Review of Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

Ancillary Mercy is the third and final novel in Ann Leckie’s award-winning Imperial Radch series. The books are about the adventures of Breq an Ancillary who was connected to a ship that was destroyed. An Ancillary is a human who has been turned into an AI and has their consciousness connected to a ship. They can access its data and see and hear what all other ancillaries are experiencing. They will do whatever the ship’s captain commands them to do.

 The third novel starts where the second novel finished. Breq is still the nominated fleet commander of the Athoek system and is located on its space station. She is trying to fix the station’s under-garden area, which was damaged in the previous novel, as well as fix the station’s complex politics. She has to deal with the agendas of an uncooperative system governor and power-hungry religious leader.

 Her attempts at fixing the station are interrupted when an envoy from the all-conquering Presger arrives to survey humans and to see whether they have broken the “treaty” between the two races. The envoy’s arrival is then complicated by unknown warships appearing in the system.

 This novel is about Breq’s attempt to create a more merciful local system where even AIs, like the Ancillaries that run the ships and the station, get to decide their own fates. She wants them to have the choices that she now has as an ancillary severed from her destroyed ship. She also wants the indigenous population of Athoek to control their future.

 One of the most intriguing features of the novels is that Breq cannot differentiate between female and male, so she refers to every character as “she”, which creates a viewpoint character who does not bring gender into the power dynamics between the characters she deals with. Leckie leaves it to the reader to add genders to characters if they want to.

 I very much enjoyed this novel as it attempted to bring the series to a conclusion, but there were still plenty of loose ends for a fourth novel to explore. It’s probably not as good as the first two novels, as the first was huge on world-building, and the second was more about Breq attempting to redefine herself, but still it is an excellent read.

 

 

Review of Us and Them by Anthony J Langford.

Us and Them is a collection of short stories and poems that will open up your heart to the lives of others and especially the mind of its author Anthony J Langford. The collection will have you thinking about how you interact with others, and had this reader vowing to be more open to what might be going on in other people’s lives.

About half of the stories are autobiographical scenes from the author’s life, giving an insight into events that have influenced the person he has become. They illustrate his quest for adventure and his genuine desire to understand other people.

But among that desire to open up, it is a book of regrets, of things not said and done. In one story he is haunted by a girl crying on the streets of New York and his failure to ask her what is wrong, like all the other people who walked past her. As he says in one of his poems: It is always worth it, To reach out, Even if it doesn’t go well. The collection also ponders aging and its effect on us.  

It is a book about someone looking back at their life and contemplating what he could have done better.   

Collectively, the poems and stories had me contemplating how well I have lived my own life.  

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. Tommy, a failed artist who is Francie’s carer, acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings. 

 The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct. We say we care but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia. 

 Anna is the main protagonist, a successful architect, who, rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. She frequently forwards articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taking responsibility for what is happening around her, and in the world, generally by staying uninformed and deferring action to others. 

The novel has magic realism elements that work. Other reviewers have likened it to The Corrections by Jonathon Franzen, a book I enjoyed. It was full of characters deceiving others and themselves.

Much is going on in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. I was particularly interested in it as I have an elderly mother the same age as Francie, whose mental capacity and stamina have been declining in the past few months after a fall, and I wonder how I would respond if she, like Francie, lying in a hospital bed in pain, requested the last rites. Would I have the courage of my convictions to let her pass? It's a bit like how the father with dementia drew me into The Corrections, as my father was battling dementia when I read that novel. But then climate change, the destruction of the planet, and my feeble attempts to do something about it come to the fore. I hope this novel will get me to do more. 

 The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a novel that will get people and possibly bring to the surface their guilt and fears.

 It is an utterly compelling read.

 

Back with more posts soon

I haven't posted for a while due to work and before that study and I now have long covid, but I hope to reverse that trend and start posting book reviews once more and information about writing. 

Quick review of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Occurs in a universe where there are six mounds of rock that when hit in the right combination allow time-travel througout earth's history. They are well known and time geologists use them all the time to not only view history but edit it. This is different from most time-travel stories where the characters are usually worried about changing history and causing unexpected results. They can't make massive instantenous changes (like killing Hitler) to history, the changes have to be slow, like planting a seed of a thought in a person's mind. In this version of the timeline the supression of women is slowly being increased, but a group of women are fighting back by editing the timeline. Learnt a bit about a few historical figures like Anthony Comstock, a special agent in the 1890's who was allowed to read every suspected liberated women's mail and arrest them for anything he deemed obsecene. The book has a parallel story going of the teenage life (in the 90's) of one of the main characters. The novel did peter out a bit at the end, but overall a good read.

Novels I read last year.

It has been a while since I posted anything. I was way too busy last year to regularly post (I started up a web design business on March 19 -Wangaratta Website Design Services - and before that I did a six week intensive NEIS course on how to start and run a business). I had many long weeks of work, working late into the night some nights and on the weekends. But I still managed to read 17 novels by setting aside a couple of hours on three nights a week to read. Here's what I read: 

1. Purity, Jonathan Frazen 

2. Testaments, Margaret Atwood

3. The Drowned World, JG Ballard

4. The Wall, John Lanchester

5. The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu

6. The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Richard Flanagan

7. The Old Lie, Claire G Coleman

8. Engine Summer, John Crowley

9. Wake, Elizabeth Knox

10. Clade, James Bradley

11. Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson

12. The Affirmation, Christopher Priest

13. The Swan Book, Alexis Wright

14. Pattern Recognition, William Gibson

15. Lone Wolf World, Anthony J Langford

16. Embassytown, China Meiville

17. All Clear, Connie Willis.

While many of the books were science fiction written by white guys, there is some diversity in the list. Two of the novels were written by Indigenous Australians about Indigenous Australians - The Swan Book and The Old Lie. The Swan book is a very challenging read as it has a narrator whose life is nearly totally detached from reality. The authors came from: 

• Australia (5)
• Canada (1)
• China (1)
• New Zealand (1)
• US (6)
• UK (3)

The best of the novels were The Three-Body Problem - with its unique take on first contact with aliens, A Narrow Road To The Deep North - a harrowing prisoner of war story that reeked of authenticity, Testaments - Atwoods sequel to the Handmaid's Tale which wrapped up all the loose ends, Affirmation - a ride through what is and isn't reality, Wake - a horror story set under a supernatural dome in a New Zealand seaside township. Embassytown - where language mistakes have bizzare consquences when communicating with aliens, and Lone World World narrated by a delusional psychopath who is full of wit and dark observations about the world.  

This year, like last year, my aim is to read 24 novels. 

Good reading to you. 

Review of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments

Unless you only get your news from a Donald Trump-authorised news source, you would know that The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s recently released sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. I loved The Handmaid’s Tale when I first read it a few decades ago. It had great world-building and created a believable brutal vision of a right-wing theocracy in an almost post-apocalyptic US (Gilead). I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for a university course where we studied the text in-depth, so it was relatively fresh in my mind as I read The Testaments. I have not watched any of The Handmaid’s Tale television series. People who watch it may make different connections to The Testaments than I did and react differently.

The Testaments takes us back to Gilead 16 years after The Handmaid’s Tale. It tells the story from three points of view. From that of a 16 year-old-teenager whose mother escaped with her from Gilead to Canada when she was a baby. One of the four head Aunts complicit in imposing the strict regime of oppression on the women of Gilead is the second storyteller. The final narrator is a teenager who grew up in Gilead and joined the Aunts to flee an attempted arranged marriage.

The story has a plot which the author does not fully explain. Atwood leaves it up to the reader to work out why some things happen rather than have one of the characters tell the reader why she is doing something. For example, I wondered why the Aunt chose a particular courier to smuggle documents out of Gilead. A reader looking for plot holes might think they had found one, as it took me a while to figure out why that particular courier was chosen.

The novel switches back and forth between points of view, but unlike many books that use this technique, I wasn't troubled by the frequent change of viewpoint as I was keen to learn more about that person’s story. This indicates that all the storylines were equally important and not dominated by one main storyline with interrupting subplots.

I found the novel a real page-turner, reading its 400 pages in five sittings, which is quick for me. I particularly enjoyed discovering more about how Gilead came into being and the origins and motivations of the original Aunts.

The Testaments’ words flow off the page. Atwood is very much a writer who writes for readers. She would rather impress with her ideas, themes and story than with her clever word usage. I have read four of her other novels, including the excellent Maddaddam trilogy, so she is one of my favourite authors.

The Testaments has a much more definite ending than the somewhat ambiguous finish of The Handmaid’s Tale. Overall, I think The Testaments is an excellent end to the world of Gilead, but it is not as good as The Handmaid’s Tale, which created Gilead and the belief system imposed on the people there. I think The Handmaid’s Tale would have been a more worthy winner of the Booker Prize. But The Testaments is still a great novel by a great speculative fiction writer.