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.
