So, I hate this book. I originally started writing this review nearly two years ago. I was excited to read a book that won basically every award. I'm thinking, yay!, another book on the level of Neuromancer! Here's a rare book that was so good that it won all the damn awards.
Yeah, well. The awards apparently mean nothing now. Because Ancillary Justice isn't worthy.
Ancillary Justice has too many awards to read as badly as it does: the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, BSFA. Yes, this book is boring. I wouldn't have finished it if it wasn't for all the awards it won. I figured, okay, just keep pushing, there's got to be something good here. But upon finishing it, I now feel that the award systems are flawed, deeply flawed.
Let me say that I like the premise of AJ. I've considered writing something about hive minds before. Hive minds allow for a consideration of schizophrenia, collective intelligence, Orwellian social control, rhizomes, and the individual vs. society. So, you know, you've got some cool material to work with. Score one for Leckie, she has a ship's computer control multiple bodies at once. Indeed, the ships in her world take over bodies, creating a sort of zombie crew all under the power of a single overmind. At the idea level, this is superb.
And literary criticism has a lot to say about the body, as well it should. So far, humans have relied on bodies to progress throughout all the stages of history up to now. And we're at an impasse where the future could take us into some weird, disembodied places. Posthumanism is a likely future for humanity, especially in the Anthropocene, where we're increasingly making the world into a zone hostile to human life.
And literary criticism has a lot to say about the body, as well it should. So far, humans have relied on bodies to progress throughout all the stages of history up to now. And we're at an impasse where the future could take us into some weird, disembodied places. Posthumanism is a likely future for humanity, especially in the Anthropocene, where we're increasingly making the world into a zone hostile to human life.
We're going to need new bodies. We're going to need new modalities. Our philosophy will change. What will be the ethics of the disembodied humanity? Maybe we'll watch The Terminator movies and realize we had it wrong all this time. Maybe The Terminators were the heroes, stomping out humans before they completely destroyed the Earth.
Question:
How did a book that was this bad win so many awards? Or really, how did it even get nominated for any award? Where was Bruce Sterling that year? Where was William Gibson? Kim Stanley Robinson? Margaret Atwood? Where is the talented new generation of writers? Have the major publishers selected only the worst science fiction so that this is the best offering for an entire year? Has the self-publishing world kept amazing talent confined to small pockets of interest?
Ancillary Justice should have been half it's length, at best. It could have been a strong novella. The part where the armored MC jumps off a bridge is awesome, for instance (read: I wanted the book to jump off a bridge and disappear forever).
Ancillary Justice should have been half it's length, at best. It could have been a strong novella. The part where the armored MC jumps off a bridge is awesome, for instance (read: I wanted the book to jump off a bridge and disappear forever).
Let me backpedal a second because I can already hear the protests. "But the book won everything! How can you say it's not good?"
And see, the problem isn't really the book so much as the system that would vaunt this book as good, great, the best!
And see, the problem isn't really the book so much as the system that would vaunt this book as good, great, the best!
If we look at, say, the Hugo awards, we find a cluster of hacks winning the award in the past decade or so. Though Bujold and Sawyer should never be given an award for anything either.
I read N.K. Jemisin's Binti and couldn't believe it was a book at all. It felt like a poor attempt to turn a bedtime story into a short story that was then stretched out far too long. I can't imagine that the person that wrote Binti is capable of writing anything good, let alone winning the most prestigious sci fi award three times in a row. What in the world? Then there's this Robinette Kowal person who writes The Calculating Stars. Truly awful aside from the first 90 pages, which is tense and fun with a comet hitting the east coast and a pilot winging her way to safety. But then the build up to a female piloted space flight is brutally boring and interminable. I'm not sure about Memory Called Empire, but I've heard whispers and the whispers aren't encouraging. We can only hope that Rebecca Roanhorse wins the 2021 award. Her story, This is Your Authentic Indian Experience is fascinating (although she shouldn't have written in the 2nd person, no one should write in the second person).
I read N.K. Jemisin's Binti and couldn't believe it was a book at all. It felt like a poor attempt to turn a bedtime story into a short story that was then stretched out far too long. I can't imagine that the person that wrote Binti is capable of writing anything good, let alone winning the most prestigious sci fi award three times in a row. What in the world? Then there's this Robinette Kowal person who writes The Calculating Stars. Truly awful aside from the first 90 pages, which is tense and fun with a comet hitting the east coast and a pilot winging her way to safety. But then the build up to a female piloted space flight is brutally boring and interminable. I'm not sure about Memory Called Empire, but I've heard whispers and the whispers aren't encouraging. We can only hope that Rebecca Roanhorse wins the 2021 award. Her story, This is Your Authentic Indian Experience is fascinating (although she shouldn't have written in the 2nd person, no one should write in the second person).
The point here is, if you look at the books that won the Hugo in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s (for the most part, but that's where it started to go sideways), you've got the great classics of science fiction, big bold books that inspire wonder. The new type of Hugo winning books though, the only wonder they inspire is wondering why in the hell these books are winning awards.