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igenlode"Ancillary Justice" by Ann Leckie - a NaNoMo book that eventually made it into print and won a slew of science-fiction awards (Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, British Science Fiction Association Award). I picked up a second-hand copy, leafed through and decided it warranted a proper read: this is seriously hard SF, set in the deep future in an alien culture and narrated from the point of view of a starship's artificial intelligence in an android body, but it's also a compelling story of loyalties and revenge, as we gradually find out exactly who (or what) the narrator is, what happened to her, and what she plans to do about it.
And for those who are looking for 'diverse' fiction... the ruling culture of the galactic empire in this universe turn out to be dark-haired and brown-skinned (although this is only very incidentally mentioned, since everyone naturally takes it for granted) and speak a gender-neutral language (which again becomes apparent only through the narrator's struggles to guess the sex of the 'primitives' she meets and to use the correct pronouns for them) which is 'translated' into English by referring to everyone as 'she'. Even though one of the major characters is explicitly defined as biologically male in the first chapter, this simply isn't relevant in the vast majority of situations, so Seivarden is 'she' almost throughout. One of the side-effects of this, of course, is that since everyone has alien names you never really know what sex most of the characters are -- thus accurately representing a culture that genuinely doesn't *care* about the sex of its soldiers (or its bed-partners, apparently).
However, these 'diverse' people aren't necessarily terribly nice, and much of the book revolves around the clash between the narrator's ruling culture and the 'uncivilised' subject peoples who are incomprehensible to her, but, ironically, would probably be easier for the reader to empathise with. It's a very clever double-distancing of the viewpoint to immerse us in what really is an utterly alien universe: where it's considered indecent to go around with bare hands ungloved, but normal procedure to brain-wipe captives from a surrendered planet and reprogram them as android soldiers, for instance.
This is grand-scale space opera in an incredibly detailed setting, the full depth of which is gradually revealed throughout the book. I'm not at all surprised that it won all those awards in 2013: I'm very surprised that I had never heard of it!
Also read the sequel (a third is apparently in the works), "Ancillary Sword". I didn't think this was so outstanding; with this sort of world-building fiction, the problem is that a large portion of the original novel is taken up with detailed backstory and setting description, so there is always the problem of a second story needing to be heavier on plot.
Here the author takes the choice of sending her narrator to spend the entire book in a cut-off star system where the culture is completely different from those we have seen previously, enabling her to do further world-building on a smaller scale and examine conflicts of race/class within a conquered society and the differences between 'ordinary' soldiers and the ancillaries now being phased out. Unlike in the original novel, the underlying plot isn't really resolved, making it clear that the author is now able to count on getting a sequel published: this is very much a middle book, and feels a bit of a detour.
I think the bit I liked best was the little details about the tea sets, actually: it makes sense that this is an etiquette issue that an AI has never previously had to know much about, so it's realistic that she's learning at the same time we are. And it's one of the few elements that go to deepen our knowledge of the Raadchai culture from the original book, rather than the various rather cursory new things being thrown around. (Yes, Slavery and Exploitation is Bad; we know that. It's more interesting when regarded through the reflecting mirror of a society that *doesn't* see such things as undesirable and leaves us to draw the deductions ourselves -- and maybe question them -- rather than having the moral made heavy-handedly.)
I'm not sure this one is quite such 'hard' SF. It certainly doesn't deal with such large themes.
I'm certainly curious to see what the author will do as a finale...
And for those who are looking for 'diverse' fiction... the ruling culture of the galactic empire in this universe turn out to be dark-haired and brown-skinned (although this is only very incidentally mentioned, since everyone naturally takes it for granted) and speak a gender-neutral language (which again becomes apparent only through the narrator's struggles to guess the sex of the 'primitives' she meets and to use the correct pronouns for them) which is 'translated' into English by referring to everyone as 'she'. Even though one of the major characters is explicitly defined as biologically male in the first chapter, this simply isn't relevant in the vast majority of situations, so Seivarden is 'she' almost throughout. One of the side-effects of this, of course, is that since everyone has alien names you never really know what sex most of the characters are -- thus accurately representing a culture that genuinely doesn't *care* about the sex of its soldiers (or its bed-partners, apparently).
However, these 'diverse' people aren't necessarily terribly nice, and much of the book revolves around the clash between the narrator's ruling culture and the 'uncivilised' subject peoples who are incomprehensible to her, but, ironically, would probably be easier for the reader to empathise with. It's a very clever double-distancing of the viewpoint to immerse us in what really is an utterly alien universe: where it's considered indecent to go around with bare hands ungloved, but normal procedure to brain-wipe captives from a surrendered planet and reprogram them as android soldiers, for instance.
This is grand-scale space opera in an incredibly detailed setting, the full depth of which is gradually revealed throughout the book. I'm not at all surprised that it won all those awards in 2013: I'm very surprised that I had never heard of it!
Also read the sequel (a third is apparently in the works), "Ancillary Sword". I didn't think this was so outstanding; with this sort of world-building fiction, the problem is that a large portion of the original novel is taken up with detailed backstory and setting description, so there is always the problem of a second story needing to be heavier on plot.
Here the author takes the choice of sending her narrator to spend the entire book in a cut-off star system where the culture is completely different from those we have seen previously, enabling her to do further world-building on a smaller scale and examine conflicts of race/class within a conquered society and the differences between 'ordinary' soldiers and the ancillaries now being phased out. Unlike in the original novel, the underlying plot isn't really resolved, making it clear that the author is now able to count on getting a sequel published: this is very much a middle book, and feels a bit of a detour.
I think the bit I liked best was the little details about the tea sets, actually: it makes sense that this is an etiquette issue that an AI has never previously had to know much about, so it's realistic that she's learning at the same time we are. And it's one of the few elements that go to deepen our knowledge of the Raadchai culture from the original book, rather than the various rather cursory new things being thrown around. (Yes, Slavery and Exploitation is Bad; we know that. It's more interesting when regarded through the reflecting mirror of a society that *doesn't* see such things as undesirable and leaves us to draw the deductions ourselves -- and maybe question them -- rather than having the moral made heavy-handedly.)
I'm not sure this one is quite such 'hard' SF. It certainly doesn't deal with such large themes.
I'm certainly curious to see what the author will do as a finale...
