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Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear
May. 19th, 2019 02:11 pmAncestral Night
3/5. Space salvage tug operator stumbles across a derelict that was part of a terrible crime, and gets entangled in complicated ancient alien politics.
I wanted some crunchy scifi with actual people in it, and this did well enough. This book is doing interesting stuff with cognition and memory: our narrator has had herself "right-minded" by her peacefully authoritarian government to edit out unpleasant memories and dangerous impulses, and the heart of this book is her conflict with a pirate who doesn't believe in neural tampering. It would be boring, but it's not a black-and-white question, even as our narrator cycles through different states of being altered and not. It's complicated and compromised, and the only truth anyone can come to is that there is still a self, still a you, no matter what.
So, nice enough scifi, and dealing with brain stuff I generally care about. But this didn't set me on fire or anything.
…Now let's see if the author inappropriately inserts herself into the comments of this review, as she has done to me before. Why why why do authors think that is ever a good idea? Aside from all the other issues, it sure was a great way to make me not want to come within spitting distance of one of her books for years on end.
3/5. Space salvage tug operator stumbles across a derelict that was part of a terrible crime, and gets entangled in complicated ancient alien politics.
I wanted some crunchy scifi with actual people in it, and this did well enough. This book is doing interesting stuff with cognition and memory: our narrator has had herself "right-minded" by her peacefully authoritarian government to edit out unpleasant memories and dangerous impulses, and the heart of this book is her conflict with a pirate who doesn't believe in neural tampering. It would be boring, but it's not a black-and-white question, even as our narrator cycles through different states of being altered and not. It's complicated and compromised, and the only truth anyone can come to is that there is still a self, still a you, no matter what.
So, nice enough scifi, and dealing with brain stuff I generally care about. But this didn't set me on fire or anything.
…Now let's see if the author inappropriately inserts herself into the comments of this review, as she has done to me before. Why why why do authors think that is ever a good idea? Aside from all the other issues, it sure was a great way to make me not want to come within spitting distance of one of her books for years on end.
