Lake of Souls
Ratings2
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings2
Average rating3.8
Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke award-winner Ann Leckie is a modern master of the SFF genre, forever changing its landscape with her groundbreaking ideas and powerful voice. Now, available for the first time comes the complete collection of Leckie’s short fiction, including a brand new novelette, Lake of Souls.
Journey across the stars of the Imperial Radch universe.
Listen to the words of the Old Gods that ruled The Raven Tower.
Learn the secrets of the mysterious Lake of Souls.
And so much more, in this masterfully wide-ranging and immersive short fiction collection from award-winning author Ann Leckie.
Contents:
The Lake of Souls
Stories from the world of the Imperial Radch
Night’s Slow Poison
She Commands Me and I Obey
The Creation and Destruction of the World
Stories from the world of The Raven Tower
The God of Au
The Nalendar
The Snake’s Wife
Marsh Gods
The Unknown God
Beloved of the Sun
Saving Bacon
Sci-Fi
Footprints
Hesperia and Glory
The Endangered Camp
Another Word for World
The Justified
Fantasy
Bury the Dead
The Sad History of the Tearless Onion
Reviews with the most likes.
I have been a long-time Ann Leckie fan, but in long-form I only enjoyed the Imperial Radch books, and I don't usually enjoy short stories at all, so I was hesitant approaching this, but it was mind-blowingly good. Each story had a new take, even when it felt like it was going to retread speculative fiction genre conventions. Almost all of the stories were about negotiation, persuasion and diplomacy and I liked that it felt like they were in dialogue with each other, but each story had a unique perspective to add.
I thought the first third, the stand alone stories, were shockingly the strongest: I really liked the first-contact and symbiosis set up of the titular story, which really immersed me in the setting and world very quickly.
Hesperia and Glory also packed a punch in its short pages, about how perception defines reality
Another Word for World, which is clearly a descendent of Ursula Le Guin's A Word for World is Forest cut to the quick with its exploration on how well-meaning people could still fail to connect across linguistic and cultural boundaries
The imperial Radch stories were in fact the weakest, in part because they were all quite distant from the Radch we know. If they hadn't been marked as belonging to the same universe, they could easily have stood alone. The only one I remember is She Commands Me and I Obey, another great look at negotiation and what happens when we take the status quo for granteed.
The Raven Tower stories were somehow very successful (even though I really didn't like the Raven Tower?) with the one exception that each of them recited the rules for the gods not being able to lie – it would have been better if they'd been edited to be in a collection made to be read together. Of those, the Snake's Wife was by far the strongest – a disturbing read, but captivating and really a capstone on the themes of negotiation, manipulative practices and the ways that scheming to get the upper hand can fail.
Overall, a really strong collection organized along a powerful central theme with very little redundancy or “duds”
