? Why is is so disconcerting not to know the gender of characters when it doesn’t actually matter? One of my favourite characters of the people Breq interacts with I don’t think we ever learn the gender of. I realised late on in the book that I had this person pegged in the “female” box, not just because it’s always “her” & “she” but also because of all sorts of social cues that put this person in the “social inferior” box in both professional and personal situations. And that says a lot about my unconscious assumptions, doesn’t it?

The Radch don’t divide people up by gender, but they have a keen sense of social status – which family you belong to, how long your family have been “civilised”, whether you have the right accent, the right colouring, whether or not you dress appropriately. There’s a scene in the flashback section of two (human not ancillary) officers from the Justice of Toren having dinner with two high status locals – shown from Justice of Toren‘s point of view (as the whole book is) we end up with no idea of the genders of the four people but a very vivid picture of the relative social status of the various people. And the miscommunications of that status between cultures, and the unhappiness of the lower status Radch lieutenant with her obvious lower class markers of speech etc. Justice of Toren/Breq is outside this hierarchy – as a ship she is a tool not a person – but exquisitely aware of it. However she makes her own judgements of people based on their actions that don’t necessarily match the heirarchy – which demonstrates how this obsession with birth & rank doesn’t say anything about the person in question: “better breeding” doesn’t necessarily mean a better person.

I mentioned in the last paragraph that Justice of Toren/Breq sees herself as a thing not a person. I think another thing that’s going on in this book is exploration of what it means to be a person. Justice of Toren definitely isn’t human, and doesn’t experience the world in the same way as a human. The flashback chapters show some of the effect of being simultaneously in many bodies in many places, and the different perspective it gives. But I think it’s equally clear that she (and Breq) is a person, despite her belief that she isn’t. She has a personality and her own likes & dislikes. And she has a person’s sense of self and of self-preservation. An example of this comes when Breq meets a doctor who knows what she is. Making ancillaries is now considered unethical, because you have to erase the memories & personality of the person who’s body you’ve turned into a part of the ship. The doctor is fairly enthusiastic about how she might be able to restore Breq’s body’s memories, and is asking wouldn’t Breq like to be free. But Breq is horrified – that would mean her death. The body might be free (and the person it used to be would be alive again), but she – Breq – would be dead.

There were other things I wanted to talk about, but I think I shall stop here – this review has got quite long. So did the book live up to the hype? Yes, it definitely did. As well as the things to think about that I’ve talked about above, it’s also a really good story at the space opera end of the genre 🙂

“Crown of Renewal” Elizabeth Moon

Crown of Renewal is the fifth & final book in Elizabeth Moon’s Paladin’s Legacy series and so, as she says in her Author’s Note at the beginning, it’s really not an entry point if you haven’t read at least the four other books in this series (and preferably the other 5 in this world). I’ve got them all, and I’ve been looking forward to this instalment in the series since I read the fourth one last autumn (post). And as with that one I’ve read this through at a gallop (not quite in one sitting this time but only because I had other things to do). It’s a satisfying conclusion to this series, and also ties up some of the loose ends from the earlier two series.

To recap a little – these books are secondary world epic fantasy, set in a universe that owes a debt to the Tolkein-esque & D&D flavours of fantasy. There are elves, there are gnomes, there are dragons, there are paladins, and so on. But Moon has taken these archetypes and made them into something her own. I particularly like her gnomes – these are humanoid and live in stone & work with it. And they have a society based around a very strict Law. Moon has managed to make them feel very alien, and very much their own thing. The first series set in this world was the Deed of Paksenarrion, which followed the life of Paksenarrion from her early life as a sheep farmer’s daughter who signs up with a mercenary company, through to her becoming a Paladin of Gird. The next series was a duology set much earlier in this world’s history – about the human life of Gird before he became a sort of demi-god. This current five book series starts not long after the end of the Deed of Paksenarrion, and deals with the events that Paks set in motion – nothing is without consequences after all. Another thread of the story is about why there are such differences between Gird’s teachings and life as we see them in the duology about him, and in the “now” of Paksenarrion’s time. It’s not just a case of chinese whispers across the centuries, although there’s some of that too.

Moon’s antagonists tend to be less nuanced than her other characters – they are generally flat out evil. In some ways this is a weakness in her writing, but I also feel that she does it deliberately as part of portraying a comforting faith in humanity. Her non-antagonist characters (in particular the secondary characters) can be mistaken, misguided, irritating, wrong, and do bad things. But that doesn’t mean they’re bad people – where you step across the line is when you know something is wrong and then do it anyway. These books have a fairly black & white morality and a Good vs Evil struggle, but you don’t have to be perfect to be on the side of light you just have to be doing your best. Which is a comforting way of looking at the world. Even Moon’s paladins aren’t avatars of perfection, they have flaws and make missteps.

This is still one of my favourite worlds to read books in 🙂 It’s a shame this book means no more for a while (if ever) but it was good to get another 5 books series after I’d thought the story was over.