Ancillary Sword!

[psocoptera]

So my very initial reaction was that this was a powerful fantastic three-quarters of a novel but I was baffled by it stopping where it did. We don't get to go through the Ghost Gate and see this renegade ship? No fallout from the Presger from Dlique?

Thinking about it more, I see two possibilities. One is that this was in many ways a book-two-bridger-book which mostly gets us from the self-contained book one to the big action of book three, and the renegade and the Presger are going to be major threads in the next book, and it took most of this book just to set those situations up. (Supported by Leckie's Reddit AMA in which she said she does know more about what the Presger are like but wasn't going to answer the question.) The other possibility is that in choosing to focus on the personal and social-justice stories rather than aliens and rebels, Leckie is doing a deliberate act of genre criticism or genre reframing, saying, no, look, all that space opera stuff is just stage dressing, people's personal stories are as important or more important, the heart of the story is in who will hold who when they're hurting.

All that aside I thought this was a fascinating book about what it means to be an American and how much someone well-intentioned in a position of power might be able to change things or not. The shooting of Dlique, *man*. *Wow*. For me that was probably the most powerful sequence in the book, the casual snuffing out of this fascinating character because they weren't a person you wouldn't shoot, wow that was straight out of current events. "Glad" seems like the wrong word, like, I'm not *glad* to see science fiction grappling with police murders because these fucking tragedies shouldn't exist in the first place, but I feel very strongly that's something that fiction is supposed to do? Ann Leckie apparently lives in St. Louis Missouri interestingly enough.

An interesting window into my biases: because of the pronouns I mostly read along happily thinking of the Radch universe as populated entirely by women, but as soon as they established Raughd as a domestic abuser my mental picture of her switched very firmly to male, to the extent that I just had to go back right there and change the pronoun from "my mental picture of him". I'm sure that's unfair and prejudicial and all that but there it is.

I still don't get why exactly Tisarwat was supposed to have fallen so hard for Basnaaid, I think Breq said she had some sort of theory about that and then never elaborated on what it was. Anybody?

Comments

[randysmith]

Wow. I didn't catch the current events relevance of the shooting. Ow.

I took the book as being multiple things, mostly along the lines you described--I don't particularly think of it as a genre critique, but I do think of it as both a space-opera-bridge-book and a social patterns exploration book. Breq's been set up as someone who cares about patterns of power abuse, and she's just been handed a whole lot of power in a society that has a whole lot of inherent power abuse. Some of it is "What does she do with it?" and some of it is "What are the limits of that power?" And then there's a whole lot of "Who (what?) the heck is Breq?", which is a topic that I think there's *still* room to do interesting exploration of--this is in many ways the most alien character I've ever read a first-person narrative from.

I was recommending this series to someone and remarking that I thought it was very good despite being not the sort of book I usually like. They asked what sort I usually liked, and after flailing around a bit, I eventually came up with "one in which the protagonist is easy to empathize with". Breq's not (at all!) a bad person, but for obvious reasons involving her background she's someone who it's fairly hard for me to feel like I grok. And that's part of the fascination of the series.

[glynhogen.livejournal.com]

Structurally, it reads to me like the bastard child of a middle book and a fix-up novel. (I hadn't really thought of the latter until this moment, when you framed the book as a reframing book. The reframing was a matter of focus on short, discrete episodes, not quite self-contained short stories but close.) There are certain types of passes I am willing to grant those books, and did so in this case. I agree the ending isn't strong (though ending with a whimper rather than a bang was appropriate for the emotional arc and, again, something that you can get away with if it's not the end-end) and I wonder if maybe Leckie's going to be an author whose ending's aren't quite up to snuff. For me, the prior book failed to stick its landing in a more annoying way. It moved fairly abruptly from self-contained to set-up book, and Breq's distaste about working with Anaander Mianaai seemed to owe more to genre expectations than anything else.