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Some thoughts on Ancillary Justice

<2022-08-22>

So, I finally got around to reading Ann Leckie's novel "Ancillary Justice," eight years or so after it won all those awards. In my defense, when it was first published in 2013, I had only recently started reading contemporary sf again, after more or less abandoning the genre in 1980 or thereabouts. So I had a lot of catching up to do, and was still working my way through the back catalogues of folks like Alastair Reynolds and Iain M. Banks. Why take a chance on a new author when I could be reading novels that were pretty much guaranteed to be entertaining? Banks and Reynolds have never let me down, although I will say I don't think Reynolds' post-2010 work lives up to the best of his pre-2010 work. But I digress.

I don't propose to write a review of Leckie's debut novel here. Lots of those scattered about the Net. However I will say that I quite enjoyed it and will definitely be picking up the sequels one of these days. I don't think it's a masterpiece, but it has a lot of what I look for in sf, namely a compelling and reasonably sensible plot, interesting ideas about technology and society, decent world-building, and relate-able characters.

Given the rather extensive press coverage back in 2014, what is left to say about it? Well, one thing is that although one of the major themes of the novel is often said to be "revenge," I don't think that's quite right. One of the sticking points for some folks is that the revenge the protagonist Breq is plotting (and is her primary motivation) doesn't make any sense. It would at best be a minor inconvenience for the antagonist and not effect any lasting social change. While reading the novel I kept expecting some revelation would make it make sense (like, maybe Breq, who is an AI in human form, is actually executing a program that's part of a larger plan she's not aware of). But that didn't happen.

So instead I choose to view Breq's motivation as a desire for atonement, not revenge. If you see her motivation as a desire to atone for a past crime by going out in one glorious, futile act of defiance, the book reads a lot better.

Another aspect of the book that got a lot of coverage was the author's unconventional use of pronouns, using "she/her" for all of the characters in the novel, no matter what their actual gender. The conceit here is that Breq, the first-person narrator, hails from a culture - the Radch - whose "language does not mark gender in any way." So Breq has trouble identifying gender in cultures where gender is still a thing, and has basically given up trying.

There are a number of nits one could pick with this. The only one I'll mention here is that it makes no sense to use a gendered pronoun to represent a pronoun from a language that has no concept of gender, when non-gendered alternatives (eg, they/them, or even just a made-up word) are available. However, I've suspended my disbelief for worse lapses of logic during my long association with sf.

Going in, I was concerned it would be gimmicky and annoying. Turns out I was half-right. It /was/ gimmicky, in the sense that the novel isn't much about gender and Breq's pronoun usage has no significant impact on the story. However, after some initial friction it was not annoying, and in the end it made for an interesting reading experience.

The initial friction primarily manifested itself when I attempted to visualize the characters. When I'm really into a novel, I tend not to see the words on the page so much as a movie I'm creating in my head. (This is probably fairly common, but I know not everyone does it.) Early on, uncertainty about gender caused my mental images of the characters to be somewhat vague and out of focus, and would occasionally interrupt the movie, making the reading experience less immersive than it would have been otherwise.

However, by the time the novel really picked up steam (the last third or so) I realized that I had completely adjusted to the exclusive use of the "she/her" pronoun and was no longer even conscious of it. The mental movie rolled along unimpeded, and the characters were by then clearly in focus (though perhaps incorrectly gendered). I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but it's definitely given me something to think about, in terms of how language works, and the brain's ability to adapt to a fairly fundamental linguistic change.

So I'm quite looking forward to reading the sequels, and curious to see how permanent my new-found ability to read "she/her" as a genderless pronoun turns out to be.

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Some thoughts on Ancillary Justice was published on 2022-08-22