L (Nineteen Adze)'s Reviews > Translation State

On reflection, I think this is somewhere in the 3.75-star ballpark for me. Leckie is a talented writer-- I just admire elements of this one more than I enjoyed the whole result.

First, the good: I think that Leckie has a real eye for alien perspectives that feel alien. Qven's perspective never feels like just a weird human, and (view spoiler)[Reet's experience of feeling different from those around him reads first as an analog for intrusive thoughts or autism and later fits with his alien background (hide spoiler)]. The human cultures also have great variety, and I think that the interplay of human and alien ways of thinking about things like gender and personhood is richly articulated. Thematically, there's some great work here about societal categories and people's freedom to choose their own identities.

The downside for me is that I admired and often liked this book, but I rarely loved it. There are some great elements, particularly in the early chapters about Enae finding new purpose after years of emotional mistreatment and Qven's morbidly fascinating childhood, with all its non-human moments about casual vivisection and cannibalism, but the story slowed down a bit for me after that. It often felt like I was waiting for the next thing to happen rather than anticipating it or feeling any real tension, especially in the second half where (view spoiler)[the characters are just wandering through a pocket dimension and worrying about things (hide spoiler)].

The characters mostly tend to read as younger than their years, which didn't quite land for me. Reet is a convincing adult, just something of a longr, but he's the outlier. Enae's sheltered and belittled background makes sense, but it was hard to believe that this character was so far into middle age. Qven is in an interesting spot-- e (gender-neutral pronoun in this setting) is reaching adulthood by local standards, but the emotional processing just reads very young (with moments like relating to "a princex in disguise" from an adventure show and bringing that up in a court setting). It's an intriguing situation, but (view spoiler)[one that fits oddly with the way e was attacked in an attempt to force premature matching-- that whole scene is strongly sexual-assault coded.

Later on, Qven grows to trust Reet and think about matching (which is clearly an on-the-clock moment for both of them) in a way that reminds me more than anything else of lifetime sexual bonding between werewolves in paranormal romance. The whole dynamic straddles an odd line between sexual parallels and non-sexual moments. I like a lot of those elements separately, but taken together, they just didn't quite click for me. Leckie strikes me as a careful writer, so that low-level discomfort is probably deliberate, but I kept rooting for Qven to get the initial dream of bonding to a robot and maintaining a singular identity instead of waiting for the obvious bonding shoe to drop between a character who feels like an adult and one who feels like a child. To be clear, I don't think that the book is inappropriate or that Reet is subliminally a pedophile-- this is a personal disconnect where I wanted something different for the characters than what they wanted for themselves, and having so many rounds of "I want to be with this person, but I don't want to force anything on them, they don't want me" from both sides in the spotlight tanked my enjoyment of the back half of the book. Have a conversation and kiss already. (hide spoiler)]

In the end, I'm left wanting to try more Leckie (and wishing there had been a bit more actual translation in this book to give us a break from the endless rounds of tea and discussions starting around the midway point). I suspect that this is a richer story if you've been following all the related works in this universe, and I've been meaning to go back and try the Imperial Radch books for years-- this one was just not a perfect entry point for me.

//First impressions: I'm done with my last read for the Hugo season, and I have mixed feelings on this one. There's a lot to enjoy, particularly in the first third, but for me, the tension was draining even during exciting scenes in the back half. (And with the caveat that I am a *huge* tea fan with an overflowing cupboard, the constant tea mentions became too much even for me.) I think this is a story I admired more than I enjoyed.
Overall, this has left me most interested in exploring the original Imperial Radch books, since the Radch and ship-human ancillary were the most compelling bits. RTC.

Other recommendations:
- If you're most interested in the human/alien gender discussion, try A Half-Built Garden, a first-contact novel that deals with aliens drawing human differences of opinion to the surface.