Believe The Hype! _Ancillary Justice_ by Ann Leckie Does In Fact Totally Rule!

I know I'm late to the party, but boy am I glad I came. Ancillary Justice is the party and it's Ann Leckie's debut novel and winner of the 2014 Nebula Award. (Deserved, I feel!) It's also nominated for a Hugo, but crazily enough is competing against the Wheel of Time series, a billion-page fantasy epic that probably shouldn't be in a category labeled "novel." Anyway, how awesome would it be for a novel so progressive on gender politics (AJ) to deny the Hugo to an entire series known for being the opposite (WoT)?

But I digress. Ancillary Justice can be elevator-pitched into the handy phrase "character-driven military sci-fi" but that wouldn't do the book j-- <cough>. Sorry. The novel's awesomeness comes from the way Leckie uses point of view--the pov character is a space ship, literally. The ship's AI resides not just in the body of a ship itself, but in its ancillaries too. Ancillaries are the bodies of the peoples the ship has helped to conquer. And the ship's AI inhabits a number of these bodies simultaneously. Hence one of the wonderful things that Leckie can achieve with the point of view: the ship can talk to a Lieutenant at the temple while her other segment (ancillary body) directs citizens on the street. The pov character can be in several places at once. (Noice!) And Leckie uses that to great effect.

But Leckie's most brilliant pov shenanigan comes from a constraint of having Breq, the ship's consciousness, as our first-person narrator: she can't seem to tell the difference between a man and a woman. (Of course! Why would a ship need gender distinctions?) Her pronouns are totally effed. And the reader soon understands via other characters' pronouns that certain important characters are probably male instead of female. But Leckie never pins it down, and that was a fantastic choice. As the plot unfolds and the characters deepen, the reader is forced to acknowledge that the sexes of the characters don't matter. Breq must judge characters without any preconceived notions of how the sexes behave and so must we. It's everything else that matters and in fact makes them fully-realized, 3D human beings for the reader. I'm not sure any author has so cleverly shown the value of ignoring those preconceived notions of sex and gender.

All that said I haven't begun to scratch the surface of the complicated world Leckie builds or explored the depth of its characters and their choices, or even begun to unpack the implications of what ancillaries are not to mention the ships' consciousnesses that inhabit them. I leave those amazing ideas for you to discover as you read.   

A moment of perspective

Another rejection hit my inbox this morning, and no matter how many I receive, they still get me down. Obviously it's inevitable in this business and a suit of armor is necessary for any aspiring novelist. I'm still working on mine. It's a bit ramshackle. Then something happened that made me feel silly for feeling bad.

On my way back from dropping Henry at daycare, I was trudging through the parking lot, and yeah, I was thinking about the rejection email and feeling sorry for myself. To make matters worse, I had recently listened to a podcast where an author I respect said the usual age to publish a first novel is 33. Both those things had penetrated my ramshackle armor.

Then a stranger approached me as I was unlocking the door to our building. "I'm sorry to bother you," he said. "But may I ask you how old you are?"

The question caught me off guard of course. In addition to being relevant to my thoughts in a Twilight Zone way, you don't get that question much, especially from strangers. The man had emerged from a silver Mercedes parked in one of our reserved spaces, so we shared the building, sure, but I had never spoken to him before. But when I looked more closely, I could see that he meant no harm. He was smiling, obviously aware he had asked a rude question, but his graying beard and youthful face immediately made me feel kindly toward him.

"37," I told him.

He backpedaled a bit. "I noticed that gray at your temples. But I see the youth in your face now." Many friends and coworkers had recovered with far less tact after mistaking me for an older man.

"Thanks," I said.

"And was that your little boy that you were with a moment ago?"

That's when I remembered his silver Mercedes idling in the lot, probably ten minutes before, as I pulled Henry out of the way. "Yes, that's my son." I said smiling.

Big smile in return. "Oh good. That's such a relief. It's so nice to see older parents out there. We're still trying."

Stupidly, I spoke before I thought. "How old are you?"

"44," he said still smiling.

And with that we introduced ourselves and parted ways. 

Ursula K. Le Guin Kills It

I've read Ursula K. Le Guin off and on for a long time, so I'm not terribly surprised that revisiting the Earthsea trilogy has felt inspiring in so many ways, especially at the language level. I can't help but think that Le Guin must have continuously weighed how to strike the right balance between lyrical exposition and dramatic scenes because of the way that balance develops through the first two novels. 

So far I've only read the first two books--A Wizard of Earthsea ('68) and The Tombs of Atuan ('71)--and the latter in particular strikes me as ahead of its time. But that's the subject of a different post, I think, and not what inspired me to resuscitate my blog. What inspired my post is this: the first book in the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, is, well, slow. Okay, let me back up and put it this way: it gets off to a slow start. And I think this is because Le Guin fills the first third to half of the novel with long sweeping passages about Ged's early life. The language is lyrical and a pleasure to read, but there aren't many dramatic scenes, and so the details of his childhood fly by in a series of beautifully-written, poetic sentences. The problem is that there is little drama, and without the dramatic element it's difficult to remember Ged's childhood from one reading to the next. Later, as Ged chases down the evil thing that he released into the world, the novel becomes more scenic, and the lyricism is in service to the story. Tombs of Atuan is more evenly-balanced from start to finish, and the lyricism never seems to intrude on the scenes. For days I held in my head a vivid understanding of Tenar's life from her birth to the point in time the novel ends. Perhaps Le Guin learned something in the writing of the first book that she applied in the second.

What did I learn from this? I think when writers strive to be lyrical or have a talent for lyricism, maybe it's tempting to tell too much (as opposed to showing in scene). Maybe they/we should resist the temptation to describe the way the sea tosses the ship during a storm if nothing happens during the storm except that the hero gets wet. Early in A Wizard, Ged goes on some sea voyages that do very little dramatic work for the novel. They're nice to read, and as someone who enjoys lyrical writing, they do justify their existence. But that's me. Do they advance the story enough to justify being there to a young reader? My feeling is no, they probably don't. Not to readers who might otherwise be playing video games--the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure books. At fourteen I would have dropped A Wizard in the middle of one of Le Guin's beautiful, boring paragraphs if I thought I could play a round of Street Fighter. And I imagine fourteen-year-olds today are less patient than I was.

I must admit I feel funny criticizing Le Guin's work, especially because I admire and enjoy it so much. But I think any aspiring writer can learn something about craft when reading in a critical mode, even when reading one of the masters like Ursula K. Le Guin.

Reflection on Jack Vance's _Planet of Adventure_

I'm working on an anthology of Jack Vance's pulp sci-fi advenure novellas, _Planet of Adventure_. I picked it up based on my love of a similar anthology called _Alastor_, which I read sometime in the early aughts.

What I admire most and hope to emulate is Vance's lyrical treatment of adventure stories. More specifically how beautifully he renders passages of action--because that's all it is, a series of action scenes. There is little (if any) interiority, but the sentences are brilliant and his clever shorthand ensures a brisk pace. If anyone could have translated Star Wars into a lyrical prose piece it would have been Vance.

The main weakness are the damsel-in-distress scenarios that play out again and again, and the messianic white man trope that so many critics took the film _Avatar_ to task for--a white man enters a foreign culture, masters it, shows the culture the error of its ways, and then dominates it. Vance wrote these novellas in the late 60's, so maybe we can forgive him more easily than we can James Cameron. But it's definitely worth pointing out lest you fall into the same writing trap.

Bottom line: Read Vance to learn how to render action and move your plot along. Be wary of his old-fashioned politics.

Thanks for dropping by

I gave up blogging a few years ago to concentrate on my new career as a librarian. But I thought it was time to return to the blogosphere to talk about work/family/writing balance. I'm taking a rather unconventional path to becoming a writer--if there is such a thing as a conventional path--and I often wish for insights from folks who raise children, work a full-time job, and manage to write novels. So I thought maybe I should share my own!

When my son Henry was born, I felt a renewed sense of purpose both in my daily work and in my writing. That's where the title comes from.