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.

Dune Meh-ssiah

*As always, there are spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk.*

There are a lot of problems with Frank Herbert’s original Dune.  The gender politics and white savior narrative alone could sink the novel.  But in spite of being put off by those aspects, I really enjoyed the novel overall.  The writing itself is decent, and a handful of the characters are fascinating, but most of all, the world of Arrakis and the universe of the novel are so beautifully and completely imagined that it’s easy to forgive the other flaws.

What I found when reading Dune Messiah, the second book in Herbert’s series, is that it is plagued with the same problems as the first book without providing the same fascinatingly depicted world.  The big contribution to the universe is the Tleilaxu and their technological abilities, such as facedancing and the creation of ghola.  The moments at which the book soared were when Herbert explored and developed everything associated with the Tleilaxu. 

When it wasn’t showing us the marvels of Tleilaxu technology, the novel progressed ponderously, bemoaning Paul’s undesirable fate as a godhead, feeling bad for Paul that millions in the universe were dying from the Jihad started in his name, and making me feel grossed out by Herbert’s fascination with Alia’s newly sexualized body (not by Alia’s sexuality, mind  you, but by Herbert’s overly-fond descriptions) as well as the unmotivated romance between Alia and Hayt/Duncan Idaho, a man her father’s age (and about the age of Frank Herbert himself when he was writing the novel).

The novel posed an interesting challenge to the author.  How do you write about Paul’s reign 12 years after he became Emperor and not write a novel about trying to run a city, state, world, and universe of worlds?  How do you write about him and not have the reader hate him for standing idly by as millions are slaughtered by his followers in his name.  This latter concern is addressed by reassuring us that the slaughtering will happen no matter what Paul does or doesn’t do, so we should take comfort in the fact that he is walking the best path possible.  How much comfort you take in that is up to you.  The former concern is addressed by creating a plot to kill and undo Paul.  That was a clever approach, I think, although many of the conspirators were given short shrift, and personally, I would have liked to have seen more of Edric and the Reverend Mother.  Actually, I would like to have seen more of Irulan as well.  Scytale was clearly the focus of the conspiracy plot, and as much as I liked the character, I would have liked to have spent more time with the others, who had, I believe, far more interesting motives and personal interest in the fate of Paul Muad’dib.

The revelation of the Tleilaxu plot to break new ground with ghola technology through Hayt and Paul’s relationship was good, and the attempt to manipulate Paul by offering to bring Chani back as a ghola was fine.  Unfortunately, I never believed Paul was truly tempted by the offer, so there was no real drama present.  Having the dwarf, Bijaz, provide the same narrative beat by making the same offer after Scytale is killed didn’t contribute anything noteworthy to the tale.  All in, it was . . . okay. 

We’re reading on into Children of Dune to see if Dune Messiah or Dune itself is the fluke.  I will report back with my findings.

The Left Hand of Darkness

*There are spoilers ahead, so read at your own risk.*

I don’t know what I expected from Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, but I’m really delighted with what I got.  This is the first book of hers I have read, and I found it to be intelligent, rich, complex, beautiful, and strange.

The story follows two men, Genly Ai and Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, on the planet of Gethen, sometimes called Winter by Genly.  Genly is an alien to Gethen, an envoy from the Ekumen, an alliance of planets throughout the galaxy with the goal of establishing trade relationships with all the inhabited planets.  When contact is made with a prospective member, the Ekumen sends a single representative, an envoy, to make contact.  The Ekumen knows that one alien is a curiosity while two are an invasion.  At the start of the novel, Estraven is the right hand of King Argaven, ruler of Karhide, one of the two major nations on the planet of Gethen.

 While all the inhabited planets the Ekumen has visited seem to be populated by humans, Gethenians are the only known humans to be monosexual.  For most of the month, they are sexless.  Then for a week or so they enter what they call “kemmer” and become sexual.  Two Gethenians in kemmer will find each other and one will develop female organs while the other develops male organs.  Gethenians consider only the parent that carried and bore them their parent.  The sexual role any Gethenian takes during kemmer varies, so one might have male parts in one encounter and female parts in the next.

LeGuin has an anthropological mind and does a phenomenal job of playing out how such a being would structure society differently than our bisexual society.  As a point of contrast, Genly is obviously sexist in his thinking.  His default pronoun for the Gethenians is “he,” and when something annoys him about a Gethenian he attributes it to something feminine about them.  The Gethenians don’t bifurcate the world into masculine and feminine as Genly (and bisexual earthlings) do, and they especially don’t give those divisions opposing valences: strength and weakness, good and bad, scientific and emotional, etc. etc. etc.  Gethenian society expects everyone to take a week off each month to experience kemmer without shame or judgment.  Kemmerhouses are common so people in kemmer can find each other to mate.  Pregnancy and child bearing aren’t stigmatized as everyone on the planet is expected to be pregnant and be the main child rearer at some point in their lives.  At one point, Estraven notes that Genly has an odd hang-up about crying in front of other people, and much of the misunderstanding between the two is due to Genly’s deep commitment to ideas of masculinity.  The language barrier is nothing compared to the cultural assumptions and misinterpretation of subtext.

The dismantling of gender assumption results in a really bold approach to a science fiction civilization, and I imagine the book made quite a few waves in 1969.  Because LeGuin has Genly gender everyone on the planet male by default, the romance scenes all have a trace of homoerotica.  The entire second half of the book involves Estraven and Genly alone in a dangerous trek across the northern country to avoid capture, and the two “men” grow very close.  Estraven of course enters kemmer on the trip and the sexual tension thickens.  There is a love that grows between the two, and it is a very touching relationship.  That relationship is not something that happens in passing, but is a major focus of the novel, and like Romeo and Juliet, these two people from different worlds have a love that is doomed.  The two chapters in which this love blossoms and is recognized by the two protagonists (chapters 16 and 18) are some of the most beautiful and moving chapters that I have read.

Genly grows to understand that all his assumptions are wrong.  Here’s a passage from chapter 18, “On the Ice,” in which Genly makes the critical move from being a mere envoy to being a man of genuine understanding and acceptance:

And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man.  Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was.  Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality.  He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted.  For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being; who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty, and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance.  I had not been willing to give it.  I had been afraid to give it.  I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

That resonates as much today as it must have in 1969 as gender norms are being challenged daily by all who refuse to say that we are, as a people, binary creatures.  And that’s what science fiction can always do, make the everyday alien in order to see it, analyze it, and discuss it.

I want to share another passage from that same chapter because I think it is important, although I can’t quite tell you why.  It’s something I keep thinking about.  The passage is Genly’s answer to Estraven, when asked why the Ekumen made everything difficult by sending Genly alone instead of giving him support on the planet:

It’s the Ekumen’s custom, and there are reasons for it.  Though in fact I begin to wonder if I’ve ever understood the reasons.  I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself post no threat, change no balance; not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy.  But there’s more to it than that.  Alone, I cannot change your world.  But I can be changed by it.  Alone, I must listen as well as speak.  Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political.  Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou.  Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical.  In a certain sense, the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic.  It considers beginnings to be extremely important.  Beginnings, and means.  Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means.  It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model.

And Genly is changed thoroughly.  Whereas early in the novel, the monogender of Gethenians is constantly irksome, the opposite is true in the final chapter of the novel.  Reunited with other’s from the Ekumen, he finds their voices too deep or too high, too masculine or too feminine.  He is in deep mourning for the loss of his lover and friend and is truly between worlds, tragic but better for it.

LeGuin introduces us to the world through Genly as a first-person narrator, but she wisely gives us other perspectives as well.  Estraven has his own voice through the diary he keeps, and he is equally present as Genly.  In addition to these two voices, there are a number of chapters that present Gethenian legends and folktales.  Through these tales, LeGuin creates an impressively complete world, both physically and sociologically.  I get the sense that LeGuin has considered every aspect of culture that would develop from such humans existing in such an environment.  She has a full geography and history in her head, and unlike some writers, she never throws it all on the page because she did all the work to figure it out.  She presents only what is relevant and meaningful with the ghost of other events, places, and meanings haunting the edges of what is said and what is left unsaid.

The Left Hand of Darkness tackles half a dozen other subjects as well.  There is certainly a study to be made of how the novel fits into its historical moment, namely the cold war and the Vietnam war.  The people of Gethen have never had a war and have no word for war.  This seems intimately tied into the notion of have a monosex culture as it is uncommon on Gethen to see duality rather than unity in the world.  A male-female split naturally creates an us-vs.-them in a way that monosexuality on Gethen doesn’t.  But Gethen is on the verge of change as the new right hand to King Argaven, Tibe, is seeking to push the king toward war through a newly developed sense of nationalism.  Orgota, the opposing country, is similarly poised to turn nationalism into a tool for war.  It is against this impending change to the world that Estraven is fighting to save the people of Gethen from themselves.  Estraven’s position as an outsider, a “traitor,” is yet another element of this larger discussion encouraged by the novel.

Another topic in the novel are the Handara notion of ignorance as the only thing that makes life bearable.  And what of the ability to see into the future, power coming from knowing what questions not to ask?  And what do we make of the incestuous love affair between Estraven and Arek, and the lack of taboo about incest on Gethen?  What about “perverts” and “normals” in Gethenian society and in our society?  Why does Genly sound like Arek in Estraven’s head when he mindspeaks?  What is LeGuin saying about humanity when she posits that all the populated worlds have the same essential humanity throughout the galaxy? All of these categories feel closely related and simultaneously distinct.  I love when I finish a book and feel that there is a lot of meaning to be mined from it, and The Left Hand of Darkness delivers that feeling like a bouquet of unbloomed flowers.  In fact, this is one of the few books that upon finishing, we (my wife and I, to whom I had read the book aloud) started back at chapter one.