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Sep. 20th, 2023 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI have just finished today Ann Leckie's Translation State, which I found a quick and easy read with quite a lot to like and also quite a lot that -- for me at least -- a bit dissatisfying.
There are three main plot threads in this one. The first focuses on a meek middle-aged caretaker whose rich and unpleasant relative has just died, sending hir out for the first time into the universe with independent means; the second involves a young man of unknown parentage who has just been claimed by a diasporic minority as a long-lost descendant of their long-lost ruling family; and the third is about a young Presger Translator who does not wish to comply with familial plans involving a pre-arranged merging of identity into another Presger Translator.
It's fun to see more expansions of this universe; it's fun to see Leckie play around with various complexities of cultural identity and interstellar politics, and it's also quite fun to see Leckie have a good time taking a lot of classic Victorian Novel of Manners tropes (the unpleasant and rich relative! the long-lost heir! the arranged marriage problem!) and reframing them through her own science-fictional setting.
I was enjoying all these plots until they started coming together, in ways that should, naturally, have involved interesting friction between characters and never quite seemed to do so. Everyone that we're expected to like in this book likes each other so immediately -- they meet for a chapter in which they regard each other with suspicion, and by the next chapter they've decided this person is lovely and they really like them very much so that the plot can move onto its next beat. We're told by the text that some of these characters are genuinely odd and uncomfortable be around and have always had trouble forming connections with others, but you'd never know it! I think that Leckie wants the Presger Translators to be unnerving and unsettling, but I never for a moment thought that our Nice Young Presger Couple were ever going to do anything to harm anybody we or they liked that would get in the way of their marriage-plot ending, which sort of took the teeth out of it a little bit.
'Let people dislike people' is not something I usually think of Leckie having problems with, but there is quite a lot of plot in this book, and several different places and factions to worldbuild, and it does feel like the character dynamics took the backseat here.
Or, entirely possibly, it's a me problem, and I just don't fully click with a Leckie book unless one of the protagonists is dedicated to being really passive aggressive.
There are three main plot threads in this one. The first focuses on a meek middle-aged caretaker whose rich and unpleasant relative has just died, sending hir out for the first time into the universe with independent means; the second involves a young man of unknown parentage who has just been claimed by a diasporic minority as a long-lost descendant of their long-lost ruling family; and the third is about a young Presger Translator who does not wish to comply with familial plans involving a pre-arranged merging of identity into another Presger Translator.
It's fun to see more expansions of this universe; it's fun to see Leckie play around with various complexities of cultural identity and interstellar politics, and it's also quite fun to see Leckie have a good time taking a lot of classic Victorian Novel of Manners tropes (the unpleasant and rich relative! the long-lost heir! the arranged marriage problem!) and reframing them through her own science-fictional setting.
I was enjoying all these plots until they started coming together, in ways that should, naturally, have involved interesting friction between characters and never quite seemed to do so. Everyone that we're expected to like in this book likes each other so immediately -- they meet for a chapter in which they regard each other with suspicion, and by the next chapter they've decided this person is lovely and they really like them very much so that the plot can move onto its next beat. We're told by the text that some of these characters are genuinely odd and uncomfortable be around and have always had trouble forming connections with others, but you'd never know it! I think that Leckie wants the Presger Translators to be unnerving and unsettling, but I never for a moment thought that our Nice Young Presger Couple were ever going to do anything to harm anybody we or they liked that would get in the way of their marriage-plot ending, which sort of took the teeth out of it a little bit.
'Let people dislike people' is not something I usually think of Leckie having problems with, but there is quite a lot of plot in this book, and several different places and factions to worldbuild, and it does feel like the character dynamics took the backseat here.
Or, entirely possibly, it's a me problem, and I just don't fully click with a Leckie book unless one of the protagonists is dedicated to being really passive aggressive.
