Ann Leckie immediately won me over with the masterful Ancillary Justice, which kicked off a movement in sf that continues to this day, as evidenced by the 2024 Hugo Award finalist Some Desperate Glory: action-focused space opera that critiques empire and colonialism with careful attention to cultural difference but also explores its allure.
 |
|
Originally published: 2023 Acquired: May 2024 Read: July 2024 |
After the conclusion of her original trilogy, Leckie's returns to the world of the Imperial Radch have been in a slightly different mode. Like Provenance (2017), this takes place in that realm but while it has intrigue, it doesn't have space opera–style action. Translation State has three protagonists that it rotates between: Enae, the scion of a powerful family whose grandmother dies, leaving eir on their own but with nothing to call eir own; Reet, a maintenance worker on a space station who finds out he might be the heir to a ruling family thought extinct; and Qven, one of the mysterious, strange Presger Translators, humans put into the service of the most dangerous of the alien species. Over time, their three stories intersect.
All three storylines are about belonging; the characters are all ones who have not had it for various reasons, but are in search of it. Enae was hated by all members of eir family, including the only one sie was close to; Reet was an orphan raised in foster care and thus has always felt a bit estranged, even from his loving foster parents; and Qven has always felt a bit strange even among the Presger Translators. Leckie does a great job bringing us into the minds of all three characters, and the opening chapters for Enae are particularly strong, as we see eir struggle when sie is cast adrift. The Presger chapters are also strong, Leckie displaying (as in her novels Ancillary Justice and Raven Tower, in particular) for off-kilter, thoughtful worldbuilding.
In the end, though, the whole thing ends up feeling a bit sedate. In Ancillary Justice, Leckie starts with a moment of high drama (the flashback to the Justice of Toren's last mission), continues though some desperate actions in the present day (Breq and Seivarden's ice trip), and ends with an explosive but character-driven action sequence. For most of its run, though, there's little like any of that in Translation State. I feel like all the ingredients are all there, but the characters are very rarely making interesting, dramatic choices; in the end, it feels like they kind of all did exactly what you might have expected them to do. There are a few too many sequences where it seems like the characters are waiting around for other characters to decide important things. The climax is pretty creepy, but it doesn't have the tension of any of those sequences from Ancillary Justice.
Enae, in particular, ends up feeling a bit superfluous to requirements, even though sie was the character I was most interested in at the beginning. (The end hints at future adventures for eir, so I hope those come to pass in future novels because I would be on board with seeing Enae do something more.) I think the thing that worked against the novel's success the most is that the three protagonists are all näive people who feel very young even though they are all actually middle-aged. It's a type I wouldn't mind seeing once but three times—why? As a middle-aged reader myself, I think you can depict someone uncertain of their own position in the world but not make them come across as a twenty-something YA protagonist. Obviously Breq in the Ancillary books is näive in some ways, too, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that they are very powerful and knowledgeable in others. That's true of Qven here, and I ended up liking the end of their storyline a lot, but less true of Enae and Reet, who both kind of grated in the end.
All this makes it seem like I really didn't like it. I don't think that's true; I always enjoyed reading it. Leckie writes compelling characters and neat worlds. Unlike Provenance, this one feels like its asks for more, too; in addition to the bit about Enae I mentioned earlier, both Qven and Reet are left in places that seem to imply interesting complications to come, and the political situation left in place at the end of Ancillary Mercy continues to develop. This is solid work, but it's solid work from a writer I know is capable of great work.
No comments:
Post a Comment