melannen | (no subject)

1. Still have not read any more FMK. I am trying to get through Downbelow Station, but it started with a long section of character-less history exposition, and it did not motivate me much to keep going. IDK - I like a good fictional exposition, but I think I am glad publishing has moved away from encouraging them as the first chapter of novels.

2. If you want a poll, though, I posted a very important poll to

fictional_fans yesterday.

3. The reason I haven't written more Imperial Radch fanfiction is that I want to write stuff that really digs into the worldbuilding, but the canon worldbuilding is really deep (without having any convenient-to-fanwriters history chapters) and there are no really good online concordances for it, so I have to go back to the originals to get the worldbuilding details, and then I have to re-read the whole trilogy, because those are not books I can just dip into and out of. Oh well!

So anyway, for my own references, here is A list of major stakeholders in the Republic of Two Systems as of the end of Ancillary Mercy

Not residents of the Athoek system:

Anaander Mianaai, who can be subdivided into:
- The Anaander who thinks scorched earth is a good tactic, represented by the Anaander from Tstur Palace
- The Anaander who thinks giving One Esk Nineteen a fleet command is a good tactic, represented by Fleet Captain Uemi
- The person who hid AI cores in the Undergarden?? who we know nothing about but seems to know Anaander's secrets very well and can access most of her resources. Another faction of Anaander? Another Tisarwat? A rogue Ship who's a better con artist than Sphene? Possibly represented by Eminence Ifian
The Presger, of unknown motives and desires, but we can separate out:
- The Presger/Human Translators, who seem to be aware that acting in the best interests of the Presger may not be in the interest of their continued existence, represented by Zeiat
Free AIs, whose presence RE: the Presger treaty is the Republic's insurance against reprisals, represented by Mercy of Kalr and her cousins, including
- Sphene, who as the only resident of the Ghost System presumably gets her own vote on the Security Council
- Sword of Atagaris, who seems to mostly be sticking with Breq because everywhere else would be worse
- A pile of unclaimed baby AIs??? Possibly the only ones currently in existence???
Other Radchaai military presence, of unknown factional loyalty (as represented by Mercy of Ilves)
Other non-Radchaai trapped in the system (I don't think any are named, but presumably Dlique was not the only non-citizen stranded when the gates went down, or unwilling to go home via a war zone)
Non-Radchaai galactic powers who are affected by the Radchaai civil war and the Presger treaty (currenty unrepresented, unless you count Sphene, but presumably not for long.)

Residents of the Athoek system:

"Outsystem" Radchaai. These are curiously difficult to figure out, because Breq really truly does not seem to care where you are from as long as you wear gloves and don't expect her to gender you, but presumably they include
- Most of the high-ranking political appointees on Station, represented by Governor Giarod and most of Tisarwat's friends
- The top ranks of the state religion, represented by Eminence Ifian
- Most of the large plantation owners, represented by Fosyf
- "Provincial" Radchaai who are partly "Radchaaiized" but can still more or less code-switch between Radchaai and their home indigenous cultures, probably mostly in support roles for Radchaai institutions or Houses, represented by Basnaaid
"Athoeki" Radchaai, who presumably include
- Xhai, who seem to have been the dominant culture at the time of annexation, and who we see curiously few of, at least as distinguished from default Athoeki
- Ychana, who seem to have been the lowest-status ethnic group, as represented by Emer of the Undergarden tea shop
- Assorted other Athoeki ethnic groups, including the Sahut, as represented by Head of Security Lusulun
- "Radchaaiized" Athoeki, who speak Radchaai as a first language and are mostly culturally oriented to the Empire, or are mixed between different ethnic groups or part Outsystem; Breq reads this as default for any Athoeki citizens, but presumably includes at least some of the influential Station Athoeki of ethnicity not otherwise specified.
- Samirend transportees, who have been on Athoek enough generations that they are fairly Radchaaiized and may be starting to think of themselves as a Samirend-Athoeki diasporan community, represented by Sirix
- Valskaayan transportees, 0-3 generations from the Valskaay annexation, not Radchaaiized at all, including an unknown number of still-frozen transportees direct from the Valskaay annexation, some of whom are on Sphene; represented by Uran and Queter

/looks at that list
/thinks about dreams of one day writing the post-AM fic about all of Breq's family working things out, but that would inevitably require dealing with the above mess in the background
/says "good luck, folks!" and nopes out.

Other Imperial Radch fic I would like someday but know I cannot write is the crossover where a Dendarii ship falls out of the Ghost Gate and Admiral Naismith and Lieutenant Tisarwat need to have a charm-off ~~and then a lot of sex~~.

....actually I would like to write a lot of Tisarwat fic, but I do not know how to write unreasonably charming and charismatic characters. I can write unreasonably smart ones - you just have them know something the audience doesn't at the right times, and they'll fill in the blanks - and unrealistically lucky ones - you roll the dice, you can cheat - but I dunno how to write people that are more charming than I am. And Tisarwat does it so well!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

There's definitely 3 AMs, and there have been since at least Awn died. Certainly Breq's been thinking there were at least three that long, and there's no way we got that much hint dropping without that being the case. So we can rule out that AM being a rogue ship, and it's only a faction of Tisarwat if it managed to intercept "no more scorched earth" AM's interference there. It wasn't caused by that choice, I mean.

Which really means there's possibly way more than three by now. I mean, what're the odds the division has conveniently stopped at that point?

I'm not sure what you mean by "A faction of Tisarwat" here - I was probably unclear, what I meant by that was an individual Anaander, or small group thereof, or failed ancillary - that managed to cut itself off from the hivemind some time ago and has been running completely independently and off-the-grid even since. Not anything directly connected with our Tisarwat - I just find it unlikely that was the first time she'd tried putting herself in an anonymous body (might have been the first time she'd tried it with unsuitable implants and no preparation time, though) or been cut off from herself long-term.

But definitely what the hints were hinting at is just a third faction, true! I just am not sure I trust the hints, and it seems like if there's a sequel trilogy that's the entry point, so who knows. A ship seems the least likely, but Sphene managed to fool Hetnys and probably Ifian without even trying very hard, and I still have my headcanon that Anaander may have originally been a ship herself; and if it was a rogue ship teamed up with somebody who had a lot of accesses they could probably get pretty far. And I do wonder about a third faction on the scale of the other two managing to keep herself *completely* hidden from the other two even while being that active.

But yeah, even if there weren't more than that, it seems like the longer Anaander keeps communications down, the more at risk they are of each Palace separating too far from even the other ones it's theoretically with. But there's also .... hmm, the series raises really complicated questions about to what extent someone with ancillaries is ever one person, and never really answers them - certainly there's some sense in which each Anaander body is her own faction, and the civil war is just an exaggeration of that, a forced acknowledgement. Breq simplifies it by talking about two Anaanders when she's giving the news, because that's what makes sense to humans, and that's how the war's playing out, but I don't see how that could ever be true - Anaander has always been a shifting mass of contradictions some of which sometimes agree or disagree on things, and also one whole being (heck I only have one brain, and so am I). Breq never really thinks about this in detail because it's her natural state too, but it always seems to factor into her analysis of Anaander, the almost Zeiat-like unwillingness to separate Anaander into stable categories, in a way it doesn't to the humans around her.

So yeah. There's a sense it which it's not even a reasonable question.

Also I suppose it's possible that any or all of the ones we know did it, but hid it from themselves so effectively that she forgot entirely! That's the boring answer.

Edited 2018-04-05 04:23 (UTC)

1. I misread, nevermind that then!

2. Intriguing thought, that she may've tried before. Oooh, possibly only AM3 did it before and she could be lurking ANYWHERE.

3. On a related note, sooner or later I want to find out what's going on in the original Radch.

The original Radch terrifies me. I've read Ringworld, and that's only about 1/20th of a full Dyson sphere. A full Dyson shell around a Sunlike planet would have the surface area (and presumably population and energy resources) of 600,000,000 Earthlike planets and could probably easily overwhelm the entire rest of Human space if it wanted to - except for the problem of communication over distance. A Dyson swarm might have less but if it was filled-in enough to have a reasonable sense of "outside" and "inside" it would still be a LOT.

Even if it's around a tiny dwarf star it's tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of Earths in area, and with smaller Dyson spheres you'd usually live on the outside not the inside, so it's probably much larger even than that, and would care about the Radch Empire approximately as much as the US cares about Tuvalu. And presumably Mianaai and Sphene's culture complex, with the purity obsession and the singular gender, is just a teeny fraction of the cultural diversity of the original Radch, probably the least isolationist bit....

Ann Leckie is pretty good at scale for a space opera writer, so I presume she knows this.* O_o (This is why my headcanon is that other than a few academics, the Radch itself neither knows nor cares about Anaander Miaanai, and never did. Nor Outradch Notai, for that matter.)

(It's also possible that large parts of the Radch are occupied by massively multiple Anaander-like people, because they *could* have an empire that dwarfs hers without ever hitting the brainlag problems that Anaander did.)

On the other hand, if there is anything outside the Radch they do need to care about, it's the Presger (especially since given the general tech level of the rest of Humanity, I bet they moved into somebody else's pre-built sphere and never had the tech to build it themselves.)

So I do enjoy imagining the scene where Conclave diplomatic matters progress to the point where Sphene and Breq and Tisarwat have to be carefully welcomed by the original Radch as important foreign dignitaries. :D

*It is possible the Radch sphere is just a swarm of automated solar panels surrounding a perfectly ordinary-sized inhabited planetary system, but really, why would you bring up a Dyson sphere if you're not going to blow people's minds with it?**

**also Ann Leckie has hinted on her Tumblr that she doesn't actually know much about any of this yet, so probably all options are still open!

Or, since there apparently was contact with the Radch at one point and isn't now, maybe they've all suffered some cataclysmic event. (Or maybe they're like Asimov's Solarians and really, really like their personal space.)

Ooh, I hadn't even considered the possibility that maybe the Radch wasn't there any more! I just figured they didn't think they needed to bother with anything outside it, which is probably true. But the idea that the Radch isn't functional anymore - that Mianaai and company are in some sense refugees - is really intriguing!

There are so many possibilities, really. I just... I want answers, darn it!