Justice for...
Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Yes, I’m going back a few years, but I finally got around to reading this. I can see why it won all the awards it did, but Translation State is a lot better. Leckie’s clearly matured as a writer through the series.
The gender stuff is less radical than I thought it was, but the protagonist not being able to keep anyone’s gender straight (or not straight) is amusing.
I think I would have enjoyed this more if I didn’t have a favorite AI I like a lot better than Breq, although I did like Breq.
The Imperial Raadch is, basically, Rome. Interstellar Rome has been done many times before, but this version shows both an understanding of history and playful diversions from it. It’s still about what happens when an Empire stops expanding. Can it?
And it’s also about what happens when an Empire stops keeping slaves; with a variety of high tech slavery that’s even worse than any that has come before.
The resultant instability and uncertainty resonates. And the ancillaries do have personalities. Sort of. Breq is and is not Justice of Toren, in an exploration of identity that verges on the cyberpunk.
I agree that it’s a classic, but I didn’t like it as much as I hoped.
Review: Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
I was given copies of the reprints of books one and two of the trilogy, and this is the first one. Feminist science fiction from the eighties, and compared by the writer of the foreword, Leni Zumas, with The Handmaid’s Tale.
It’s clear that the people at Feminist Press think this book was unfairly forgotten.
I disagree. Because there is a clear difference between Native Tongue and The Handmaid’s Tale and that is this: In The Handmaid’s Tale not all men are evil. And the book contains lesbians.
Native Tongue has the Sheri Tepper problem of gender essentialism (and, of course, queerness doesn’t even exist in this world, it exists less than the concepts created by the women).
Women good, men bad…this was a staple of feminism of this era, and it does not age well. Given Elgin’s dates on the constitution being rewritten to declare women second class citizens, it is a piece that has turned into alternate history over time…and even imagining (I’m sure some pseudo-conservatives would have wet dreams) those dates into the future don’t help.
There are aliens, but there’s no advanced technology. We don’t learn anything about how people get to the alien colonies…which is fine, because it’s not relevant…but the technology we see people use on Earth, with the possible exception of the Interface, is firmly fixed in the 1980s.
Again, that’s fine. And overall, the book is well written. The characters, though, are almost archetypal. We have to have the murderous nurse. We have to have the brilliant woman forced to marry a man she can’t abide, etc.
Maybe she started some of these archetypes.
And, of course, I have to give the author some outdated ideas about linguistics, including the classic sci-fi concept that a good enough linguist can read minds and detect lies. Asimov did that one too. Allowing for the time, she knows what she’s talking about.
I just can’t get past the gender essentialism. The story is good enough that I’ll read book two, as I have it, but am probably not going to go looking for book three.
Men are no more inherently evil than women are inherently inferior, no matter how much it looks that way some days.