skygiants | (no subject)

And this is not a meme post, and it is still 1 AM and I should be in bed, but I have to write this anyway because I just finished Ancillary Justice today and if I do not publicly recommend it RIGHT AWAY then I am going to spend all my time for the next week buttonholing people and recommending it to them individually. To be fair I will probably do that anyway, but at least this way I can pretend that I'm lessening the impulse by getting it out here first.

So the narrator and protagonist of Ancillary Justice is Justice of Toren, a warship of the Radchaai empire. Justice of Toren consists of a vast artifical intelligence deployed across hundreds of ancillary units. She's stationed at Ors, officially the last planet that will ever be annexed by the empire, which is changing A LOT of its policies lately - and Justice of Toren and Lieutenant Awn, one of her favorite officers, are about to get caught in the crossfire of that.

Twenty years later, all that's left of Justice of Toren is the unit One Esk Nineteen. Instead of a vast linked consciousness, she has a single human body. Instead of her favorite lieutenant, she has a confused and unpleasant time-displaced drug addict she found dying in the snow, who coincidentally used to be one of her least favorite lieutenants before a wacky twist of fate sent said unpleasant lieutenant into a suspended animation pod for a thousand years. And instead of a calm sureness of purpose and commands to follow, she has a seething anger the size of -- well, a spaceship -- and a very strong need to make a choice, the kind of choice that will matter.

If you've seen this book recced before, you have probably seen people talk about how it does things with gender and language and class and colonialism thoughtfully and well, and all of this is one hundred percent true. PLEASE READ IT FOR ALL THOSE THINGS.

You may also have seen

qian's post about the amazing id factor of SPACESHIP WITH FEELINGS. I agree, but I would like to add what is to me a really important extra id factor, which is that she is a REALLY JUDGY spaceship with JUDGY feelings. This delights my heart and soul! I love every single conversation along these lines:

ONE ESK: *makes mild comment*
OTHER PERSON: oh no u mad
ONE ESK: ...I am very sure my face did not make an expression of any kind
OTHER PERSON: no, but still, you're JUDGING ME! I can tell!

Actually, this may seem like a strange comparison, but there are ways in which One Esk reminds me of Anthy Himemiya. Partly this is because of the way people treat her when she's a ship. Partly it is the passive aggression and the divided loyalties and the calm, simmering resentment. OF COURSE I LOVE HER.

And I love, too, that is not striving for humanity, this is not that kind of story; there are many things she's striving for, but humanity is not one of them. Late in the book, various people try to convince her that she is human, and she's like "...no...you have a fundamental misunderstanding of me..." WHICH IS ALSO GREAT. It is not necessary to be human to have feelings or agency!

Guys! Talk to me! This is going to be part of a trilogy? I did not know that until I hit the last page, and I'm super excited! What do you think will happen? Things from this book that I think will likely be relevant:

- the hints about the personalities of corpse soldiers maybe not being so completely erased/irrelevant as the Radchaai would like to think
- the well-meaning hypocrisy of the Awer
- One Esk's weird random background as some kind of religious figure...???
- Seivarden's crush on 'Breq'...?!?!?

Okay, I'm not gonna lie, I don't want romance in the books at all, but for whatever reason I think Seivarden's crush is HILARIOUS. I think Seivarden has had secret rescue romance dreams all her life, and now someone has come along who fits all her secret dream patterns. Unfortunately, that someone is a spaceship. Who doesn't particularly like her. SORRY, SEIVARDEN.

I really love Seivarden too, and her awful prejudice and snobbery, and how once she gets some basic social justice 101 she immediately becomes incredibly and hilariously indignant about social injustice, all "OMG those SNOBS what ASSHOLES" and One Esk is just like "um, you were saying literally the exact words they were all of two months ago. Literally those words." IT RINGS SO TRUE.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/357174.html

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ashen_key

Ah, ah, ah, I can't read the rest of your post because I've actually ordered this book for Christmas, and I refuse to spoil myself.

SO, I WILL BE BACK TO READ THIS ONCE I'VE DEVOURED BOOK :D

From:

skygiants

YESSSSS READ IT and then come back and talk to me!

From:

dorothean

Arrrrghhh I gave this book to my boyfriend for his birthday and he is reading it SO SLOWLY (for good reasons, though) and I said I wouldn't reclaim it until he finished and every time I go in his room I see it sitting in a different place with the bookmark advanced by like FIVE PAGES

AAAUUGH

From:

ashen_key

POST-CHRISTMAS, WATCH THIS SPACE.

(Ahhhhhh, omg, this book sounds so incredibly fantastic)

From:

jinian

I love this book! Definitely need to know more about Breq as religious figure who appears on icons with severed heads -- it's mentioned multiple times and goes nowhere, so I'm sure it'll show up again -- and the original personalities of the ancillaries. I loved the "you want to destroy my current, living identity to make yourself more comfortable" exchange: nope, that is not an act of virtue or humanitarian aid based on what we know so far, and I really want more discussion in that vein.

I love the narrative of being fundamentally different from people and learning to relate to them in your own different-but-valid way, so I expect to be very happy with anything more about Breq. Who else does this? Parker from Leverage started out similarly, but got too close to normal-person in the last season. Abed from Community is good, though the writers sometimes go too far in the other direction.

Although I sympathize with Seivarden's massive crush and look forward to laughing cruelly while being charmed by the actual devotion, I do not know what readers are doing shipping Breq/Seivarden. The great thing about Breq is that she does not wish to be shipped with anyone due to BEING A SHIP ALREADY.

From:

elsane

*carefully does not read spoilers*

this sounds amazing and wonderful and I think you're the second person in my Internet circuit who has recently mentioned this as an overlooked thing and my gosh now I really want to read it and

how can you do this to me when I am busy packing, and it is borne in upon me exactly how many books I actually own, not to mention what is likely to be a whole box full of books I bought in a fit of optimism about my free time and have yet to read :(

From:

skygiants

OH NO THE MOST FRUSTRATING THING OF ALL. I am sure it is frustrating for him too; I had a really busy week this week and I spent a lot of time doing other stuff and feeling resentful that it was not time I could be spending reading this book instead.

From:

skygiants

I feel like the reason One Esk loves singing must be something to do with ancillaries, but maybe I'm overthinking it? BUT YES I LOVED THAT TOO. "Ah yes, so I should seek a future that meets with your approval." Every interaction between Breq/One Esk and the doctor was pure gold.

I can't think of anything else that does this quite as well (and with as little angst about it) as One Esk. And, I mean, One Esk is also a different thing now than she was when she was an AI, as is made pretty clear by the interactions with Mercy of Saarse ("you can be your own pilot!" "no, no I can't") but she is not human either, she is a different and new kind of identity and it's AWESOME.

The other thing that One Esk reminds me of actually is Clare from Claymore, with the fundamental inhumanity and struggle for agency asexual but completely devoted loyalty. Not to mention the habit of picking up devoted followers and being utterly bemused by it. But oh, man, I know, I can't even try to wrap my head around the idea of the sexy kind of shipping with Breq/One Esk! AND I DON'T WANT TO EITHER. Like, okay, if Seivarden is very lucky she MAY achieve some degree of shiply affection from One Esk, but but by this I mean the kind of affection that comes . . . from a spaceship . . . AND NOT THE ANNE MCCAFFREY KIND OF SPACESHIP EITHER.

From:

skygiants

I WOULD SAY I'M SORRY but um you should totally read this book ASAP so I am not all that sorry actually >.> I am about to go buy my own physical copy so I can begin lending it out to people!

From:

jinian

There's got to be a story in the singing thing, yes. Two-way flow of some kind between ancillaries' original minds (because the singing didn't come from Justice of Toren) and the ancillary-unit (because it's all of One Esk that does it). Probably the easiest explanation is that the first ancillary added has a stronger input, and that was the one who was a singer/ethnologist originally. There must be some kind of sandbox created in the ship's mind for each unit, or Justice of Toren would've been singing too. And we're back at McCaffrey again!

I should read Claymore; I kinda bounced off it due to unreliable availability when I tried a few years ago.

From:

jinian

Thinking as I walked in to the lab: So is it then not a coincidence that all the (few) ancillaries we see doing rebellious or interesting things are Ones? (One Amaat One of wherever was the cause of serious trouble, while One Esk is a weirdo -- are there more?)

- Ancillary unit creation: a subdivision of the ship's mind.
- First ancillary is added: shipmind mingles unequally with person's original mind, but passions can come through.
- Subsequent ancillaries: accreted mass of the unit's mind tends to be more overwhelming with each addition, so original minds are more completely suppressed.
- But still in communication/selfhood with the overall ship throughout? Somehow?
- And, possibly, secondary ancillary unit creation (e.g., Two Esk) partakes of primary's mishmash mind rather than starting fresh, so still subsumes added ancillaries pretty completely.

I wonder if we'll ever see identities bleeding into each other, though. Did One Esk Nineteen get to be able to imitate humans so well solely through practice, or is she accessing buried memories? It'd be kinda cheesy if she ran into someone who knew her before she was an ancillary; Seivarden showing up from a thousand years away is unbelievable enough. (Though I was fine with Skaiaat and Ceit.)

From:

skygiants

Wasn't One Amaat One a human crew, though? I don't think we know yet to what extent the ships have ties to their human crews -- I assume it's similar to the relationships they have to their officers, but maybe that's not the case.

I think there's another possibility besides the first ancillary having personality bleed -- what if accreted ancillary passions/feelings influence the personality of the unit? So, like, one ancillary soldier who liked singing wouldn't necessarily affect One Esk, but if you happened coincidentally to have ten soldiers in a unit who all were interested in music, enough of that might bleed through into the greater link that you'd get a subdivision of the ship's mind that liked to sing. And other subdivisions with other coincidental commonalities might have different personality influences. But ships without ancillaries do have unique personalities too, like Mercy of Saarse, so the personality distinctions can't all be ancillary-bleed. Come to think of it, I'm excited to see what Mercy of Saarse' units will be like, since presumably One Esk Nineteen will be interacting with them a lot!

I'm curious about that too! I was okay with the coincidences in the book because of the general sense of fate/coincidence being a part of Radchaai religion and culture, so I could probably suspend my disbelief there. But I think I'm more interested in the idea that One Esk Nineteen's shifts further away from AI behavior are due to being trapped in a human brain -- that being stuck in a single consciousness is affecting the way she sees the world. I loved the hints of that when she's sort of surprised to find herself contemplating her own mortality.