The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

For some reason, reviewing this book escaped me at the time I read it, so I am belatedly writing it up in March 2022, a full year after I read it. Oops! My memories are thus a little vague, but I remember thinking that:

1. 

   Published: 2019
   Acquired: December 2020
   Read: March 2021
   

   no one in contemporary sf&f quite does worldbuilding to my taste like Ann Leckie. She's very good at unspooling the information in a way that keeps you intrigued—she gets that speculative fiction is a form of mystery fiction, in that the way the world works is a mystery that the reader wants to solve. Like in a mystery novel, you don't want the book to give you too much information (too easy) or not enough (too difficult).
   
2. she's also very good at the sf thing of taking a what if? and thinking through its implications. Here, the conceit is that praying to or making offering to gods gives them powers, and that anything a god says is true becomes true: if so, how would this work? We get a lot of different permutations of this, many of them quite clever. Yes, technically it's fantasy, but like (say) Jemisin in The Fifth Season, it's approached with an sf worldbuilder's mindset, which is how I like my fantasy.
3. the book is interestingly and intriguingly told; like in Ancillary Justice, there's a strong sense of narrative voice.
4. the ending was abrupt and made me feel like I was missing something. The plot is tied up, but I felt like the character threads hadn't paid off in the way I'd expected.
5. I had some kind of complicated theory about the narrator that I don't remember anymore, but I was wrong.

I would say it's not as good as Ancillary Justice, but it is still a masterclass in how to build a world, and shows why I will pick up any novel Leckie writes.