(no subject)

[owlectomy]

I have Ancillary Justice feels!

(Meaghan: read, like, half of it, and if you still can't get into it, then, you should probably read the whole thing just to be sure?)

When I started it it seemed so dense and chewy, a book I could admire intellectually more than I could get into it emotionally, which is because I read so much YA and all the feelings are right on the surface, but then after a certain point I went "Wow, it is really smart what she did there with the parallelism of the two situations, and also, FEELINGS." Because, for such an intellectual book -- and a book that's really about colonialism and empire and identity and free will -- it also manages to mash a couple of my id-vortexy buttons right near the end.

I want to read the whole thing again because I'll understand it better the second time around but maybe I'll wait until Ancillary Sword? (Which is coming out in October? Which I only just learned about? And which I'm pretty excited for right now?)

I am also thinking about it as a response to The Left Hand of Darkness -- not just in terms of what it does with gender and pronouns, which I didn't really find to be the most interesting or radical aspect of the book -- but in terms of being a survival quest of two people thrown together who don't (initially, at first) care about each other that much, and come to see each other in different lights...

Comments

[meaghansketch]

I am super into it! It is just dense and I am reading it very slowly...

Also (so far) the most interesting thing about the pronoun thing is realizing how disconcerted I am when I can't remember or don't know what gender someone is...

[owlectomy]

You know what it reminded me of? Those holes in the Beacon art museum, where your attention is drawn to how disconcerting it is when you can't see the bottom or judge how deep they might be. The most radical thing it's doing with gender is pointing to that place in one's head that really wants to know how to classify these characters according to *some* gender framework, even when it so clearly isn't a category that's relevant for the narrator and her perceptions.

[meaghansketch]

Yeah, exactly. I'm only about a third of the way through but so far the characters' gender is utterly irrelevant to the narrator or the plot, but still I find myself thinking BUT HOW CAN I PICTURE THE CHARACTER IF I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF IT'S A MAN OR A WOMAN when... somehow I manage not knowing so many other aspects of how the characters look, so why is that thing the thing I'm getting caught up on?

[owlectomy]

Yeah! And then I would catch myself doing that and think, "You know, this is really far in the future and in societies very different from mine so even knowing if a character was male or female wouldn't give me any relevant information about their social role, their appearance, etc..."

Which is kind of neat.