Obsessed with The Dispossessed

As always, there are spoilers ahead.

The Dispossessed was published in 1974, the fifth book published in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle.  It is thematically tied to the other Hainish novels in that it deals with the soft collision of drastically different cultures as seen through the interactions of individuals from those cultures.  The Dispossessed differs from the previous novels insofar as neither of the two cultures are Terran or Hainish or alien at all.  The two cultures at issue are from twin planets that circle each other, each acting as the other’s moon.  Urras is the parent planet, where all the people originated.  170 years before our story begins, a group of anarchists fled Urras for the moon, Anarres, where they could establish their anarchical utopia.  For the past 7 generations, the two cultures have not mixed or interacted more than some radio communications.  The people on Anarres, the Odonians, have an entirely original language and have divorced themselves entirely from the Urras way of life.  In the opening chapter, one lone Anarresti boards a freighter rocket that irregularly transports goods between the planets to travel to Urras.

Shevek, our main character, is a temporal physicist who has worked out a unified theory of space and time, called simultaneity.  His work has gone as far as it can among the Anarresti, and he hopes to make progress among the minds and technology on Urras.  The Urrasti want him to complete his work so that they can build the ansible, which is only a theoretical concept on Urras.  We have encountered the ansible in all the other Hainish novels: it is the device that allows simultaneous communication across any distance of space.  With it, the Urras hope to have an edge on the interstellar communities—the Terrans and Hainish—who have been in recent contact with them. 

Thematically, the novel, like all Le Guin’s other works in the Hainish cycle, is about the space between the cultures that are mid-clash.  She calls that synthesis “marriage” in her introduction to Planet of Exiles, and I talk about it in my posts about that book as well as City of Illusions. The metaphor in The Dispossessed is the wall, the things we build in an effort to protect ourselves but that have the added effect of imprisoning ourselves.  There is but one wall on all of Anarres, because there is no property or boundaries in the anarchical society.  That wall is what the book opens on:

 There was a wall.  It did not look important.  It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it.  Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary.  But the idea was real.  It was important.  For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
 Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced.  What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
 Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. . . . The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe.  It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
 Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

Near the end of the book, a dozen or so paragraphs from the end of chapter 10, Shevek (in a scene that takes place before the opening of the book) decides that he needs to start a printing syndicate to print all the things the other syndicates on Anarres refuse to print.  Among the things he will print is the play written by his childhood friend, Tirin, the performance of which resulted in Anarresti society shunning Tirin. “I owe him that,” Shevek says in explaining why he’ll print Tirin’s play. “He taught me what prisons are, and who builds them.  Those who build walls are their own prisoners.  I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism.  I’m going to go unbuild walls.”

Walls are boundaries, ways we imprison others, and ways we isolate ourselves in the name of protection.  Walls say “this is mine, not yours.”  Walls are rules without words, telling other where they can and cannot go and be.  The Anarresti have one wall, and one written law, and not coincidentally, they are the same thing: no one from Urras may come onto Anarresti soil. On Urras, Shevek doesn’t encounter literal walls, but they are everywhere around him.  They structure the way people talk to each other; they structure what he can see and what he cannot; they channel his movements and his experiences without his even knowing it.  Urras is a capitalist society with all the social ills that accompany it.  There are hierarchies at work in every interaction.  As an Anarresti in this strange land, Shevek has to find a way to square up these social inequities with the beauty of the world he’s shown. 

This is a great book, and it is a very Le Guin book.  Like all her Hainish novels, there is no immediate “plot” that gives the reader a sense of where the story is going.  We are meeting characters and watching their interactions, and through them we are discovering the world of the novel.  Tension within situations develop not through characters butting heads, but through the general clash of expectations and world views.  There are no villains and no heroes, and the journey is not one of personal development.  Shevek’s understanding of how the worlds and cultures are related goes through a major shift, but nothing about Shevek’s character changes.  I was talking with my wife the other day (with whom I am reading these novels) and we described “plot” in Le Guin’s book like hand-beating cream into whipped cream.  For a long time, things are spinning and spattering, and then, just when you think it will never become whipped cream, it transitions from a liquid to a solid seemingly all at once.  The Dispossessed is no different in this—it hums along as an interesting story, and then, wham, there is suddenly a plot and the story arrives it one big bang.  You can then look back and see all the strands and connections, but nothing seems forced or inevitable.  In so many ways her novels seem like anthropological studies, in which she creates situations, molds some representative characters, and then watches them bounce off one another.  It is only through the power of her art that those characters and the worlds they inhabit take on full independent life.  It’s amazing to behold.

One of Le Guin’s greatest gifts is communicating genuine tenderness, love, and affection between two characters.  In The Dispossessed, we see this most in Shevek and Takver’s relationship, and in each novel before it, there are equally moving relationships, the most affecting for me being Genly Ai and Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness.  Normally for Le Guin, this kind of description and connection is its own reward, but in the case of The Dispossessed, I feel like Shevek and Takver’s relationship is given a foil in the relationship between Shevek and Vea, the Urrasti woman.  Vea is witty and urbane in an almost classic Hollywood sense.  She’s flirty with sharp retorts and interested in defending her decadent culture by revealing the repression and hidden decadence of Anarresti culture.  The back-and-forth between Shevek and Vea is the kind of interpersonal relationship that is common in a lot of novels, and its presence here draws attention to the fact that it is not anywhere else in the novel.  It is hollow and disturbing, and not a delight the way it is in classic films.  It’s one of the more troublesome chapters in the book since we see Shevek ready to practically rape Vea, Shevek who up to this point has been the voice of feminism in the novel.  There is much to be made of this chapter, and I look forward to reading the thoughts of a much smarter literary critic, but I’ll limit my observations to this one thing.  Shevek’s premature orgasm that puts his semen on Vea’s leg seems to me the crucial symbol of the scene.  When the sexes are not established as equals, and the only power granted women is sexual power, then the arena of conflict between a man and a woman will necessarily become sexual.  And the fruits of that encounter will be as wasteful and disturbing as Vea’s stained dress.  Shevek’s and Takver’s relationship is only possible between equals, and the sexism in the Urrasti system destroys that possibility, and it makes monsters out of men and women alike.

One of the greatest aspects of The Dispossessed is its ability to present an “ambiguous Utopia.”  In the end, Anarres is a true Utopia, a vision of what humankind could have, but it is not an unproblematic vision.  It is simultaneously admiring and critical of the civilization, knowing that any group will always fall short of their ideals.  Le Guin is unflinching in her vision and analysis.  As she says through Shevek when he thinks about the complicated reality of Urras: “The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native.  To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.  It was not an easy job” (about a third of the way into chapter 9).  Include and connect.  That could be the motto of Le Guin’s writing.  She never denies one reality at the expense of the other, but holds them both up and draws lines to connect them.  It’s what those of us who love Le Guin’s works keep coming back for.

I have talked in other reviews (mostly in my look at City of Illusions) about the important of synthesis in the Hainish novels, of two different cultures coming together to make a third thing, unique and superior.  That idea is given a unique twist in The Dispossessed, in that synthesis is rejected.  The difference here is that Anarres and Urras are not two alien cultures, but a splintering of one culture.  To re-synthesize would be to recreate the imbalances and troubles that caused the separation in the first place.  No, Shevek rejects the synthesis in chapter 11 when he is talking to Keng, the Terran ambassador:

It was for that idea that I came here too.  For Anarres.  Since my people refuse to look outward, I thought I might make others look at us.  I thought it would be better not to hold apart behind a wall, but to be a society among the others, a world among the others, giving and taking.  But there I was wrong—I was absolutely wrong . . .
 'Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need!  We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right.  We took nothing.  Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery.  There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras.  There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power.  You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is “superior” to the other, or trying to prove it. . . . I have been to Hell at last.

Keng offers a counterpoint, that Urras, in spite of its flaws is as close as she’s ever come to paradise.  He asks what she would think of Anarres, and Keng responds that the Terrans “forfeited our chance for Anarres centuries ago.”  Shevek responds:

You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres.  You don’t believe in me, though I stand with you, in this room, in this moment. . . .  My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you.  You will not let us.  You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolution.  You would destroy us rather than admit our reality, rather than admit that there is hope!  We cannot come to you.  We can only wait for you to come to us.

For all its faults, Anarres is a utopia, a dream of equality and communal support.  It is not a culture to be synthesized and absorbed; that would destroy it and not improve the other culture at all.  It is rather a kind of goal post, a place to push for.  And we see this at the end of the novel when the Hainish citizen requests to visit Anarres.  You have to come to Anarres; it cannot come to you, and it cannot meet you half way.  It is outside of the League of Worlds where synthesis between cultures takes place.

The Dispossessed didn’t knock my socks off when I read it.  None of Le Guin’s novels have done that.  They are wonderfully written, but they are not poetry in prose seldom breathtaking in their presentation.  But they have a power that grows as you read them, and that sits with you (or I should say me) once I’ve finished them.  They are intelligent, quiet, meaningful, heartfelt, and thoughtful.  They are like ancient structures built to last and be revisited, learned from, studied, explored, and admired.  And I love them for that.

City of Illusions

City of Illusions is the third book Ursula K. Le Guin wrote for her Hainish Cylce.

It’s been a lot of fun reading these books in order because you can see Le Guin’s style and skill evolving, with each book offering more impressive writing and thinking than the one before it.  It’s also neat to see how she places the books in the same universe with casual connections rather than strict chronology or any kind of cause and effect between books.  The main character in City of Illusions, Falk, is a descendant to the Jacob Agat in Planet of Exile, but it’s not an important fact, and nothing in the story hinges upon your understanding that connection.  The details are rewarding to a fan but not an impediment to a new reader.

Another fun element for us is that our edition of these collected works includes the introductory essays that Le Guin wrote in the 2010s.  Le Guin is a loving and astute reader of her old texts, able and willing to point out their weaknesses and their strengths, noting connections, and treating each one like an old lover for which she is grateful to have had in her past.  It was in her introduction to Planet of Exile that she noted a recurring theme in her novels is “marriage,” which I wrote about in my review of the book.  Foregoing any plot summary of City of Illusions, I want to jump right into my analysis because it picks up on this notion of marriage.

There are plenty of spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to know what happens, stop reading here.  Know that it is an excellent read and that if you like her other books, you should read it.  Then come back and tell me what you think of my analysis.

My interpretation of Le Guin’s “marriage” theme is that she is interested in the coming together of two cultures or people to see how they synthesize to create something original.  Her most common approach in these Hainish novels has been the stranger in a strange land motif.  Here, Falk is an alien with no memories making a home on Terra.  Through his education in the first chapters of the novel, he comes to inhabit the culture of the forest dwellers and then sets off to Es Toch, the city under the control of the Shing.  On his way, he encounters different people who teach him a little more about the world.  Finally, in Es Toch, he is reunited, through the Shing’s technology, with his original identity, Ramarren.  Le Guin makes it clear that Falk and Ramarren are two separate individuals cohabitating in the body of one man.  We have a literal coming together of two cultures in the mind of Falk/Ramarren.  In her introduction, Le Guin says that that idea, two minds existing in one person, was the kernel of the novel she set out to write, which she intended to call The Two-Minded Man. In the climax of the novel, Falk and Ramarren come together in one identity:

He turned and stared foggily at Orry and Ken Kenyek.  What to do with them?  They had come along, evidently.  Erase the records on the computers, said a voice inside his mind, a familiar voice, his own—Falk’s.  Ramarren was dizzy with fatigue, but gradually he saw the point of this request, and obeyed.  Then he could not think what to do next.  And so, finally, for the first time, he gave up, made no effort to dominate, let himself fuse into . . . himself.

Fusion occurs because of an act of relenting, of ceding to a state of equality, of not dominating.  For two things to meet in the middle and have a genuine and productive union—marriage—there needs to be mutual respect, equality.

In contrast to this moment of fusion are the Shing, inhabiting Terra but totally separate from the native people.  The Shing control and dominate and keep themselves apart.  In that same climactic scene, before their union, Falk thinks about the Shing while considering the fate of Estrel:

Had they retrained her, razed her mind, killed her?  No, they did not kill.  They were afraid to kill and afraid to die, and call their fear Reverence for Live.  The Shing, the Enemy, the Liars. . . . Did they in truth lie?  Perhaps that was not quite the way of it; perhaps the essence of their lying was a profound irremediable lack of understanding.  They could not get into touch with men. They had used that and profited by it, making it into a great weapon, the mind-lie; but had it been worth their while after all?  Twelve centuries of lying, ever since they had first come here, exiles or pirates or empire-builders from some distant star, determined to rule over these races whose minds made no sense to them and whose flesh was forever sterile.  Alone, isolated, deaf-mutes ruling deaf-mutes in a world of delusions.  Oh desolation .  . .

The Shing’s relationship with earthlings, and specifically the sterility of their relationship, recalls the situation in the Planet of Exile.  In Planet of Exile, the two people are able to bridge the divide between them and become one people, but here, the Shing apparently have no interest in a marriage of equality, and so are doomed to a lonely existence.  The Shing refuse to fuse with the people of Terra, and unlike Falk and Ramarren, no third thing is created, and become, in Falk’s analysis, something to be pitied.  In Le Guin’s universes, there is always more power—and pleasure—in union.  Without that union, you have hierarchy, rulers and ruled, controllers and controlled.  With that union, you get equality and progress.

I think it is important that the novel culminates in a city, Es Toch.  Cities are meeting grounds for all kinds of cultures and ways; they are the embodiment of cultural synthesis.  Not surprisingly, the Shing have forbidden all cities but the one they control.  Presumably, this is to keep humans apart from each other, but in the terms of the novel, it is to keep thing homogenous and unmixed.  When Ramarren gets to tour Es Toch near the end of the novel: “That day they showed Ramarren all over Es Toch, which seemed to him who had lived among the old streets of Wegest and in the great Winterhouses of Kaspool, a sham city, vapid and artificial, impressive only by its fantastic natural setting.”  Instead of being a place of synthesis and life, Es Toch is a sham, vapid and artificial.  There’s no genuine mixing of ideas and culture, no chemical reaction between people that is life.

The Shing’s big claim of success is how peaceful Terra is under their rule.  Ramarren observes that under the Shing, humans have become “almost a race of children.”  The peace the Shing bring is an unproductive peace.  When people don’t interact or clash, there are no battles and no conflict, but there is also no synthesis, no growth.  What I find interesting is that the logical extension of this argument is that people must necessarily war to some extent or another in order to synthesize and change each other.  Given that, it seems perfectly natural that Le Guin moves on to Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness for her next novel, asking herself what a world without war might look like and what sort of circumstances might create a world without war but still with cultures coming together.  In fact, not only does Gethen exist without war, but the League of Worlds is replaced by the Ekumen, the former being a league built around war and the latter built around the exchange of ideas between planets.

I found City of Illusions to be a rich novel that gave me a lot to think about, and in my understanding of Le Guin’s writings, it’s a kind of lynchpin of ideas as she pivots from one way of thinking to the next.

Planet of Exile: Crossing the Divides

Planet of Exile is Ursula K. Le Guin’s second novel in what became the Hainish Cycle.  It’s a relatively short novel, only spanning 100 pages in my edition.

The story takes place on a planet whose rotation around its sun is equivalent to 60 earth years, so seasons last about 15 years a piece.  It is the end of autumn, the beginning of winter, when the story begins, and the whole narrative covers about three (Earth?) weeks.  There are three groups of people at the heart of the story.  The Tevarans are a nomadic people, native to the planet, who exist in the technological equivalence of our Iron Age.  The Alterrans are a dark-skinned people who live in a city by the sea.  They are the descendants of a group from the League of All Worlds who came to the planet to enlist the inhabitants in the upcoming battle.  An unknown trouble struck, and their ship left them there.  That was 10 Years ago by this planet’s calendar, 600 years by our own.  The Alterrans have a code that prevents them from using technology beyond the capabilities of the planet’s natural-born people.  Finally, the Gaal are a group of Northerners who come south every winter.  This Year, they have amassed as one great people and are essentially building an empire as they head south.

The Alterrans and Tevarans have something of an uneasy alliance, which becomes more strained when the Rolery, daughter of the Tevarans’ leader, becomes the lover of Jakob Agat, the Alterrans’ leader.  The Tevarans and Alterrans have intermixed in the past, but something within them are incompatible, in the sense that no children can be born from the union.  Miscarriages or death of the mother are the most common result.  The lovers are discovered just after Tevarans have agreed to team up to fight against the Gaal, and the discovery dissolves the alliance leaving each people to fight for themselves.  The second half of the novel covers that invasion.

Okay, if you haven’t read the novel, you probably want to stop here, because I’m going to get all spoilery and analytical about what I think is happening in this novel.

So what’s with all the patriarchal bullshit in this story?  Wold’s people are all about the gender division, and even though Rolery notes that the women of Landin (the city of the Alterrans) have fewer restrictions on their behavior, it is clear that when the war comes, the women play just as much a secondary role as the Tevarans.  While there was a serious lack of female characters in Rocanon’s World, the division of gender roles and the diminished social status of women were not drums that were beaten in the novel, certainly not like in Planet of Exile.  So what’s the deal?  Was Le Guin just feeling especially patriarchal while writing the novel?

I don’t think so.  I think gender, and the division of the genders, is thematically on-point in the novel.

In many ways, the novel is all about divisions between people, both the social divisions and the physical barriers.  The Alterrans and Tevarans have not only different ways of life, but they are physically separated as well.  When Rolerly enters the city of Landin in the first chapter, she makes her way through the various barriers of the city—the outer wall, the inner square, the long causeway.  In fact, that last one is a barrier that is too much for her.  She goes around it onto the sands and out to the Stack, it’s own little fortress divided from Landin itself and the rest of the world by the unpredictable tides.  There rolery is called in from the sand by Jakob.  His mindspeech breaks the barriers of her own mind, and then she in turn breaks the barriers of the Stack.  And that’s the beginning of their love, though neither knows it. 

Le Guin summons up all kinds of images of division and focuses on the forceful breaking down of those divisions, such as the siege of the Winter City and of course the multi-chapter siege of Landin.  Similarly, she has clear opposites that have to be redefined in the face of new threats.  First the Alterrans and Tevarans are placed in opposition, then they are united against the invading Gaal.  The Gaal are successful because they overcame their own internal divisions so that separate tribes joined together to become one force.

Even the snowstorm is a dividing force, isolating groups and individuals from each other, a barrier put in place by nature itself.  Mindspeech too is about barriers and divisions.  Jakob tells Rolery that the skill of mindspeech is to keep the brains natural barriers from flying up at the first intrusion.  Mindspeech is about successfully opening yourself up to another human.  In this world Le Guin has created, no surprise that so few have mastered the art form; they are all so busy blocking themselves off with names and titles and scientific specifications.

In the end, the story itself is about the Alterrans finally becoming a part of the ecosystem, as opposed to self-enforced aliens in exile.  There is hope that they have adapted to the planet, which on the one hand lets them suffer infections (another broken barrier!), but on the other lets them potentially conceive children with the Tevarans.  Jakob’s big speech in the final chapter to the Tevarans in Landin is to say that the city is open to them, that they are free to leave and equally free to stay forevermore.  Those barriers and differences are dropped entirely.

It’s in this entire context that the gender division that seems so ridiculously stringent exists.  We may not see Rolery or Alla pick up arms and fight side by side with the men, but everything in the story tells us that difference is not only meaningless, but ultimately harmful.  Even though the novel changes perspectives from chapter to chapter, it is in Rolery’s chapters that we find horrible sentence like “but she was only a woman, and so she wept” (I can’t find the exact passage now, but it is within the final three chapters).  The final divide, gender, is the only divide that goes unexamined by these characters.  It’s possible that it is unexamined by Le Guin herself, but something compelled her to be especially explicit about that divide, something I haven’t yet seen in her other writings.  If she has any hangup about that bridging that divide, I think it is because she sees the divide as necessary and bridged in other ways, by which I mean that man and woman come together in the act of sex, and their union creates a child, that third thing that is separate from them, just as the Alterrans and Tevarans will come together to create an all-new people over time.

Rocannon's World

After our experience with Left Hand of Darkness, I knew I wanted to read more Ursula K. Le Guin.  We ordered the American Heritage collection of Le Guin’s Hainish novels the day she passed.  As much as I enjoyed Ann Leckie’s trilogy, it is nice to return to an author with so much poetry in her prose.  Le Guin’s language is rich while always remaining easy to read, even allowed, which is how we are working through the novels in this collection.

Rocannon’s World is Le Guin’s first published novel, and it is a charming one.  It doesn’t have the depth and insight of Left Hand of Darkness, but I really enjoyed it.  It’s a short novel (116 pages in our edition), that combines science fiction with swords and sorcery fantasy.  Yeah, there are overtones of the pale outsider who comes to the world as its savior.  And yeah, there is a certain coming-of-age flavor in which the bookish scientist comes into his manhood as a warrior.  And yeah, there are a lot of stately blonde and beautiful women whose value seems to primarily be their stately blonde beauty.  I could see any one of those causing a problem for some readers.  But for some reason, I took those elements with a grain of salt.  I suspect that it’s because I trust and like the author, which goes a long way to influencing how we read a text.

There are a ton of cool world-building moments in the novel.  The preface in which Semley retrieves her necklace and describes space travel through the eyes of a fantasty character is way cool.  The vampiric Winged Ones and their city of horrors  are awesome, as are the Keimhrir who help Rocannon escape with his friends.  The windsteeds are fantastic.  The standoff with the strangers who want the necklace and are willing to kill to get it is intense.  The novel is a bit episodic, but each episode is interesting with something unique to offer.

And it’s almost outrageous how many classic story arcs Le Guin piles on in the narrative.  We have a coming of age (or coming into manhood) story.  We have the journey home.  We have the capital-Q-Quest.  We have the savior narrative.  Any one of those can serve as the spine for a narrative, but here we find them all layered on top of one another—and surprisingly, the story is the better for it.

I think one of the things that I love about the novel—the thing that raises it beyond issues of masculinity and white-saviordom—is the pervading sense of melancholy that lingers at the edges.  There is a sorrow at the center of Rocannon and all he does that lends a sweetness to the story.  In many ways, it’s a story of loss, the loss of home, the loss of one’s people, the loss of innocence.  Rocannon stops the “bad guys,” but his heroism is one of sacrifice, and he never relishes anything that has to be done.  He is a reluctant hero without any of the handwringing that makes such heroes intolerable.  It’s a fine line to walk, but in my eyes, Le Guin walks it deftly and gracefully.

As an endnote, if you have an edition with Le Guin’s own introduction to the novel (our copy has the introduction as an appendix), I highly recommend reading it.  Le Guin is very smart in thinking and writing about what she has created, and the introduction, while short, is funny and enjoyable. 

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.