Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower

Ann Leckie is a talented writer.  I find I am never more in love with her writing than when she is exploring a supra-human perspective of the world she has created.  The first book in her Ancillary series was exhilarating in its presentation and narrator.  The two books that followed I liked less and less as the narrator became more of a Sherlock Holmes figure, human, but not.  Here in The Raven Tower, Leckie returns to that exhilaration by taking on the perspective of an ancient god in a fantasy world.

The basic plot of the story is simple and straightforward.  The heir to the throne (we’ll call it a throne for simplicity’s sake) is displaced by his uncle when the heir’s father abdicates the throne.  The heir’s best friend and aide investigates the situation and tries to set the situation right.  The whole novel takes place over only a couple of days, at least in the present time.  But told concurrently with this story is the history of our narrator, going back to their first moments of consciousness when the world was new and still covered in water, and it takes us from then up to her their present condition and intersection with the current story.

The novel moves back and forth between these stories, and each one is made more interesting by its companion piece.  Although honestly, I could have spent the entire novel going over the god’s past because I delighted in that character and their world so thoroughly.  The strongest aspect of the novel is Leckie’s world-building, which is top notch.  Her logic of godhood, their powers, their limitations, the nature of god-spoken objects, the power of speech—damn, it’s all just so good.  On top of that excellent construction is Leckie’s ability to breathe life and personality into the Strength and Patience of the Hill.  Their voice is human even as their perspective is not, and I found myself moved by their plight and confident in their abilities and ideas.

I read the entirety of the book out loud to Ann (as I do with many books), and the reading was always easy, which is the mark of accomplished writing in my book.  Moreover, I could always feel who was talking by the way they were talking, and the dialogue always felt natural, never clumsy.  The cast of characters are lean and focused, each with drives and relationships that charge the interactions.  We were driven enough by the writing to have a marathon reading session covering the last 80 pages of the novel.  And then we couldn’t sleep for some time after talking about the story and the writing and the clever way Leckie gave information throughout the novel to make sense of what is to come and reveal something gripping from the past.

This is a nice story of morality, commitment, and reciprocity.  The story itself is rewarding, but as with any wonderful book, the true power is in how the story is told.

Ancillary Mercy Me

*Spoilers aplenty ahead*

It is impossible for me to review Ancillary Mercy without reviewing the whole of the Imperial Radch Trilogy.  The first book in a trilogy exists on its own as well as launching a series.  The writer can have all kinds of things planned, but since the first book as to sell well in order for that series to launch at all, it has to be able to stand on its own.  The second book is a midpoint, and I found it hard to judge, since its merits depend almost entirely on where the series as a whole is headed.  The third book, while still a thing unto itself, brings the whole of the author’s goals into focus, and exists almost solely in relation to the two books that precede it.

So where does Ancillary Mercy take us?  Going into the novel, I had a set of expectations, or at least a set of possibilities.  I expected a major confrontation with at least one of the Anaander Mianaais, and felt there would probably be several of her.  I expected the introduction of the Presger and possibly a confrontation.  I expected Seivarden to play an important role, since it felt like she had been a major and continuing plot point without a purpose; possibly what happened on her ship a thousand years ago would prove to be important.  I expected Breq’s arc to go . . . somewhere; I didn’t know if she’d find love or happiness or death, but I knew her story would have to reach some kind of inevitable and hopefully surprising ending.  I expected her song collection to play some pivotal role.

Yeah, I was wrong about most everything.  We did get a confrontation with Anaander Mianaai, but she wasn’t the rich and enjoyable villain she had been in the previous books.  This Anaander was a desperate and angry Anaander, lacking the class and calm of the other.  The Presger never appeared, only their translator Zeiat.  Seivarden has a regular appearance, but no ghosts from her past revealed themselves; Breq did have an arc, but not in any definitive way; the song collection continued to be present but didn’t play a critical part in the plot.

While reading the novel, I continually felt disappointment as my expectations weren’t met, but I withheld final judgment because who knew where things would go in the final 50 pages.  Then, once the secrets from those final pages were harvested, I continued to feel disappointed, but I was immediately aware that I felt that way because the book didn’t follow predictable paths, and I knew that the author was smart enough to know that that was what she was doing, that that was what she intended to do.  The book purposefully rejects traditionally masculine story arcs and conflicts in favor of a different kind of story, and you need to meet the novel on its own terms to enjoy it for what it does.

In the end, the trilogy is about the ways we understand and communicate with each other.  It’s about how one person can make huge changes by making the small changes she can when she can.  It’s about progressively (and slowly and determinedly) rebuilding a world founded on deep injustice to make it more just, more loving, more respectful, and better.  Just as Justice of Toren collected one song at a time, but over three thousand years ended up with a vast knowledge, Breq collects one broken soul after another and nurtures them into independence, strength, and self-determination.  She begins with Seivarden and her kef addiction.  From that one changed life, she finds herself in charge of a single ship and the lives under her command.  In the second book she saves Tisarwat and Queter and establishes trust among many others, so that in the third book, she is saving an entire station full of people and getting AIs their freedom.  Her ambitions are never grand, and for all her wisdom and planning, none of this progress is part of some master plan.  She puts one foot in front of another and fixes what she can.  She doesn’t set out to free all the Valskayaans, and says as much to Queter, but because of the little things she does, the laborers on Athoek own their own work by the end of the third novel.

Anaander is given short shrift because this isn’t Anaander’s story.  Mianaai is an abuser, and Leckie does not attempt to humanize and explain away those abuses.  Leckie’s story is about the oppressed and trammeled upon, their perseverance and their fight.  Anaander has a bunch of power—until station says no.  Mianaai can’t be a big threat because her strength is built up entirely on the bodies and minds of others.  When those bodies and minds reject her, she is nothing but a desperate and pathetic figure, which is exactly what Leckie wants to show.

It really is a neat and unusual trilogy, and Leckie is a solid writer if not particularly poetic or insightful at the sentence-level.  The individual bricks might be merely above average, but the edifice she constructs from those bricks is a thing of beauty and great insight.  I’ll be very interested to see what kinds of stories she tell when she leaves this universe.  For now, though, I’m impressed and a fan.

Ancillary Sword - Stuck in the Middle with You

Ancillary Sword is the middle chapter of the Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie.  I have read and reviewed the first book, Ancillary Justice, and you can find that review at my blog insearchofsmarts.blogspot.com or at GoodReads.  Be warned: both that review and this review are full of spoilers, and I write with the expectation that you are reading this after you have read the novel itself.

Ancillary Sword picks up at almost the exact spot we left off.  Our narrator, Breq, has been given the surname Mianaai, the rank of Fleet Captain, and charge of the ship Mercy of Kalr.  Breq is assigned to travel through the gate to the station at Athoek, but Breq cares nothing about her orders, only about seeing Lieutenant Awn’s sister, Basnaaid.  At Athoek Station, Breq uncovers abuses of power and attempts to right some egregious wrongs.

Had I not known this was part of a completed trilogy, I would have thought Leckie intended to make a 20+ book series in which Breq travels from planet to planet to use her Sherlockian powers of observation and deduction to solve local mysteries centering around the way those in power and cultural dominance systemically oppress those over whom they rule.  By that I mean that the world and characters are as clever as they were in the first book, but the action centered on much more immediate issues of plot than they did in the first novel.  The first novel spend a lot of time exploring what it meant to be an AI passing as human and exploring gender construction.  Similarly, there was a whole world and past to uncover.  In the second novel, all that has already been covered, and Leckie wisely avoids retilling the same ground.  Unfortunately, it means that the stuff that was most compelling in the first book, the stuff that made it original and exciting, was largely missing in this book.

What Leckie does instead is thematically ground her novel by looking at all manners of abusive and exploitative relationships.  At its heart, this is a novel about the fucked up ways people interact with each other.  The most obvious case of this is Raughd and the way she uses everyone, especially Piat.  But it goes beyond someone being a jerk.  Tiserwat is literally enslaved to Anaander Mianaai, her brain physically altered to supplant her own thoughts and desires with those of the Lord of the Radch.  Breq, who was once equally controlled by Mianaai, has to pose an intervention to free Tiserwat from Mianaai’s influence.  And Leckie plays out the trauma of such mistreatment, but continually observing that in the wake of her abuse, Tiserwat is permanently changed, unable to be the young woman she was as these toxic traces of Mianaai will forever be with her. 

The bulk of the relationships in the novel are unequal.  Piat loves Raughd, but Raughd just uses Piat.  Seivarden reveres Breq, but Breq doesn’t much care.  Raughd wants to impress her mother, but Fosyf talks casually of creating a new clone and trying again.  All these imbalances lead to pain and abuse.  The unique example is Breq’s desire to pay her respects to Awn (and to apologize for her actions) by helping Basnaaid, who in turn wants nothing from Breq.  Breq respects Basnaaid’s wishes and does not try to manipulate or force anything on Basnaaid to address Breq’s own sense of guilt.  That basic respect for the desires of another stands in stark contrast to the other relationships highlighted by the novel.

This analysis of dysfunctional relationships goes well beyond individuals as the novel looks at the way whole peoples are mistreated.  The Ychana and Xhai in the undergarden.  The Valskayaans and the Samirend.  Ancillary Justice, the first book, explored the imperial nature of the Radch at the 30,000-foot level, criticizing the imperialist drive to discuss murder and displacement as “civilizing” the people.  That exploration and criticism continues in Ancillary Sword.  The defining trait of the Radch, the very hallmark of their civilized stature, is their drinking of tea.  In this novel, we see how that tea is made at the expense of an entire people.  The Valskayaans are trapped in a system that will not let them escape so that tea can be made profitably for exportation.  Civilization always exists on the blood and sweat and permanent entrapment of an underclass.  And of course the Valskayaans are blamed for their own entrapment as a way of dismissing the system that holds them there.  Moreover, the slight elevation of the Samirend are used to point to the system’s fairness.

These abusive and exploitative relationships exist at every level of the Radch’s civilization, interpersonally and interculturally.  Breq, our hero such that she is, sees through these systems and relationships (and systematized relationships) and does what one person (with a lot of authority) can to right a handful of those wrongs.  Leckie does not over-romanticize Breq or her actions, which is one of the novel’s strengths.

The novel was focused and thematically tight, but overall I found it less gripping the previous novel.  We will see what happens in the final segment, Ancillary Mercy.  There we will either find that this novel set up everything for a grand and unified climax or that it killed some time while we got there.  I suspect the former, but I have been disappointed before.  As with any tight trilogy, the success of Ancillary Sword will depend entirely on the finale of the tale, so I’ll hold off on any further comments until we have read it.

Ancillary Justice is a Must-ice! (Yeah, I know that's a horrible title)

*As always, this review is full of spoilers*

*Secondary warning: I’m incredibly busy, so I’m posting this without proofreading.  There are bound to be a ton of grammatical errors, so poorly formed sentences, half-baked thoughts, and insufficiently reasoned comments.  My apologies.*

We stumbled across Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice quite by accident.  We were a quarter of the way through The Children of Dune when we decided a read through the online summary would be a more satisfying way to learn how the book ended.  The next day we found ourselves in Barnes & Noble looking for a gift for someone else and decided to get a new sci-fi book for ourselves.  Random browsing through the stacks (a luxury I had not indulged in in some time) brought us to a boxed set of the three Imperial Radch trilogy.  Seeing all the awards Ancillary Justice won, we decided to give it a shot.

Ancillary Justice and Ann Leckie deserved every award they won.  It is compelling, original, well-written, well-plotted, and completely absorbing.  The narrator is a single segment of what was once a multi-body inhabiting artificial intelligence.  In this universe, the Radch people have set out to conquer the known universe purportedly because of the fever-dream of single woman, Anaander Mianaai, who feared for the safety of her home planet so fervently that she sought to keep it safe by increasing the buffer between it and any possible hostile civilization.  The A.I.s of the ships and stations under Radch command have not only full personalities, but a host of human bodies that have been fitted in such a way to allow the AI to inhabit the bodies while staying connected to all the other individual expressions of the A.I.  These human bodies are called ancillaries.  Ancillary bodies were originally the bodies of enemy combatants who stood against the Radch invasion.

At the beginning of the novel, our narrator(Justice of Toren (her ship name), One Esk (her ancillary name), One Esk Nineteen (her segment name) Breq (her assumed human name)) has been learning to masquerade as human for nearly 20 years.  She is on the icy plant of Nilt in search of a special gun that has the power to penetrate Radchaai armor with the intent to kill Anaander Mianaai.  In the opening scene, Breq (we’ll call her for simplicity sake) finds the body of Seivarden Vendaai, a member of the Radchaai military who disappeared a thousand years ago when her ship was destroyed by a resisting army who had been helped by the Presger, a superior alien race who supplied the army with the guns that could penetrate Radchaai armor, the very guns whose brethren Breq now seeks.

I had to write that summary to see if I could write that summary.  Like all the best science fiction, the set up is complicated because the world is complicated, but the actions that make up the plot are simple and straightforward.  The first 40 pages or so are work as you figure out the lay of the land and the intricacies of the cultures that are all foreign, but the rewards are grand.  I’ll just break down everything I loved.

First, the narrator. Having a 2,000 year old narrator who knows insane amounts of history not only because she lived through them but because she has computer banks worth of knowledge inside her head, is a brilliant literary device.  She can be on the ship and on the planet and be in communication with the Sword of Nathtas halfway across the universe to experience everything first hand to a certain extent.  Breq is practically a first-person omniscient narrator.  Add to that that she is an artificial intelligence, but one created with emotions, so she mirrors humanity but is clearly not human.  In a lot of ways, she fits in perfectly with the recent vogue of having inhuman narrators, and I’m thinking here of Dexter’s sociopathy and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, who is also a sort of sociopath.  These are humans who are inhuman in some way, and Breq is very similar.  Like Holmes, she has an eye that has been collecting data for millennia, and thus can harvest incredible meaning from the slightest details.  In fact, wisdom is set up in the novel as merely having a large enough data set to be able to make inferences.  So Breq is both inhuman, painfully human, and superhuman all at the same time, which makes her both unique and familiar, and overall a fantastic narrator for the tale.

There is plenty in the book that ties it to the cyberpunk tradition of cybernetic implants and the mechanization of the human body, but the book is certainly not cyberpunk.  But it is concerned with a lot of the same questions as cyberpunk fiction: what makes us human?  Where do the lines between human intelligence and artificial intelligence meet and vanish?  What does it mean to have an “identity”?  Are we unique in our identity?  Leckie’s narrator incorporates all that without ever belaboring the point.  The novel takes a lot of those questions for granted and then moves ahead with the particular story at hand.

Moving ahead with the particular story at hand is what Ann Leckie constantly does in this novel.  There is not a lot of authorial contemplation or insight communicated through passages of contemplation.  The insight and contemplation come in the form or action and plot progression, which some will find especially rewarding and others will find a little lacking.  I personally am a fan of lyrical prose, and I love an author that can write a sentence that makes me hurt with its beauty, power, and truth.  There was none of that here, nothing that sent me running to social media to share some exquisite piece of prose.  Which is not to say that the writing itself lacked anything.  The novel is very well written from the sentence level to the plot level.  The dialogue is sharp and thoughtful, and Leckie clearly has a great ear for the subtle music of her language.  I know this last bit because I read the entire novel out loud, and I never got tripped up by her language; it all read fluidly and easily, which is itself not an easy thing to do.

I of course love the role of gender in this book.  The Radch have no gender distinction and use the feminine pronouns for all their people.  Breq, being both a Radchaai creation and an A.I. has a difficult time distinguishing human gender.  The most stressful of her experiences as she masquerades as human is when she has to guess at someone’s gender.  She does not appear to have more than a 50/50 success rate.  At first, I tried to figure out the “real” gender of characters, but then realized that 1) gender is only a construction so what is “real” about it to begin with, 2) every culture or planet has their own definitions anyway, so even if this character calls Seivarden “him” it doesn’t mean anything about what Seivarden might look like.  The end result is that everyone in the book is presented to us as female, which is an incredibly refreshing stance.

I cannot help but think that Leckie is responding to some extent to Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.  It would be hard enough to create a science fiction novel that has a genderless set of humans at its center without referencing Left Hand of Darkness, but Leckie drives the point home by setting the first half of the novel’s present timeline on Nilt, an ice planet that is reminiscent of Gethen.  But where Genly is obsessed with gender and cannot view the Gethenians except through is own lens of masculinity and femininity, Breq has no interest in gender and has no interest in categorizing people by their sexual roles.  Genly defaults to the masculine pronoun because of his gender biases (see my review of Left Hand of Darkness if you’re interested in my reading of it), and Breq defaults to feminine because it is the common linguistic pronoun of her native tongue.  Also, there is an interesting contrasting nature of the Ekumen who find human worlds to set up trade and open communication versus the Radchaai’s interest in domination and assimilation.  I would love to see a full comparison of gender in the two novels written by someone much more talented than I am.

And speaking of native tongues, I love that the whole novel is an act of translation.  By that, I mean that Breq makes us aware that the words we are reading are translated from the various languages the is actually using.  Many times she stops to explain the various connotations, unwanted and unavoidable, accompany the word she used in her exchange.  That the novel is in English for us to read is itself an act of translation.  I don’t have a reading of what the significance of that decision is, but I feel like it is important.

And while I’m on the subject of things I don’t understand, I don’t have a strong understanding of Seivarden’s role in the novel.  On the one hand, she is central to the story, but on the other hand, she doesn’t do much, does she?  She serves plenty of narrative functions in telling us about Radchaai culture, but what is she doing beyond that?  I feel like there is some importance to the parallel between her feelings toward Breq and Breq’s feelings toward Lieutenant Awn.  As Breq attends to all of Lieutenant Awn’s needs, and as Breq is devoted to Lieutenant Awn to the extent that she is in love with Lieutenant Awn (it is her grief over Awn’s death that fuels the entire plot of the novel—making it in some ways a revenge tale), so Seivarden comes to serve Breq and feel greater affection for Breq than Breq feels for her.  Seivarden acts as an ancillary servant to Breq’s performance of a human.  Breq is rather dismissive of Seivarden and never comes around to really respecting her even as Seivarden has swallowed her pride, and grown as a human by subjugating herself.  It’s a potentially painful relationship, but I never found it to be.  I kept expecting us to learn that Seivarden was crucial to Mianaai’s plans or that Breq had been unknowingly programmed to save her, but that was never the case.  Now it’s possible that we will learn later in the trilogy Seivarden’s larger role (it can’t be mere coincidence that she was there when the Garseddai attacked), so I will have to wait for the trilogy to end before drawing any final conclusions about Seivarden.

I love the novel’s portrayal of colonial imperialism, this expansion and nationalism propelled by the basest of feelings: fear.  The Radchaai view themselves as the very definition of civilization even as they have built the most barbaric of cultures, a culture whose whole structure is built around never ending military expansion.  The in-book debate over ancillaries and whether they are better (more civil, less violent) than humans is beautifully done because Breq is well aware of the tremendous act of violence it takes to turn a human into an ancillary.

I love that the science in the novel both feel thoroughly reasoned out and presented without explanation.  A.I.’s, for example, all have emotions because we are told that they won’t function without emotions, that they cannot make decisions based on facts alone.  God damn, I love that.  Leckie doesn’t feel the need to get into the nitty gritty because it would only detract from or bog down the tale at hand.  The same goes for the Garseddai weapons, Mianaai’s gun that can work in a vacuum, and all the cultural details of the Radchaai on the Omaugh Palace.  Leckie has done her work as a writer in developing a fully realized culture, but she doesn’t feel the need to explain any more than is necessary for the reader to accept the reality they are presented with.  In doing so, she makes the whole world feel rich and three-dimensional.

Anaander Mianaai is an awesome character.  That’s all I have to say about that.

Actually, I think I have just about drained myself of what I wanted to say.  I can always add on whatever I miss when I review Ancillary Sword, because having read this wonderful book, you can’t expect me not to read the entire trilogy.