Ann Leckie

Another excursion into Anne Leckie's Imperial Radch universe. In this novel, three different characters pursue converging paths of discovery and end up each changed by the encounter. It's perhaps not too much of a spoiler to say that there are happy endings all round; the tension in the book comes from seeing how the characters will get there from where they started out - some of those starts are fairly extreme. But certainly I was ahead of the author when I spotted one of the congruencies show more between two of the characters about half-way in. This did not spoil the book for me.

I saw some parallels with Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries, in that one of the characters prefers to retire to their quarters and curl up with their favourite tv soap adventure series, and later uses that to bond with another character. But something else struck me about this book, which it has in common with the Martha Wells and also with the books of Becky Chambers (which are still on my TBR pile, but I've read enough reviews to have some idea that they fall into this category).

I recently read a paper in the scholarly journal of science fiction, Foundation, on Leslie F. Stone, a pre-Golden Age writer in the pulps, and the varied reaction to a woman writer in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The debate seemed strangely contemporary, with women readers saying "Yes, we want SF stories with exciting super-science, but we want feelings and relationships too", whilst some male readers had a more hostile reaction, saying "We want exciting super-science but we also want intellects cold and hard and super-rational, and the more unfeeling, the better". In the end, that attitude prevailed, especially when John W. Campbell came on the editorial scene; Campbell rejected a Leslie Stone story, saying "We don't need this sort of thing in science fiction". And the identification of SF as "boys' stuff" set in and hasn't gone away, even amongst those who should know better and despite a lot of trying. I doubt that Anne Leckie could have sold stories to John W. Campbell. Fortunately, things have changed.

I'm beginning to feel that the Imperial Radch books are rather like Iain M, Banks' Culture novels. The books are not a series, in that there are few, if any, recurring characters, and the plot of each book is pretty much self-contained. Instead, in both series, each book adds another brick into a wall of comprehension, adding to our knowledge of their respective universes. In the case of Translation State, we find out much more about Presger Translators, the near-humans bred by the alien Presger to act as go-betweens for their interactions with human races in Radchaai space. Previous novels have set up Presger Translators as near-mythical characters of great power and danger, though the few we have come across in earlier books are either enigmatic or comic, as their disconnection from human societies lead them to all manner of faux pas in their dealings with humans. All this changes in Translation State. We see just why Presger Translators are considered dangerous, as dangerous as the Presger themselves. We also see that it might just be that the term "Translator" may not just refer to languages.

We also see that the concept of the ancillaries - human soldiers put under direct control of their ship's governing AI, with many ancillaries carrying out massive parallel task processing in the real world under the direction of one AI - may have its conceptual origin in certain races who can have the same consciousness occupy multiple bodies; the Presger Translators seem to be able to have two bodies sharing a consciousness and yet each acting independently, and other races who interact with humans via remote biomech avatars seem to be able to manage the same trick as well.

The writing is fairly plain and straightforward, though Leckie's characters often have a particular turn of phrase accurately reflecting their personalities. The fluidity of gender is an ongoing theme; different races have different numbers of genders, whilst other races get this wrong, either because they have different numbers of genders, or have no concept of it all (this often applies to AIs, as in the original trilogy), or (in the case of a Radch Ambassador) because they are simply too arrogant to worry about such niceties. But everyone seems to just roll with it, and no-one gets too exercised about people getting other people's pronouns wrong, because, as a character in a Joe Haldeman story once said, "Such things happen when different peoples meet".

(I did get a little puzzled by the first main character we are introduced to, who is identified as neuter but is referred to by the personal pronoun 'sie'. Trouble is, in German that's a feminine pronoun, and that threw me for a while. But I fairly quickly got into the habit of visualising the neuter characters as if they were some of the non-binary actors now appearing in tv shows like Star Trek: Discovery, and that little bit of visualisation gymnastics helped a lot.)

We also get a good picture of a group of nationalists who start out as a slightly comic pressure group, then become a political irritant, and finally become a threat, especially when they try to put into practice their firmly-held - but wrong - belief that the Presger do not actually exist and stories of their awfulness are a conspiracy by virtually everyone else. This, plus the pronoun soup, gave the story quite a contemporary twist; perhaps too contemporary for some readers, who might not be able to see past the gender fluidity. But hey, this is science fiction; if you can't cope with depictions of many very different lives, different worlds and different societies, perhaps you should go away and read something a bit less challenging? show less

I can't believe I didn't review this! I was apprehensive because I've lowkey hated most of the fantasy I've tried to read in the last few years, but Leckie takes a much more sci fi approach to fantasy, which fucking rules: What if there are gods and everything they say comes true?

It's a lot more than that premise---it's also a story about human foibles and (in a weird way) a "coming of age" story about the main character, who is a god. BUT ALSO there is beautiful wonderful mind-expanding show more worldbuilding, like a gorgeous literary account of being a god before life on earth and living through that, and gods learning language, and god economies and politics, and offhand mentions of how gender variant and neuroatypical people are commonly priests.

We named our kombucha mother The Myriad, which might be the gayest sentence ever written. show less

Breq was once Justice of Toren, an immense spaceship with thousands of ancillaries (AI soldiers in human bodies). Now, Breq is a single soldier on a quest of her own, one that leads her to a remote, icy planet where she encounters an acquaintance under unexpected circumstances...

That's really just the bare bones beginning of this story, which switches back and forth from Breq's present mission, to events that happened on Justice of Toren twenty years earlier. It's an intricately formulated show more book, a puzzle that slides together in a neat and satisfying way by the end of the book. I occasionally struggled with the complexities of the writing, particularly its handling of gender pronouns (in Breq's home culture, she/her is used exclusively as the default, and Breq complains of the difficulty of functioning in different cultures and languages where variable pronouns are used, and she must guess and often gets them wrong. I'm using she/her pronouns for Breq in the Radch sense, as she would, I think, prefer). But I enjoyed the story tremendously, and put a hold on the next book in the series right away. show less

A very engrossing read. Partially written in the first person, partially written in the second (!) -- which I got used to surprisingly fast -- and jumping back and forth between a very short time span "present" narrative and a very long time span backstory narrative, this fantasy novel is likely not quite what anyone would expect it to be. But I'll try to set yours: It's part political intrigue, part high concept world building, and part murder(?) mystery. The finale (I suppose I should warn show more now of slight, general terms spoilers ahead) reminded me of little so much as a Poirot style gathering of all the potential players and culprits in a single room to hash things out -- though I stress, while the mystery is a huge part of this novel, describing it as a detective novel would be as misleading as anything else. If you enjoy world building, magic systems and/or palace intrigue lntrigue less than I do, I suppose the book might at times seem slow or uneventful, but I found the pages flying by. In short, while part of the book's charm is that the plot is at once sprawling and very, very focused, I would very much like to revisit this world and these characters again. Thanks to Obdormio for the recommendation earlier this year, and my two youngerst siblings and their partners for consistently getting me something from my wishlist for my birthday. This was refreshingly different while also checking a lot of my tried-and-true boxes, which is a wonderful combination to manage. show less