Ideas but no Engagement
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mtvesselJuly 2014
Ancillary Justice - Anne Leckie - Orbit, 2013 (Kindle edition)
* * *
I thought that for once I would get with the times and read the buzziest SF novel of the moment. This book has won the BSFA, Locus, Nebula, Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards which is an extraordinary achievement for a first novel and suggests that it is something special. Well, I can only conclude that either I am finally growing out of SF (gods, no!) or that this has been a rather thin year. It's a perfectly decent story with some interesting ideas, competently told. But it has some serious flaws and certainly didn't engage me as much as it should have.
The basic idea, though, is a good one. The viewpoint character is Justice of Toren, an AI built to control a warship of the Radchaai Empire, an unpleasant Roman/Nazi-style organisation that conquers worlds and forces them to conform to the Radch culture. Some of its citizens are re-educated (brainwashed), others simply disappear, and others, horrifically, are put into suspended animation until they are fitted with implants that turn them into ancillaries, wholly owned mobile extensions of the warship AIs that their opponents correctly dub "corpse soldiers". We soon learn that Justice of Toren's consciousness been confined to a single ancillary who goes by the name of Breq, and the story starts as she rescues a drug addict ex-officer of hers called Seivarden from freezing to death on an ice planet. The story alternates between Breq, who is on a mission, and events some twenty years earlier, when she was still a warship and involved in the conquest of a world called Shis'urna under a human officer called Lieutenant Awn. And the link between the two timelines is the multi-bodied Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai.
My problems with this book started with the background. As now appears to be the norm in SF novels, the story is told entirely through the viewpoint character and so no explanation for how the Radchaai Empire came to exist in its brutally inhuman state is forthcoming (I suspect technology running amok somewhere down the line, or possibly alien interference - a hostile race called the Presger is casually mentioned a few times, but nothing is made of it). Nor is there any description of how an AI warship is made (is it grown? constructed?). This means that Breq for me is too cold and humourless to be interesting. Her motivations were also unconvincing. Many of her actions only make sense if she is assumed to have developed the capability to form attachments to humans like Seivarden and Awm, but how this could have arisen isn't clear. Presumably it is the result of some sort of biofeedback from her ancillaries on her programming, but this doesn't seem plausible given the monitoring and control of them that the warship AIs are described as having.
The most notable stylistic feature is the Radchaaian use of the pronoun "she" as the default for all people regardless of gender, meaning that it is often difficult to tell whether characters are male or female. This is an interesting effect that could only be achieved in an SF novel and shows how unimportant gender is for the majority of human interactions, particularly in the de-humanised culture of the Radch. It is not without problems, however. For one thing, I found it impossible to picture the characters when I couldn't even tell what gender they were and this made it hard to engage with or even remember them. For another, Breq's often expressed difficulty with identifying the gender of the people she meets didn't seem plausible. The narrative implies that men and women in the Radchaai universe still have some gendered characteristics and behaviour, and the notion of an otherwise highly intelligent AI being unable to learn how to spot these just didn't ring true.
The writing is competent and clear, but strikingly unevocative. Much of the action is set on the ice world where Breq meets Seivarden and I can remember literally nothing about it. Shis-urna is not much better - there was something about hydrogen sulphide swamps and a city with an upper half, a lower half and a temple, but that's about it (though to be fair, this is common in space opera SF - many of the worlds of Star Wars have a similarly anonymous feel).
Nor is the plot anything to write home about. It fairly soon becomes apparent what Breq is about and why, and it plays out more or less as you expect. If it were a thrill-ride then this would be okay, but the pacing is ponderous, with lots of talking and relatively little action.
I can see why true SF fans would like this book - it is a thoughtful exploration of the psyche of a multiple-bodied artificial intelligence - and in my youth I would probably have loved it for its interesting ideas, just as I did the classic SF writers like Clarke, Niven and Asimov. But these days, clever notions are not enough. I need emotional engagement. And human warmth and wit, of the sort that the late Terry Pratchett (RIP) so ably demonstrated.
Ancillary Justice - Anne Leckie - Orbit, 2013 (Kindle edition)
* * *
I thought that for once I would get with the times and read the buzziest SF novel of the moment. This book has won the BSFA, Locus, Nebula, Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards which is an extraordinary achievement for a first novel and suggests that it is something special. Well, I can only conclude that either I am finally growing out of SF (gods, no!) or that this has been a rather thin year. It's a perfectly decent story with some interesting ideas, competently told. But it has some serious flaws and certainly didn't engage me as much as it should have.
The basic idea, though, is a good one. The viewpoint character is Justice of Toren, an AI built to control a warship of the Radchaai Empire, an unpleasant Roman/Nazi-style organisation that conquers worlds and forces them to conform to the Radch culture. Some of its citizens are re-educated (brainwashed), others simply disappear, and others, horrifically, are put into suspended animation until they are fitted with implants that turn them into ancillaries, wholly owned mobile extensions of the warship AIs that their opponents correctly dub "corpse soldiers". We soon learn that Justice of Toren's consciousness been confined to a single ancillary who goes by the name of Breq, and the story starts as she rescues a drug addict ex-officer of hers called Seivarden from freezing to death on an ice planet. The story alternates between Breq, who is on a mission, and events some twenty years earlier, when she was still a warship and involved in the conquest of a world called Shis'urna under a human officer called Lieutenant Awn. And the link between the two timelines is the multi-bodied Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai.
My problems with this book started with the background. As now appears to be the norm in SF novels, the story is told entirely through the viewpoint character and so no explanation for how the Radchaai Empire came to exist in its brutally inhuman state is forthcoming (I suspect technology running amok somewhere down the line, or possibly alien interference - a hostile race called the Presger is casually mentioned a few times, but nothing is made of it). Nor is there any description of how an AI warship is made (is it grown? constructed?). This means that Breq for me is too cold and humourless to be interesting. Her motivations were also unconvincing. Many of her actions only make sense if she is assumed to have developed the capability to form attachments to humans like Seivarden and Awm, but how this could have arisen isn't clear. Presumably it is the result of some sort of biofeedback from her ancillaries on her programming, but this doesn't seem plausible given the monitoring and control of them that the warship AIs are described as having.
The most notable stylistic feature is the Radchaaian use of the pronoun "she" as the default for all people regardless of gender, meaning that it is often difficult to tell whether characters are male or female. This is an interesting effect that could only be achieved in an SF novel and shows how unimportant gender is for the majority of human interactions, particularly in the de-humanised culture of the Radch. It is not without problems, however. For one thing, I found it impossible to picture the characters when I couldn't even tell what gender they were and this made it hard to engage with or even remember them. For another, Breq's often expressed difficulty with identifying the gender of the people she meets didn't seem plausible. The narrative implies that men and women in the Radchaai universe still have some gendered characteristics and behaviour, and the notion of an otherwise highly intelligent AI being unable to learn how to spot these just didn't ring true.
The writing is competent and clear, but strikingly unevocative. Much of the action is set on the ice world where Breq meets Seivarden and I can remember literally nothing about it. Shis-urna is not much better - there was something about hydrogen sulphide swamps and a city with an upper half, a lower half and a temple, but that's about it (though to be fair, this is common in space opera SF - many of the worlds of Star Wars have a similarly anonymous feel).
Nor is the plot anything to write home about. It fairly soon becomes apparent what Breq is about and why, and it plays out more or less as you expect. If it were a thrill-ride then this would be okay, but the pacing is ponderous, with lots of talking and relatively little action.
I can see why true SF fans would like this book - it is a thoughtful exploration of the psyche of a multiple-bodied artificial intelligence - and in my youth I would probably have loved it for its interesting ideas, just as I did the classic SF writers like Clarke, Niven and Asimov. But these days, clever notions are not enough. I need emotional engagement. And human warmth and wit, of the sort that the late Terry Pratchett (RIP) so ably demonstrated.