(no subject)

[skygiants]

A month behind everyone else: I read Ancillary Sword!

I didn't love it as much as I loved Ancillary Justice, but this is one of those situations where I loved Ancillary Justice so much that the sequel was never going to quite live up to it.

Generally I'm more interested in One Esk at the bottom of the power structure without resources than in One Esk Large And In Charge ... I mean this is mostly a personal thing to me because my favorite One Esk is super passive-aggressive One Esk, and as a Person In Charge she is required to be less passive-aggressive, which is probably good for the people around her but not as fun for me. >.> It also means ... hmm. I'm not exactly complaining about the fact that Esk is now apparently on a mission to upend unjust power structures, and I also appreciate how ... inherently unfixable some of it was? But I do feel like this time around we didn't get as many of her particular blind spots, both interpersonally and in terms of power structures and ways of setting up civilization that the Radch take for granted. She was right a little too often, by which I mean right in terms of plot decisions and understanding people's motivations, and also in terms of modern social justice concerns. Not enough pushing of One Esk herself, not enough growth. I'm more excited for the third book, when all the problems will be bigger, and push her harder, and also probably be super interesting (depressed exiled three thousand-year-old spaceship? YES PLEASE.)

Also I didn't realize how attached I was to Seivarden until she was mostly offscreen for 3/4 of the book. But the fact that I am deeply attached to Seivarden should not honestly be surprising given that she is a terrible snob, a really self-absorbed person earnestly attempting to learn unselfishness by the numbers, and A HILARIOUS INTERPERSONAL FAILBOAT WITH A HOPELESS CRUSH ON A SPACESHIP WHO'S JUST NOT THAT INTO HER.

I did find everything to do with Tisarwat really fascinating; I continue to be curious about whether One Esk is being an unreliable narrator (or, you know, having a giant blind spot) about how much the pre-ancillary personality affects the ancillary person that results. And the complex awkward interpersonal spaceship dynamics were also pretty great, and I loved every single one of the Mercy of Kalr non-ancillaries. Ann Leckie also did a fantastic job conveying a sense of One Esk's Mercy of Kalr-linked perceptions that was still visibly distinct and different from the actual multiple-bodiedness of Justice of Toren. I don't know, I would probably have been happy with a whole book that was just everyone hanging out on Mercy of Kalr, really.

I remember seeing a bunch of reaction posts last month that I could not read at the time; if you made one, link me? I'm very curious what everyone else thought!

Comments

[yhlee]

I didn't mean to shut down other people's discussion of these books! :(

I came to Sword from the point of view of almost having bounced out of Justice in the first ten pages because having Seivarden turn up on Breq's doorstep at an "inn" in the middle of nowhere hit my "oh God no it's another bad Dungeons & Dragons coincidence scenario" buttons so hard that I backpedaled and it was months before I tried again. (I acknowledge this is a highly idiosyncratic response.)

I think #2 is better-written from the standpoint of thematic unity, but #1, hmm. What people say above about #2 trying too hard to hit all the 21st-century social justice brownie points is an argument I definitely sympathize with. It does seem very weird that Breq, who comes from a completely different culture and is not our kind of human, would suddenly develop all these attitudes. In fact, one of the reasons I liked having the terrorist sibling of the kid Raughd raped call out Breq on being very selective about whose lives she chose to help out with was that it was an instance of Breq not being visibly in the right.

That being said, I hope #3 returns to the larger scale of #1. #2 was interestingly different, and I can see why it's so claustrophobic, but I like my space operas to feel less so.

[yhlee]

Agh, sorry, I messed up somehow--this was intended to reply to brownbetty's comment.

[skygiants]

No worries! And, ha, I mean, half my reasons for liking Justice better are just as idiosyncratic (JUDGY PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE SPACESHIP.)

I also liked the sibling calling out Breq, but - I don't know, I found it almost more jarring because that one paragraph of One Esk balking at being asked to do more is about the only time in the book she evinces a less than perfectly understanding attitude towards her own culpability -- and even then, the way it's phrased sounds like she already knows it's wrong while she's thinking it, 'I thought about telling her [...] that none of this had been my fault', instead of a flat 'None of this had been my fault. (And then it's over in three sentences, and she does the thing she balked at, and it's fine.)

I certainly don't mind Breq developing these attitudes, but -- well, over in kate_nepveu's review we were talking about how everything that's motivating One Esk in Justice is very directly personal -- she's angry about Awn's death, she's angry about the Mianaai split, she's angry about what she's lost -- whereas in Sword it's all sort of external to her, and a bit abstract. I mean, obviously people should care about injustice that's external to them and doesn't affect them directly, especially when they are culpable in it. But it tends to be more of a process. I think I wanted to see the process of One Esk trying to get herself to care about those things, instead of her arriving at the point of activism at the start of the book and hanging out there for three hundred pages without what felt, to me, like much internal change. There's a lot of really good thematic stuff happening around One Esk in Sword (and your review is so good at pulling it out!) but not as much of it happening to her.