Ancillary Justice and Sword
Dec. 2nd, 2014 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrSo I just read Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie and they were great, and aimed right at my id: intelligent space opera about a space ship AI stuck in the body of a human :D :D No time travel, alas, but she's thousands of years old and there's flashbacks to earlier times.
The plot is involving and the prose easy to read, I blew through both books in a day each. There's supposed to be a third book in the trilogy but both end on pretty satisfying notes. But I do hope the third comes out soon :)
They're not totally fluffy, there's serious themes like colonisation, rape, and grief and a fair number of unpleasant things happen, but the characters are likeable and develop satisfying relationships, by the end of each book I felt reasonably happy. I was reminded of the Culture novels, Vorkosigan novels, and *cough* the better written Homestuck fanfic about the Alternian empire. But with less makeouts and visceral violence, and not quite as satisfying as those at their best.
The narrator's culture is basically gender blind, so she calls everyone "she" and and every time she's expected to correctly guess people's gendered pronouns like it's obvious she gets gumpy. Most of the characters' genders are left ambiguous, which made for very interesting reading as I considered them as various combinations of male, female, or other.
MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW
This is one of the first scifi settings I've read that convinced me that a society really genuinely doesn't care about gender or sexuality except as a minor form of self expression. The main character, while definitely capable of platonic love, seems to find the way some (but explicitely not all) humans get so distracted by romance and sex a little irritating, so she's perfunctory describing such relationships. There's few unambiguously female, and no unambiguosly trans, non binary, or same sex attracted characters, so every now and then I think "wait are they actually all straight and/or dudes?" but this is a step up from say the Culture novels where they definitely ARE pretty much all straight and/or dudes despite the veneer of unheteronormativity. And you can't have every kind of representation at once.
Gender attitudes aside the society is not remotely equal: they're basically a dark skinned Roman Empire in space, colonisers who only pretend to treat colonised "citizens" as equals and are viciously callous towards non citizens. Which is written pretty well imo! Even if from the point of view of one of the colonisers, sort of (it's not like she got much choice about being a warship) The fact that the more powerful colonisers tend to have darker skin gave me pause, but it seems to be done ok? Like the sympathetic characters who get crap for being too pale are usually still brown, and the few genuinely pale characters we meet are bit parts. And it was kind of cool seeing the typical expectations subverted.
That said...it sometimes feels like it falls into typical "well meaning white person pokes at ideas around colonisation" holes, at least to me as a well meaning white person myself. Though not in a way I can put my finger on, see the conversation in the comments. It's still miles above most other scifi.
The explorations of minds made up of/connected to many other minds was fascinating and super fun, but I sometimes found it confusing and am not sure there's a totally self consistent description under that confusingness.
But still, overall, great.
The plot is involving and the prose easy to read, I blew through both books in a day each. There's supposed to be a third book in the trilogy but both end on pretty satisfying notes. But I do hope the third comes out soon :)
They're not totally fluffy, there's serious themes like colonisation, rape, and grief and a fair number of unpleasant things happen, but the characters are likeable and develop satisfying relationships, by the end of each book I felt reasonably happy. I was reminded of the Culture novels, Vorkosigan novels, and *cough* the better written Homestuck fanfic about the Alternian empire. But with less makeouts and visceral violence, and not quite as satisfying as those at their best.
The narrator's culture is basically gender blind, so she calls everyone "she" and and every time she's expected to correctly guess people's gendered pronouns like it's obvious she gets gumpy. Most of the characters' genders are left ambiguous, which made for very interesting reading as I considered them as various combinations of male, female, or other.
MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW
This is one of the first scifi settings I've read that convinced me that a society really genuinely doesn't care about gender or sexuality except as a minor form of self expression. The main character, while definitely capable of platonic love, seems to find the way some (but explicitely not all) humans get so distracted by romance and sex a little irritating, so she's perfunctory describing such relationships. There's few unambiguously female, and no unambiguosly trans, non binary, or same sex attracted characters, so every now and then I think "wait are they actually all straight and/or dudes?" but this is a step up from say the Culture novels where they definitely ARE pretty much all straight and/or dudes despite the veneer of unheteronormativity. And you can't have every kind of representation at once.
Gender attitudes aside the society is not remotely equal: they're basically a dark skinned Roman Empire in space, colonisers who only pretend to treat colonised "citizens" as equals and are viciously callous towards non citizens. Which is written pretty well imo! Even if from the point of view of one of the colonisers, sort of (it's not like she got much choice about being a warship) The fact that the more powerful colonisers tend to have darker skin gave me pause, but it seems to be done ok? Like the sympathetic characters who get crap for being too pale are usually still brown, and the few genuinely pale characters we meet are bit parts. And it was kind of cool seeing the typical expectations subverted.
That said...it sometimes feels like it falls into typical "well meaning white person pokes at ideas around colonisation" holes, at least to me as a well meaning white person myself. Though not in a way I can put my finger on, see the conversation in the comments. It's still miles above most other scifi.
The explorations of minds made up of/connected to many other minds was fascinating and super fun, but I sometimes found it confusing and am not sure there's a totally self consistent description under that confusingness.
But still, overall, great.
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Date: 2014-12-02 03:54 pm (UTC)Okay, I have to ask. Is there anything that's not grossly racist that wouldn't feel like this to you if it came from a white writer? I mean... ugh, I am the most hypocritical, going to debate stuff on the internet after being all preachy over the merits of not doing this when one is not in the chillest of mindsets, but every human culture ever has been an invading bad guy at some point. Every race has had its empires.
In this universe pretty much everyone is some shade of brown, the oppressors and the oppressed. And why not? I find it a little condescending to suggest that only nonwhite writers have something genuine to say on the subject of colonisation, as if the Western whites are the only ones smart enough to have been the overarching bad guy in history, and the rest of the world only knows the perspective of the oppressed.
(Also, the Roman Empire was, in our understanding of race, immensely diverse in all the levels of its hierarchy.)
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Date: 2014-12-03 02:37 am (UTC)But it's mild enough that I can only point to a gut feeling instead of anything overt.
I probably only noticed because I've been thinking a lot about how people write about colonisation recently as I try and articulate the serious problems with Dragon Age. My train of thought reading these books went:
"Huh, this is an interesting exploration of colonisation."
"...wait is it black people oppressing paler people??"
"Hmm actually that kind of works. Interesting."
"Oh wow this is EXACTLY what Dragon Age should have been."
"...urgh no actually something about this is bugging me the same way Dragon Age did. Is Ann Leckie white? I have a gut feeling she is."
So it's not a matter of knowing she's white and projecting. Nor is it the idea of an empire of colonising dark people in principle.
I think it's that despite a fantastic theme of showing that everyone is just people, whether the "civilised" genocidal colonisers or "savage" victims, deep down she still ultimately identifies with the colonisers. Even though Breq herself is a sort of slave...idk. It's just a gut feeling!
But (a) This doesn't ruin the book, just limit it's ability to give a different POV and (b) the more I think about where Breq sits on the fuzzy line between colonised and coloniser the more I think about the way she always says she is not Radch, and how we will hopefully learn about pre-Radch AI ship society next book. Which could be a fantastic POV shift.
As you point out "pale", "white" and "coloniser" are not quite synonyms, even if they're very strongly correlated amongst scifi authors. And POC, people who aren't white, colonised peoples, and dark skinned people (again not quite the same groups) are not a uniform mass of identically oppressed victims, something Ancillary Sword explores pretty well. There is definitely nothing wrong in principle with the way she's set up her society, just maybe the excecution.
My gut could be wrong. It's possible that thinking about and playing the much more simplistic Dragon Age: Inquisition as I read these books, and just generally being tired, means I missed some of the subtlety. And even if I'm right, "tries really hard to capture the full range of POVs on colonisation but doesn't entirely succeed" is not the worst thing you can say about a book.
When I have a gut feeling that something is a bit off, I feel better for saying so. Other people can comment and say "I'm glad it wasn't just me", "thanks for the warning", or "I didn't feel that way at all", and that can help me solidify my opinion one way or the other. But it is important to differentiate between "something feels a bit off" and "there are serious, unambiguous issues", I might edit my post to make it more clear this falls into the first group.
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Date: 2014-12-03 03:06 pm (UTC)See, this gives me that sense of unease. It reads like you're saying that it's not possible for this to be simply a failing of one's writing, but that it's rooted in identity. Which... right, since we're both white and can't talk race, let's stick to something where we are the under/mis/represented group: women. What, to you, is the female POV? There are three billion women in the world, coming from millions of different backgrounds. My mother's idea of what being a woman is, and how it manifests, is nothing I can identify with. She doesn't want the things I want, doesn't get upset by the things that upset me, doesn't notice or think the things I do --- and vice versa. From where I am, when it comes to "not getting the female POV", she might as well be a guy, and this is how she feels about me too. (Hell, she's actually said it on a few occasions.) And her POV is my country's majority when it comes to women, which is why Western-style feminism doesn't and can't work the same there beyond some broad agreements in terms of aims.
But to get back to the point: what you are saying there is that despite the endless variation in how women get on with being women, a guy is by the fact of his guyness unable to take a stab at any of these variations. I agree with you that we learn from existing writing, customs, etc., and it's hard to avoid cliches, but I am really unhappy with the suggestion that a writer's failing to transcend these has to do with their innate attributes such as gender or ethnicity, rather than taking the cliches for granted.
I think it's that despite a fantastic theme of showing that everyone is just people, whether the "civilised" genocidal colonisers or "savage" victims, deep down she still ultimately identifies with the colonisers.
Well... yes? The series' POV is somebody who, much as she is critical of her society, is still somebody shaped by it. (Quite literally so, being an AI). This is just good writing.
Put off replying until I felt I had a shot at getting myself across, let's see if I succeed...
Date: 2014-12-11 06:10 am (UTC)what you are saying there is that despite the endless variation in how women get on with being women, a guy is by the fact of his guyness unable to take a stab at any of these variations
No. I'm saying that a guy, by the fact of his guyness, is more likely to do a bad job at portraying those variations well, and that there are specific ways of screw up writing women that I generally only see from men. Not all male writers! And not never from female writers. But that's the trend.
I have read plenty of awful books by female writers which do an awful job of writing women as actual people (either all women, or just a subset of women the writer clearly didn't think of as people. Because as you say, there isn't just one "female pov").
I have read plenty of great books by male writers which did their female characters justice.
But for example: I find most supernatural romance unreadable, because they tend to have this "men as monsters, women as victims" dichotomy. You have the Special Female Protagonist all the male monters feel protective towards...and all other female characters tend to be stupid/slutty/doomed. 99% of these books are written by women.
But one time one of them stuck out to me, not for being more hateful towards it's non protagonist female characters (if anything it hated them a little less), but for feeling weirdly male in the way it treated them, despite the author having a female name. And sure enough, it turned out to be the pen name of a man and woman writing team.
Have you not had stuff like that, where you went "wow this really feels like it was written by a man"? Which is different from saying that you can always tell when something is written by a man, or that there are inherently ~male~ and ~female~ ways of writing.
I can understand your uncomfortableness, I have definitely seen women dismiss male writers out of hand just for being male, or say that since THEY didn't like a specific piece of writing by a guy it is unappealing to All Women, ignoring the fact that lots of women connected with it. I've even seen women say that a style of writing they don't like is inherently male (and thus inherently sexist and awful) even when written by women.
All of that is bad. Women are not a monolith. But that's not what I'm saying.
Re: Put off replying until I felt I had a shot at getting myself across, let's see if I succeed...
Date: 2014-12-11 12:01 pm (UTC)Frankly? No. I want to know what it is that trips your alarms, so I can compare. There is one analogous situation I can think of, that actually gets closer to your original complaint (which is that Leckie is, scifi setting notwithstanding, essentially writing outside her culture): when I was reading David Mitchell's "number9dream" there was a specific issue that kept throwing me out of the story, which was that the POV character, who was Japanese, had next to no (or actually none, I can't remember now) references to Japanese popular culture or culture & history in general in his life and observations, merely Western/Anglophone ones. This was nothing like reading Camilleri or Krleža, say, whose characters really felt like they grew up where the books said they did: Sicily, Zagreb, wherever. The difference was, of course, that Camilleri and Krleža shared their characters' language and general background, whereas Mitchell did not. (I also remember asking other readers in my journal if this is bad writing on Mitchell's part or if young men in Japan really do distance themselves from their country's culture, but damned if I can find that post now.)
What I want to say is that yeah, I do have moments where I start doubting if the writer has any real clue about what their topic or character is supposed to be, but this tends to be more precise in origin than just a feeling. What in the Radch books pings you as off, exactly?
Re: Put off replying until I felt I had a shot at getting myself across, let's see if I succeed.
Date: 2014-12-31 11:48 am (UTC)WELLL the problem with the Radch books is I am having real trouble saying what exactly pings me as wrong.
But off the top of my head, some other times I have had that "this has the blind spots I would expect from a [privileged group] writer":
The obvious ones are outright factual errors (eg the kinds of things Amerians get wrong in Harry Potter fic) but let's ignore those.
Sooo many Australian characters who tick all the cliched boxes and only those boxes, making it clear that the author is basing their portrayal off other portayals (also, largely, not written by Australians) not actual people. I think the most jarring and game-of-telephone-ish of these is white Americans writing Indigenous Australians, because they use American cliches about Indigenous people, which are different to the (equally racist) ones here. eg in Y the Last Man the Aboriginal tribe captures and threatens a lost white character for "trespassing on their land" then (despite apparently hating her) sends her on a random hallucagenic "spirit quest" in which she learns important plot points. I have seen that plot done a million times with Native Americans, but seeing it with Indigenous Australians was just this massive "Wow this was written by a White American" moment.
In Friday by Robert Heinlein the main character is raped by a bunch of dudes, and one of them feels bad about it but can't say no because he'll get killed, and she feels sorry for him and wishes he knew she'd been trained to see rape as no big deal. Later on she hits on him but he get put off by how sexually uninhibited she is. Female POV characters having literally no sexual boundaries and only ever feeling sad about sex when old fashioned men (eg their rapist or father) won't have sex with them (but it's ok they find more ~enlighted~ men to have sex with!) is very much a Heinlein thing and felt very straight-dude wish fulfillment.
I have definitely encountered works by women which are like 90% three dimensional male characters and 10% two dimensional female characters, but there's a certain kind of male gazey "fetishes held together with cliche" type female character I usually only see from men. Of course that's partly because most women aren't into other women. Thinking about well meaning f/f made by men vs that made by women...idk it just feels different sometimes /o\ Not even always bad, just different!
Pretty much any time a character who's been disabled for a long time (especially if it's a congenital disability) is 100% self hatred and "why can't I just be normal" and 0% "why do able bodied people have to treat me like a weirdo and make my life more difficult".
Ahhhhhh sorry I'm not sure this is really answering your question. THIS IS WHY I DIDN'T DO AN ENGLISH DEGREE /o\
:-)
Date: 2014-12-02 06:59 pm (UTC)Most memorable bit of AS for me (in a non-spoilery way I think): I just utterly bawled at Queter's soliloquy on the way from her home to the tea plantation. And, secondarily, at the bit where the lieutenant who's standing on a bench is told that that's not how we do things, and she steps down from it.
Hmm, interesting, did you get the sense that the Radchaai choose their genders and/or sexualities? Right now my hypothesis is that Radchaai are all pansexual in orientation. And the offhand comment about penises made me tentatively think that they sort of think of sex-linked biological characteristics the way many current human civilisations think of blood type, that is, a minor attribute that's only of occasional medical interest. But I'd love to hear your thoughts. Maybe the narrator is bored with, and thus eliding as irrelevant, the "hold on are you a compatible gender with my sexuality?" negotiation between potential partners....
Re: :-)
Date: 2014-12-06 04:12 am (UTC)Hmm...yeah it wasn't clear to me if they genuinely didn't care at all about gender or if they do care a little but not enough for it to ping as important to Breq. I tend to imagine the second, partly because it makes me more comfortable.
I think I've been influenced by Homestuck, which has a pansexual-by-default-but-gendered species who boggle at the idea of having the word "homosexual" but do have at least one character with an overriding preference (which noone notes in the comic, but the author has confirmed). So I tend to imagine it as...it's like having a preference for brunettes, or tall people, it's conceivable and accepted, but people wouldn't see it as an identity, or expect it to be set in stone. Similarly, you might have gender identities or something similar, it's somewhat defined but fuzzy at the edges and not something everyone cares about or notices, and is certainly not reflected in stuff like pronouns.
I looked at Anne Leckie's Goodreads page and there's a question there where she says they view it like hair colour so there you go.
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Date: 2014-12-03 04:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-06 03:37 am (UTC)Or keep a tally: the more recs the higher it goes up the queue :)
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Date: 2014-12-12 01:39 pm (UTC)I find the pronoun thing SO RELAXING because it means I just don't have to care. They don't care, I don't care! They all identify as female persons, great, that is how I will imagine them! Would other cultures potentially note Seivarden and Anaander Mianaai as male? DON'T CARE. I loved in the second book the explicit conversation about other cultures having a misunderstanding that no Radchaai had penises, because it meant that the Radchaai use of 'she' DOES translate as a female pronoun, not a gender-neutral one, and everyone is just identifying as female! AWESOME.
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Date: 2014-12-19 06:25 am (UTC)Yes I think that might be it. It all felt a bit too...comfortable, or something.