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Benefit
So last weekend I accidentally Ancillary Justice.
...I accidentally Ancillary Justice despite having a ridiculous to-do list of fifty-one fairly major items all of which absolutely must be finished by Friday morning.
You know, I have a long, half-finished post sitting around that explores why I don't read many novels anymore, but really, the whole thing boils down to: when I'm reading a good novel, I make stupid decisions like ignoring the entire ridiculous fifty-one item to-do list to finish it.and then ignoring it some more to write dw posts about the book.
Anyway, Ancillary Justice: SO GOOD. *chinhands*
So if you took Lord of Light, Sutcliff's Dolphin Ring cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness, the Alternian Empire from Homestuck, and most of Anne McCaffrey's FSP books, put them in a blender, skimmed off all of my favorite bits, and then reshaped them into something entirely new and wonderful, that would sort of begin to explain how I enjoyed Ancillary Justice.
I kind of regret not waiting until the whole trilogy was out tbh although probably better this way, for all I didn't need to spend that time on it this weekend I definitely didn't need to spend three times the time on it.
Here are some non-plot-related-but-possibly-spoilery thoughts under the cut:
I am currently sitting here being paralyzed with indecision about whether I want to go look for the Breq/Seivarden fic that I know is almost definitely simmering there on AO3 waiting for me.
On the one hand, I don't ship Breq/Seivarden like, at all? I don't get shippy vibes off them at all, and possibly the opposite, and I'm not really interested in exploring that direction for them either? (I am kind of interested in how the Radchaai conceptions of primary relationships, and Radchaai perceptions of Breq and Seivarden, overlap with our concepts of romance, but I think I would rather see it as compare/contrast really.)
Plus one of the things I like about this book is the way it carries on the long and glorious, if often discontinuous, tradition of SF POVs that are deeply awkward about romance. It's not that there's no romance, there's a backround romance, but the romantic relationship isn't elevated as being more important than all other relationships just due to being romance, and their love is explicitly written as being not different in quality than non-romantic love, and it's fundamentally different due to cultural factors from the way American readers are used to seeing romance done, and the POV character is deeply awkward whenever forced to acknowledge it.
And that is so great and so restful to read.
On the other hand I do have a desperate desperate need for about 300,000 words of story where absolutely nothing important happens other than Breq and Seivarden aggressively being people at each other until they manage to sort out some of their issues, and if that's not the entire point of shipfic then I don't know what it's for.
On the gripping hand to the extent that I ship anyone in this goshdarn book, it's Mercy of Kalr/Justice of Toren One Esk. (Raise your hand if you know me and you're surprised that I ended up shipping the ships. Yeah, thought so.) That relationship has so much potential to be fucked up and fun. (I'm kind of terrified of reading Ancillary Sword because that relationship is either going to be glorious or not at all what I want. Or it'll be what I want and then Mercy of Kalr will go down in a blaze of glory. Augh. Don't spoil me.)
(I don't get to pick up Ancillary Sword until EVERY SINGLE TO-DO ITEM IS DONE, you guys enforce that ok.)
Gender:
So the first thing I heard about this book was the gender thing: The main character can't tell the difference between male and female and just uses female pronouns for everybody.
Somehow I got the impression that this was due to her particular circumstances, but no: she comes from the Radch, a culture where nobody makes a distinction between male and female, and in fact all the main characters, and nearly all of the secondary characters, are also from that culture, or in the process of assimilating into it. So that's really interesting.
But also: I read several people's meta about how they found it brain-twisty that male characters are referred to by female pronouns, and having to remind themselves that these characters could be male despite the pronouns, and stuff like that. And Breq does spend a lot of the early part of the book embedded in a culture that's aggressively gender-binary, trying to figure out how to assign people male/female, and as a result we get told early on that certain characters are "male" by the standards of that culture despite Breq continuing to use female linguistic gender for them in her POV.
And this works really well as a way of establishing what the author's doing with gender without infodumping, and signposting the reader not to assume everyone referred to as "she" is female? But it's also something of a red herring, because it tricked me into spending longer-than-I-want-to-admit trying to figure out whether Radchaai characters were male or female, like Breq was doing at the beginning, when of course that's entirely missing the point: Radchaai characters aren't male or female, they're Radchaai.
And in fact, Breq is missing the point when she tries to make that distinction too, I think, because even in this aggressively gender-binary culture she's hiding in (I love the way the author establishes that their language is even more gendered that English) all of the locals pretty much immediately ID the Radchaai-raised characters (except when Breq is trying very hard to pass), not as male or female, but as Radchaai. Radchaai are all gendered Radchaai, and even people who are steeped in an m/f binary recognize that. (Whereas she has a much easier time passing as non-Radchaai among Radchaai, because like fish swimming in water, they don't even realize there are Radchaai gender markers that are obvious to people of other genders.)
And then I realized that Radchaai itself is a gendered language - at least, linguistically gendered - because at least some of the Radchaai characters use different pronouns for Radchaai than for Ships, which actually gives an interesting twist to JoT One Esk's repeated protests that despite being of the Radch, One Esk is not Radchaai. And now I have this theory that the Radchaai actually have different linguistic genders for Radchaai, noncitizens, and Ships, and Breq's POV is deliberately flattening that distinction and using Radchaai gender for everyone, as a political statement.
I'm going to have to re-read - AFTER THE TO-DO LIST IS EMPTY - paying really close attention to pronouns. Partly to see if that theory of Radchaai linguistics works, partly to play close attention to how the non-Radchaai are gendering the Radchaai characters.
so who here thinks Anaander Mianaai was once a ship's ancillary
(OK I also sort of enemyship Anaander Mianaai/Breq, especially given that, if I am interpreting that right, Anaander basically marriage-of-convenienced them without even asking Breq. :P)
I am totally going to have the two words "Anaander Mianaai" stuck in my head like a mantra for the next week. Thanks, Ann Leckie.
...I accidentally Ancillary Justice despite having a ridiculous to-do list of fifty-one fairly major items all of which absolutely must be finished by Friday morning.
You know, I have a long, half-finished post sitting around that explores why I don't read many novels anymore, but really, the whole thing boils down to: when I'm reading a good novel, I make stupid decisions like ignoring the entire ridiculous fifty-one item to-do list to finish it.
Anyway, Ancillary Justice: SO GOOD. *chinhands*
So if you took Lord of Light, Sutcliff's Dolphin Ring cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness, the Alternian Empire from Homestuck, and most of Anne McCaffrey's FSP books, put them in a blender, skimmed off all of my favorite bits, and then reshaped them into something entirely new and wonderful, that would sort of begin to explain how I enjoyed Ancillary Justice.
I kind of regret not waiting until the whole trilogy was out tbh although probably better this way, for all I didn't need to spend that time on it this weekend I definitely didn't need to spend three times the time on it.
Here are some non-plot-related-but-possibly-spoilery thoughts under the cut:
I am currently sitting here being paralyzed with indecision about whether I want to go look for the Breq/Seivarden fic that I know is almost definitely simmering there on AO3 waiting for me.
On the one hand, I don't ship Breq/Seivarden like, at all? I don't get shippy vibes off them at all, and possibly the opposite, and I'm not really interested in exploring that direction for them either? (I am kind of interested in how the Radchaai conceptions of primary relationships, and Radchaai perceptions of Breq and Seivarden, overlap with our concepts of romance, but I think I would rather see it as compare/contrast really.)
Plus one of the things I like about this book is the way it carries on the long and glorious, if often discontinuous, tradition of SF POVs that are deeply awkward about romance. It's not that there's no romance, there's a backround romance, but the romantic relationship isn't elevated as being more important than all other relationships just due to being romance, and their love is explicitly written as being not different in quality than non-romantic love, and it's fundamentally different due to cultural factors from the way American readers are used to seeing romance done, and the POV character is deeply awkward whenever forced to acknowledge it.
And that is so great and so restful to read.
On the other hand I do have a desperate desperate need for about 300,000 words of story where absolutely nothing important happens other than Breq and Seivarden aggressively being people at each other until they manage to sort out some of their issues, and if that's not the entire point of shipfic then I don't know what it's for.
On the gripping hand to the extent that I ship anyone in this goshdarn book, it's Mercy of Kalr/Justice of Toren One Esk. (Raise your hand if you know me and you're surprised that I ended up shipping the ships. Yeah, thought so.) That relationship has so much potential to be fucked up and fun. (I'm kind of terrified of reading Ancillary Sword because that relationship is either going to be glorious or not at all what I want. Or it'll be what I want and then Mercy of Kalr will go down in a blaze of glory. Augh. Don't spoil me.)
(I don't get to pick up Ancillary Sword until EVERY SINGLE TO-DO ITEM IS DONE, you guys enforce that ok.)
Gender:
So the first thing I heard about this book was the gender thing: The main character can't tell the difference between male and female and just uses female pronouns for everybody.
Somehow I got the impression that this was due to her particular circumstances, but no: she comes from the Radch, a culture where nobody makes a distinction between male and female, and in fact all the main characters, and nearly all of the secondary characters, are also from that culture, or in the process of assimilating into it. So that's really interesting.
But also: I read several people's meta about how they found it brain-twisty that male characters are referred to by female pronouns, and having to remind themselves that these characters could be male despite the pronouns, and stuff like that. And Breq does spend a lot of the early part of the book embedded in a culture that's aggressively gender-binary, trying to figure out how to assign people male/female, and as a result we get told early on that certain characters are "male" by the standards of that culture despite Breq continuing to use female linguistic gender for them in her POV.
And this works really well as a way of establishing what the author's doing with gender without infodumping, and signposting the reader not to assume everyone referred to as "she" is female? But it's also something of a red herring, because it tricked me into spending longer-than-I-want-to-admit trying to figure out whether Radchaai characters were male or female, like Breq was doing at the beginning, when of course that's entirely missing the point: Radchaai characters aren't male or female, they're Radchaai.
And in fact, Breq is missing the point when she tries to make that distinction too, I think, because even in this aggressively gender-binary culture she's hiding in (I love the way the author establishes that their language is even more gendered that English) all of the locals pretty much immediately ID the Radchaai-raised characters (except when Breq is trying very hard to pass), not as male or female, but as Radchaai. Radchaai are all gendered Radchaai, and even people who are steeped in an m/f binary recognize that. (Whereas she has a much easier time passing as non-Radchaai among Radchaai, because like fish swimming in water, they don't even realize there are Radchaai gender markers that are obvious to people of other genders.)
And then I realized that Radchaai itself is a gendered language - at least, linguistically gendered - because at least some of the Radchaai characters use different pronouns for Radchaai than for Ships, which actually gives an interesting twist to JoT One Esk's repeated protests that despite being of the Radch, One Esk is not Radchaai. And now I have this theory that the Radchaai actually have different linguistic genders for Radchaai, noncitizens, and Ships, and Breq's POV is deliberately flattening that distinction and using Radchaai gender for everyone, as a political statement.
I'm going to have to re-read - AFTER THE TO-DO LIST IS EMPTY - paying really close attention to pronouns. Partly to see if that theory of Radchaai linguistics works, partly to play close attention to how the non-Radchaai are gendering the Radchaai characters.
I am totally going to have the two words "Anaander Mianaai" stuck in my head like a mantra for the next week. Thanks, Ann Leckie.
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One of the things that makes the Radch books so satisfying, I think, is that Breq is missing the point a lot, and is wrong a lot, and quite often Leckie doesn't tell you this and leaves you to figure it out on your own.
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But I don't think Breq is as clear-eyed as she seems even in Justice. I think it's deceptive because she's so methodical and analytical. She goes through this very firm, determined plan in Justice, step by step, assembling pieces of the plan and as you learn what the goal is, you think "I can't wait to see how she puts these pieces together and pulls it off," but... she doesn't have a whole plan. She hasn't figured it all out. She's traumatized and broken and alone and she appears to be making progress the way she is because she's still at least part Ship and that's how she works, but she's going nowhere.
And I think we're supposed to take a lot of Breq's other cultural observations the same way- as a totally disoriented and broken shipmind trying to make sense out of a world that doesn't follow the rules the Radchaii pretend it does. She doesn't believe in the rules the Radch follow because she can't, she's been thrown out of the system. There's a few moments in Sword that suggest that there's a lot of stuff about the relationship between sex and gender and family for the Radchaii that Breq doesn't understand because they weren't in the purview of a shipmind that never had to deal with children.
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But idk, I never got the impression at any point in Justice that she had a clear, methodical plan? Like, she was pretty up-front that her entire plan was "shoot Anaander Mianaai" and she was aware that a) this was a stupid plan, and b) she didn't really know what was driving her to do it, but that c) emotionally, she really liked the idea of shooting her, and didn't have any better ideas, so why not. It actually ended up being a better put-together plan than I expected!
I also get the impression that even when she still had Justice of Toren, she didn't really buy into a lot of the ideology of the Radch? I got the impression that the Radchaai didn't really care about that as long as the ships did what they were told, and the ships always had sort of their own separate culture. So she never forgets the fact that she's lost and broken and fragmented, but that's about clinging to her identity as a ship, not as Radchaai. I got the impression that "crazed with grief" is actually a perfectly expected life-phase for a ship, and part of what makes her stand out is that she's even as put-together as she is.
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Whereas I went 'every significant character is female unless otherwise noted, screw you patriarchal-brain-colonizing fiction tropes'.
Anaander basically marriage-of-convenienced them without even asking Breq.
Huh. I interpreted that as Breq being adopted into the family, as was often done in ancient Roman family what a promise person was spotted by a family without an heir.
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And I definitely stuck with all of the non-Radchaai being female because WHY NOT FUCK THE PATRIARCHY (actually iirc the doctor was even pointed out as male but I privately decided she was female-in-her-culture but had gone with male prounouns in Nilt because it was easier) but I think it is kind of important that the Radchaai themselves (even the ones who are noted as "male") aren't either one. Because seriously fuck the gender binary even harder than the patriarchy.
Which didn't really get signposted in the story until the scene where Breq finally makes it into Radchaai space and has that moment of seeing the Radchaai marketplace through non-Radchaai eyes, and all the m/f gender markers are completely mixed up and impossible to separate out. And it's also established that the Radchaai have medical technology at a level where secondary sex characteristics can be altered at will and they don't particularly care if the result aligns to any non-Radchaai norms, so even Seivarden appearing to have male gender markers to Breq-trying-to-pass-as-Nilt is pretty meaningless (and iirc Breq doesn't specify which ones those are - she might just be going by Seivarden having short hair and wearing pants...)
I do love the fact that when picking an Englishh pronoun to best represent Radchaai gender she picked female, though. Because of COURSE the conquerors who rule the known universe are closer to feminine than masculine. FUCK THE PATRIARCHY.
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Welcome to the fandom. You have been assimilated. Hurry up and finish your to-do list so you can read Sword, because based on this review I very much want to know what you think of it.
And it's also established that the Radchaai have medical technology at a level where secondary sex characteristics can be altered at will and they don't particularly care if the result aligns to any non-Radchaai norms
YES THIS. It amazes me how no one's been discussing this, even when Breq is being accused of habitually misgendering people by a two metre tall iron grey-skinned human being. Primary sex characteristics too -- in that conversation, Strigan asks Breq how Radchaai reproduce, and Breq mentions "have surgery so they can carry a pregnancy" as one of the ways Radchaai have children.
so even Seivarden appearing to have male gender markers to Breq-trying-to-pass-as-Nilt is pretty meaningless (and iirc Breq doesn't specify which ones those are - she might just be going by Seivarden having short hair and wearing pants...)
Agreed about what gender markers Seivarden has not being specified, but a small datapoint about Breq there: she doesn't pick the pronouns for Seivarden. Both times that happens (with the Nilters, then with Strigan) the other person genders Seivarden first, and Breq just goes with what they said.
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And that exchange with Strigan is so important! Because, like, if it was just "Radchaai are male or female but it's culturally unimportant" you wouldn't ask "how do they reproduce" - you might ask (as Dwarves get asked) "how do you tell the difference when it comes time to make a baby", but you'd only ask "how do you reproduce at all" if you're reading Radchaai as not having males or females AT ALL.
(I also love that Breq just casually implies that most non-Radchaai humans have access to, and use, the same technology. Because that's exactly the sort of thing that happens with gender! People get all tied up about what certain genders can or can't do even when it's blatantly obvious that they certainly can if they want to.)
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That's how I read it. She mentions listening for the same cues and having to guess if they haven't given her the cue she needs, so it makes sense to me that that's what she's doing then.
you'd only ask "how do you reproduce at all" if you're reading Radchaai as not having males or females AT ALL.
I read that slightly differently, as Strigan trying to catch Breq out. Like, "you silly Radchaai, you THINK gender is entirely relative and not a meaningful or essential distinction, but WHO MAKES THE BABIES, huh?"
I also love that Breq just casually implies that most non-Radchaai humans have access to, and use, the same technology. Because that's exactly the sort of thing that happens with gender!
*nodnod*
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For my part, I see Seivarden being in love with Breq, perhaps not sexually, but definitely in love and devoted to her, but I also don't ship them at all.
But I love Breq, and I love that Leckie doesn't give us easy answers about anything. I also really like (and by like I mean am fascinated by) how the book handles relationships between the Radchaai and the conquered worlds they are trying to assimilate.
...Also, Leckie wrote a novella called "She Commands Me and I Obey" that's set during those twenty years we don't see in Breq's life, fyi, haha.
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I also think that after Seivarden finds out that Breq is Justice of Toren she is rapidly re-evaluating everything she has ever thought about who Breq is and her relationship with Breq.
But I also think it's, like, super-complicated??? by the fact that Radchaai don't do relationships AT ALL like we're used to. So honestly I think it's more Seivarden really, really wants to be Breq's client but also is conflicted about admitting this because that goes against everything she used to believe about how clientage works, but also the fact that it obviously *won't* be anything like a traditional clientage arrangement is part of why she wants it so much, and she's also conflicted about that while at the same time gripping it tight with both hands, and Breq is aware of this but is ignoring it because she's still thinking about relationships like an ancillary, and Seivarden is DEFINITELY not her favorite, and that's really the only paradigm she thinks she's able to work with.
But of course I still don't know much about how clientage works in practice, or how Seivarden is connecting that with sex/romance in her mind, so all that really comes down to is "in a culture with one gender and completely different relationship paradigms Seivarden has found a way to be SUPER-QUEER" and I think that's beautiful.
...and yes I love the stuff about the conquered worlds, and the way Leckie shows it to us, and the lack of easy answers! Also I would really really love something about Daos Ceit and how she became Radchaai.
I will have to come back after my to-do list is wrestled into submission and ask how to find that story. :P
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I got the impression somewhere that the radchaai pronoun is "radchaai", or "citizen", or at least that's the term of direct address? I also thought for a while about why they would ass themselves to have their pronoun translate as 'she' and I finally decided that maybe it was the closest they could get when they were out gallivanting around colonizing civilizations that matched gender more or less with reproduction because part of the point of being a citizen was that you could be the matriarch of a house? Of course that makes all kinds of cultural assumptions about what that means on my part, but I like the idea that maybe the translation is a loan-word that they most closely matched to THE PERSON THAT GIVES YOU LIFE, WHAT IS.
Also I can't pass a post about the Radch on my read list without feeling compelled to point out that I couldn't be Radch because all that dangley stuff on my blazer would make me CRAZY. So many pins! Dangling off your sleeves! Festooning your lapels! Argh.
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..and I don't know how much craving loyalty is a Seivarden thing or a ... coping mechanism? OR just a Breq thing? I mean Seivarden in Justice, at least, is basically Steve Rogers in the first Avengers movie, clinging to the first thing she finds that makes any sort of sense at all. ...not that Steve doesn't have a loyalty kink but it gets a lot more complicated once he finds his feet again.
And IDK, do we know who made the decision to use "she" as the Radchaai pronoun? I was kind of assuming it was either a much later translator into English or it was Breq's individual choice; presumably the Radchaai get different pronouns in every language they encounter - certainly Breq makes the point that gender is different in every culture she visits. I did get the impression that at least on Nilt, there was a tendency to just call Radchaai "Radchaai" rather than using pronouns, although that might be as much pejorative as gender-related.
I do love the idea that at some point some English-speaker asked a Radchaai if they should be "he" or "she" and asked what the difference was and got told, "um, females can bear children if they want to and males can't" and the Radchaai was like "well, female then I guess? Are there people who can't bear children even if they want to? How does that work?"
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To my mind, Sievarden was in a bad spot and really wanted something stable, and then over time fell in loyalty-love with Breq and started idealizing her as an ideal patron. And Sievarden is very, very aristocratic and old-school and probably has notions about how important that relationship is. I love the idea of her running smack into the fact that this is in fact a spaceship and being really thrown.
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(Some day I will type up the ongoing discussion in the letters pages of some of my 1950s Analog issues about how to handle translation and language in far-future SF...)
I'd love to read Leckie's thing about her choice, though!
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I saw something on Tumblr recently that was a linguist's perspective on how to get new pronouns into a language, that was really interesting! And of course I can't find it now either.
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It got me through a very trying holiday-season visit with my SIL, and for that if nothing else I am duly grateful (it is also quite a good novel, even if you're not trying not to yell at someone who inexplicably has not mastered basic household cooperative skills despite being 44 years old).
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(and work 8 hours)
after that I am totally reading it. It's sitting on my desk waiting to come on the camping trip with me.
ETA: and buy kitty litter and email committee chairs
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