Shawn

This goddamned series... I am trying, and failing, to think of a series I've read in my life that started out so promising and then disappointed me so greatly. I'll be honest: I straight-up didn't finish this fucker.

To briefly recap: first book, YAY! Grand in scope, a galactic emperor at war with herself! The concept of gender does not exist for the main race wowzers, that's got some weird and interesting implications! Ships are people! Action takes place across multiple worlds and many decades!

Phew! THAT'S how you start a goddamned space opera!

Book Two! You've got... um... well, a LOT of talk about the class implications of tea pottery? Ship person is sad and distant. 90% of the action takes place on a space station that might as well be any current modern city on Earth, for all of how alien and space-y it is (isn't). The rest of the action takes place on what might as well be a 19th Century Indian tea plantation. There's literally not a single thing that happens on that fucking plantation or station that implies “SPAAAACE OPERA!!!!”.

The brilliant removal of gender as a language concept that helped make everybody in the first book actually seem alien? Now just an annoyance, one that is literally tossed aside at the one point in the plot where gender actually would matter. So why fucking have bothered in the first place?

That crazy mad space-empress at war with her own self? I dunno, she was absent almost entirely in book two and hadn't shown up in the first 120 pages of book three and I punted at that point.

So, then Ancillary Mercy picks up right where Ancillary Sword left off, with Breq, our putative protagonist, recovering from “her” boring injuries incurred in the boring conclusion to the boring second book. The Mad Emperor Mianaai may or may not have shown back up in the system, I dunno, they mention her ships possibly coming through a gate but they're a few weeks out from actually being able to interact with anyone and I didn't read the book long enough to find out if she ever actually shows the fuck up.

While we're waiting for the Space Lord to arrive and theoretically start some semblance of action, we must first read through another hundred pages of Thinly-Veiled Future Space Analogy To Current Day Racism and Classism That a Goddamned First-Year English Major Would Have the Decency To Be Embarrassed About.

That's where I gave up.

To be clear: I'm not opposed to Sci-Fi As Social Analogy for Current Events AT ALL; that's one of the strengths of the genre, its ability to cast current events into an interesting alien future in a way that possibly seeds some thoughts on how to deal with said problems now. And Lord knows there have been many very interesting takes on oppression, classism, racism, etc., done by many, many authors in the genre.

I just don't find Leckie's take on this interesting at ALL. She was going someplace wonderful in that first novel, but then scoped it down to something that hardly needs to be sci-fi in the next two, and then fails to do anything with the interesting premises setup in that first novel.

And that REALLY bums me out.

Leckie is still a pretty “new” author, this series started with her actual debut novel, and I wonder if she just ran out of steam on it. I can see having added a bigger conflict between Breq and Mianaai to the end of the first novel and just having ended the whole story there. Shifting to a whole new location for books two and three that, as of ~120 pages into the third, served NO purpose to highlight or advance the conflict between the various sides of the Lord of the Radch's personal meltdown war, just makes no sense. Particularly since that conflict was setup in Book One as the Primary Plot, the pivotal event around which all other events should be viewed in relation to.

I dunno. Maybe I'll finish the book someday, I can't have more than an hour or two left in it. But I am just so disappointed in where this series has gone; it's quite obvious that Leckie has got some stellar ideas in her head, she can do some solid if, so far, monochromatic world-building, but seems to struggle with fleshing out good base ideas into an entire series of books worth reading. I'll keep an eye out for what she does in the future, but for right now, I'm setting this aside.

I consider myself pretty well-rounded in most areas of history, certainly more so than the average civilian. But I realized recently that, while I'm conversant with Irish history up to The Troubles, I don't know much about The Troubles themselves.

This is probably due to my general disdain for the Irish-American plastic paddy pro-IRA loudmouth that Chicago is lousy with, and was particularly lousy with when I was young in the 80's and 90's and The Troubles were still at full boil. The simplistic “fuck the British, Protestants suck, Catholics are saints, the IRA is pure!” narrative that dominates American thought about the era settled into my mind and I haven't been bothered to interrogate that until recently, even though I ambiently knew that my understanding was puddle-deep and probably mostly wrong.

So I was a bit stymied to find out that no one really seems to think a good single-volume history of The Troubles has been written yet. This particular book kept coming up though, and, having read it, I see why.

Say Nothing views the modern era of The Troubles (1969-today) via the lens of the disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38-year old, mostly apolitical widowed mother of ten, from her Belfast flat in 1972. Her life up to the disappearance and through the decades-long investigation into it is interwoven with the story of how the mostly-moribund legacy IRA was woken up in the late 60's to become fully active again and how it grew and changed throughout the conflict and its putative ending in the Good Friday Accords and since.

The McConville case ends up being the spine on which pretty detailed biographies of both Delours Price (early convert to the active wing of the IRA) and Gerry Adams (never-quite-publicly-admitted leader of the IRA during most of this time turned legit politician via Sinn Féin later on; gets most of the credit for bringing peace of a sort to Northern Ireland via The Good Friday Accords) are hung. Numerous smaller players are also brought into closer or further focus along the way, depending on their relationship to the McConville case and the bigger events that define The Troubles.

The book hooks the reader well, better than a typical straight history probably would, as it has this rather sensationalist criminal case at its heart. There's also a fair amount of reasonably exciting legal action around the very publication of this book covered near the end. That one also gets a fairly even, medium-detailed history of The Troubles, mostly from a grounds-eye level, is just a bonus.

That said, the McConville case IS the primary story being told here, and the further away a person or event is from the people directly involved in that, the less detail there is. Hateful bigot shithead Ian Paisley makes a couple of appearances, but there's very little coverage of, say, the Loyalists' beliefs and goals throughout the conflict, or much in the way of how the British government's policies developed.

So keep all that in mind. I'm purposely not going into any detail on the McConville case itself as that's the hook that will pull you through the book. Even if you don't care about The Troubles themselves at all, that case has enough twists and turns to keep the average true crime junkie fully engaged. Lastly, as somebody coming at this from a historian's angle, the coverage of all of the issues and drama surrounding the bulk of the primary sources used to tell this story was quite interesting to me as well.

Overall, Say Nothing gets my recommendation for anyone interested in The Troubles, and it contains enough detail that you can come in with next to no prior knowledge and follow along.

I feel like Swan spends more time on the luscious maps at the front of his books and in whiteboarding all of the politics and descriptions of each minute province than he does on the story, and I am okay with that. It's some in-depth, hard world-building and it really makes the various races and polities, human and otherwise, stick in the brain while reading.

And the plot itself is pretty interesting, too, don't get me wrong. This is the first book in a sequel series to his prior Empire of the Wolf trilogy, set a few hundred years later than that trilogy and with the medieval setting replaced by a world now deep into the Age of Discovery and nascent industrialization. “What happens to magicks when the people get machines” is an interesting question, answered most successfully, to my tastes, by Joe Abercrombie's The First Law books. But Swan is setting himself up to at least challenge that opinion, if not overtake it.

The gist is that the afterlife, which in this world is a known-real/existing thing that everybody accepts as such, is... gone. More detail than that would really enter the spoilers realm, but it's a good hook to hang a trilogy on, I must admit.

Exacerbating things for our heroes is the fact that the first-among-equals polity they hail from, the Sovan Empire, has long since banned magick entirely outside of their military Corps of Engineers. So everybody who really knows how to even attempt to deal with this new aethereal crisis is either a foreigner (and you can guess how Sovans think of less-economically-advanced foreign nations and cultures) or a dissident.

Things go from there, with some truly creepy happenings as the mystery is investigated and whole new races and nations introduced on top of the known settings from the first trilogy. It's a fun romp.

If there's a weakness, it's with the characters. The Empire of the Wolf series was served well by being told entirely from one person's perspective well after the events actually occurred. While Helena wasn't the strongest-written character I've ever read, her mentor and the actual protagonist of the series, Konrad Vonvalt, was, and her narrating what he accomplished kept things moving and memorable throughout.

Swan has gone for a larger cast and shifting perspectives in this new series, and it works well enough, but isn't as strong a choice so far as the single-perspective of his prior works. Renata, Kleist and the others are good characters, but need more fleshing out than they get in this intro book. A lot happens to them, but the hows and whys of their reaction to events doesn't feel entirely natural yet. That said, the multiple perspectives are pretty much demanded by the world-ranging scope of this series. It also allows for more intricate plotting, and in general I felt more engaged with the multiple threads of this book than I did in the prior trilogy which, while good overall, felt plodding at times.

Grave Empire also suffers from First Book in a Series curse, in that it's largely scene-setting and ends hanging from a cliff. The book is entirely about defining the problem and the stakes that the later books will actually contend with. A hard problem to work around, and there's enough happening and shocks in the plot to make the book quite entertaining, but you know the whole way through that very little is going to be settled by the end of this first volume.

That said, I'm cool with some thick world-building and scene-setting for a nice long series to come. Swan's good at that stuff. And the plot feels like it will match the setting as well, which the first trilogy didn't quite fully pull off. Let's hope!

But first, a brief digression...

I've read pretty much exclusively via Amazon Kindle devices/apps for 13 years now. I like having a lot of books on me at all times, being able to read wherever I am, in a pool, on a beach, in line at the store... I am the IDEAL Kindle customer. I have bought (god have mercy on my soul) 1206 books.
They know EVERYTHING IT IS POSSIBLE TO KNOW about my reading habits.

Yet... did I find out about this series from Amazon?

Nope.

“That's crazy, dude! Even though the collection features four authors you've previously purchased books by via Amazon? Three of whom you've purchased EVERY BOOK THEY'VE EVER RELEASED via Amazon? Wow!”

Yep! Totes true! Heard about this series from a buddy, in person.

Apparently Amazon has a whole bunch of these collections for various genres, each featuring legit superstars of the genre! A great idea, Amazon! And they're fucking FREE to me as a Prime subscriber!

Would've been great if you sent me an email or told me via the Kindle app that I'm in EVERY SINGLE WAKING DAY OF MY GODDAMNED LIFE about any of ‘em!

Anyway. God, the future is so fucking annoying.—

On to the short stories themselves. In the interests of this review not being longer than the collection itself was, I'm going to do this RAPID FIRE LISTICLE STYLE:

1) How It Unfolds, by James SA Corey

The author duo behind The Expanse gives us a short but very interesting examination of what it would mean to have many, many “you's” running around increasingly into a far distant future. The immutable issues of how vast space is become somewhat tractable if humans can be encoded as data and shot out that way.

And if those copies also keep shooting copies out further and further? Over millennia? What if the you from four thousand years ago could tell you something in a video that survived until you existed about a chance you should take with somebody you're also living with that they fucked up?

Ponderous!

A little hard to keep track of, but as ever, Corey excels at a bit of close-detail world-building married to an interesting high sci-fi concept. I liked this one quite a bit.

2) Void, by Veronica Roth

Meh. A fairly bog-standard murder mystery lightly leavened with sci-fi via it happening on a luxury cruiser that moves at a speed where like one year on the ship equals a coupla decades on either of the two planets it constantly shuffles folks between. Not a lot of there here.

3) Falling Bodies, by Rebecca Roanhorse

Somewhat interesting tale here (I'm interested these days in stories where the humans have already lost and finding our way in a universe where we're not the apex predator) but kinda lazily trope-y in its execution. Human baby is adopted by conquering alien elite figure and then a whole bunch of bog-standard racism and betrayal happens. I'd read a longer novel in this universe if it were more fleshed out and the plot actually had something resembling a hook in it.

4) The Long Game, by Ann Leckie

My favorite of the bunch. A small, simpler but undeniably sentient life-form on another planet is introduced to human capitalism in space. You can probably imagine how things go, but Leckie really makes this story interesting in the details of how humanity does its whole thing (huge military not really needed, just good ol' marketing, resource extraction, and labor exploitation, yay!) and in her characterization of the aliens. Very enjoyable, if also depressing.

5) Just Out of Jupiter's Reach, by Nnedi Okorafor

I liked this one quite a bit as well. The concept of “grown” spaceships that are bespoke and tied to their riders, but the ships kinda choose them based on DNA compatibility, so that you've got some real diversity in the characters here in a way that allows for a more-interesting-than-usual set of conflicts in the plot... all good stuff. Also, again, a sucker for the vampire specter of Capitalism just... staining every consideration of the actors. Like, these folks each stand to make 20 million Euro... but for FIVE FUCKING YEARS ALONE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM. Like, the info they'll bring back, the knowledge and data, will make the capitalists funding it TRILLIONS. It's a fuckin' rip job, honestly.

Nnedi worked that whole again very interestingly and enragingly, but also not as even a secondary plot point of much notice. It's just THERE, something everybody has to consider and deal with.
The sci-if, per se, was a bit weaker. The starships are cool as hell but there's a LOT of hand-waving and very little sense of risk in the voyage somehow. But the strength of the character-driven plot (again, not giving away much here because these stories are SHORT, just fuckin' read it yourself if you're intrigued) made that not at all annoying to me.

Props also for the very affecting side-story about the crabs. Man.

6) Slow Time Between the Stars, by John Scalzi

I've been on a journey with this guy. Loved the Old Man's War series. Liked the start of the Interdependency series, HATED the ending. Bounced hard off of everything else he's done. I had figured i just... middle-aged out of his stuff or something.

So color me pleasantly surprised that I quite enjoyed this entry. Humanity builds an AI-powered spaceship to go find other human-habitable planets. AI decides it doesn't give a shit about what humans want. Manages to utilize the resources of the universe to keep patching itself up for millions of years.

Not super-deep, but an enjoyable trip.—

Overall, I dug this collection quite a bit. Hope Amazon figures out a way to let me know about more stuff like this that it has sometime soon, I guess two decades of every bit of data about my reading habits wasn't quite enough! Someday soon, though, that plucky kid Bezos will figure it out.

I'm sorry, but this book sucks.

There's some interesting ideas on the sci-fi/setting side, kind of, but nothing we haven't really seen before.

What is TERRIBLE and caused me to bail out on the book about 40% through is the simplistic, one-dimensional, downright AWFUL characterizations.

Oh no, a sensitive artsy intellectual child is born to a brutal domineering Hitler of a father! Said father runs the biggest corpo/gov't in the galaxy and GASP might not be totally honest about what his company's been up to! Did they have a project that they promised would bring good things to everyone but is actually comically bad and evil??!?!? oh noooes!

Oh wait; there's a rebel group against the bad empire?!?! And one of their best operatives is now trapped with the artsy sensitive intellectual son of her worst personal enemy via some really contrived “the MacGuffin broke” pseudo sci-fi nonsense on a planet that wants to kill them both?

and... and... they might LIKE EACH OTHER?!?!?!? BWUUUUUUUUHHHH??????

Christ. Every goddamned chapter ends with the two mains realizing that they have a lot in common, actually, and might like each other, only for the rebel to be like “no! this is the second worst person alive behind his father! all of my direct personal experience with him aside, he must be a foul, evil baby-torturer and he's just hiding it! I must and will kill him”.

It's so dumb. It's like every chapter ends with a series of those “We should kiss. Ha ha no I'm kidding. Unless...?” joke tweets.

There were some mildly interesting if derivative and unoriginal concepts around transferring consciousness and enhancing individual abilities, and the political/economic setup of things is what kept me going as long as I did, but these characters are fucking moron teenagers at best and it just got too tiresome. I'm out.