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Translation State, Ann Leckie
I really loved the Ancillary trilogy, so was very much looking forward to reading this. I did enjoy it, and there are some interesting ideas, but I felt the plot was a bit uneven particularly near the end.
I think a lot of the ideas in this book are about identity, and how people with power try to impose their ideas of peoples' identities onto them (like the Radchaai habit of imposing she pronouns onto everyone they encounter), and the violence inherent in denying someone their identity. Including, in this case, whether someone counts as human or not. All of this is caught up in events that could have wide-ranging impact on the galaxy. I liked all three of the point of view characters, and they all develop interestingly during the book.
I do have some issues with the plotting, though - it felt too obvious too early that Reet was a Presger Translator juvenile of some sort (which I think slightly undercut the early parts of the plot). More significantly, the spiral-reality bit in the last section just felt very tonally different to the rest of the book, and it felt strange that so much time was spent on that and then the eventual matching was dealt with entirely off-stage (we needn't have had gory details, but it's such a big part of Reet and Qvem's character arcs it was strange that there wasn't even a kiss-and-fade-to-black or somesuch). And the Radchaai ambassador's error in letting Dlar get stabbed (and an armed ship get close enough to fire on the station) seemed unnecessarily incompetent.
I did like this enough to remember that I should get hold of Provenance, which I've not read :)
I think a lot of the ideas in this book are about identity, and how people with power try to impose their ideas of peoples' identities onto them (like the Radchaai habit of imposing she pronouns onto everyone they encounter), and the violence inherent in denying someone their identity. Including, in this case, whether someone counts as human or not. All of this is caught up in events that could have wide-ranging impact on the galaxy. I liked all three of the point of view characters, and they all develop interestingly during the book.
I do have some issues with the plotting, though - it felt too obvious too early that Reet was a Presger Translator juvenile of some sort (which I think slightly undercut the early parts of the plot). More significantly, the spiral-reality bit in the last section just felt very tonally different to the rest of the book, and it felt strange that so much time was spent on that and then the eventual matching was dealt with entirely off-stage (we needn't have had gory details, but it's such a big part of Reet and Qvem's character arcs it was strange that there wasn't even a kiss-and-fade-to-black or somesuch). And the Radchaai ambassador's error in letting Dlar get stabbed (and an armed ship get close enough to fire on the station) seemed unnecessarily incompetent.
I did like this enough to remember that I should get hold of Provenance, which I've not read :)
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