lightreads

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

4/5. Leckie does fantasy. You should know up front that half of this book is in second person, and all of it is narrated by a rock, and it is great. I fuckin' love that rock.

Seriously, this book is wonderful and unusual. It has this poised, restrained quality, right up to the point where it really doesn't anymore. I mentally shrieked at the last line. And Leckie is in such exquisite control of the stuntwriting here, it's just, I finished this and wandered around saying "Damn. Just damn," for a while. This is my favorite of her books so far, hands down.

I'm not really saying what this is about, am I? Um. It's about a very clever trans man accompanying his superior to the city to undertake a complicated magical inheritance, and plots, and international relations, and oh yeah the wars of gods who make things true by speaking them, so they'd better be damned sure they have the power to back up their words. Also a rock. I fuckin' love that rock.

Ancillary Mercy (Imperial Radch)

4/5. Last book in the trilogy. My enduring image from this book, and the series, will I think always be, three formerly-enslaved artificial intelligences sitting around a table genteelly sipping tea and discussing what they're going to do with their self-determination. I mean, there this series is.

I finally really like this series, with this book. I enjoyed the first but didn't go into raptures, and thought the second was oversimplified and disappointing. But this one is truly wonderful. It is deeply concerned with personhood and the functioning of complex power structures, but also flavored with Leckie's unique brand of light absurdist comedy. I mean, this is a book that manages to say things about alienation and outsiderness through an extremely weird running joke regarding fish, fish cakes, and fish sauce. I think I finally tuned my brain to the correct wavelength, or Leckie finally really hit her stride, or both, because this all finally clicked together into the weird, tipsy, anti-imperialist, seethingly furious mechanism that it is.

I still think the linguistic gender work is a bit of a misfire, magnified by the way recording audiobooks of this series requires an implicit commitment to gendering Breq, which is pretty terrible no matter how good the narrator is. But the effect of using the universal 'she' pronoun is lovely, even if it works less on a meta level the more I think about it. It obviously has a useful function in that it prevents the reader from automatically positioning people in relation to each other based on their gender. And I'm not even talking about heterocentrism here – you can't queer this narrative either, because there's no queerness. That's helpful in that it gets a lot of shit out of the way so that this power structure can exist on its own terms. But it could have done a heck of a lot more (why doesn't anti-imperial sentiment manifest in rebelling against the Radch concept of gender? Wouldn't there be radicalism in having binary and trinary and etc. gender paradigms? Just for a random thought).