The Gun Counter

I figured I'd expound upon my observation in the "What are you reading" thread that Ancillary Justice is awful.

You see, I picked it up after seeing that it was the most recent Hugo/Nebula winner for best sci-fi novel. I figured that if Larry's detractors weren't willing to do so much as read his books before giving 1-star reviews with such BS as "I prefer books where the characters are described in more detail than the guns"*, I would read a book "they" liked, rather than simply take Larry's word that the awards were doled out to political favorites regardless of the quality of their work.

See, I may be a fan of his work, but I consider the integrity to actually look at the stuff in question before excoriating it to be kind of important.

$9.99 on Amazon later, I have been given an object lesson in the fact that sometimes it's better to just be a political chowderhead. Also, that Mr. Correia's take on all things sci-fi is completely trustworthy. I figured that it couldn't be that bad. Oh no.

For one thing, you have to get 60% of the way through the book to figure out WTF the protagonist is after. That's when the central conflict starts to exist. Everything else is an utterly lifeless "I did this. I did that. 20 years ago, I did this. I did that. Now I'm doing this and that. 20 years ago I did that and this. In the present I don't know why I'm doing anything at all. In the past I also did things, which I also often didn't understand, because I was told to."

The protagonist is a thousands-year-old warship's AI, now finding itself confined to one human vessel after the rest of its "ancillaries" (other human bodies sharing the ship's AI) were destroyed along with the ship. It wants revenge for something that happened 20 years ago. You're just going to have to wait about 200 pages to find out what any of this is about, because the rest is all awkward, standing-around-talking-about-things fiction that establishes little.

Part of the problem with this concept is that for the flashback half of it (which is half the story for half the book) the protagonist is nothing more than a dispassionate AI observer. But in the present where it inhabits only one human body, it rarely has any kind of emotions either. The protagonist basically spends all its time telling us things happened, moving forward a little, and then rehashes what happened. Again, and again, and again.

You'd think that with all that rehashing we'd have a decent picture of... well, anything. But absolutely nothing is described in any detail. Much of the novel revolves around a situation happening in a damp underclass city below an... upperclass... city? place? Property? Idea? It's not clear. But the protagonist interacts with characters who are all described entirely by skin color (all vaguely-described shades of brown; one principal character is described as having skin that is brown but not so dark it's fashionable, whatever that means).

This is compounded by the fact that the AI describes everyone, regardless of actual sex/gender, as female. Everyone. This is chalked up to its people's language as not having any gender pronouns, but this does not explain why the narrative, in English, insists on defaulting to female, especially when describing (rarely) established male characters as "daughters" etc. Despite the fact that English has perfectly serviceable gender-neutral pronouns and nouns, the author chose to default to female terms for everyone. Every single character is an undefined brownish blob, moving through hazy gray backdrops. This is almost resolved once things start picking up, but then the only other consistent character's personality starts changing and he (always described as female until the protagonist is called out on misgendering him) once again reverts to a formless, brownish blob.

It's about as interesting as a poorly-written technical manual. It's hard to see why this novel would be successfully published, let alone receive awards, unless you take the political angle into account. In fact, the only characters with any kind of personality are caricatures of rich right-wingers.

The first set of upper-class undesirables are introduced as complaining about paying taxes to the Radch empire that had conquered them:

“They confiscated my entire harvest.” This was the cousin of Jen Shinnan’s, the owner of several tamarind orchards not far from the upper city . She tapped her plate emphatically with her utensil. “The entire harvest.”

A small price to pay for not getting murdered, am I right? (By the way, that is what the Radchaai do to anyone who offers the slightest inconvenienced when annexed: Execute the hell out of them. Indeed, the protagonist seems wistful about it:

“Well, but I would certainly have gotten more if I could have taken it to Kould Ves and sold it myself!”
There had been a time when a property owner like her would have been shot early on, so someone’s client could take over her plantation. Indeed, not a few Shis’urnans had died in the initial stages of the annexation simply because they were in the way, and in the way could mean any number of things.

But apparently the author realized that, still, completely jacking someone's entire source of income might make the rich guy seem sympathetic, so she starts laying on the stereotypes, starting with attitudes toward the underclass:

Jen Shinnan gestured acknowledgment . “And no one here is ever really starving, Lieutenant. No one has to work, they just fish in the swamp. Or fleece visitors during pilgrimage season. They have no chance to develop any ambition, or any desire to improve themselves. And they don’t—can’t, really— develop any sort of sophistication, any kind of…” She trailed off, searching for the right word.
“Interiority?” suggested Lieutenant Skaaiat, who enjoyed this game much more than Lieutenant Awn did.
“That’s it exactly!” agreed Jen Shinnan. “Interiority, yes.”
“So your theory is,” said Lieutenant Awn, her tone dangerously even, “that the Orsians aren’t really people.”

Of course, Lieutenant Awn is our tragic, sacrificial lamb. "She" is a fairly important character, yet all we really know about her is that she comes from a less-than-well-regarded house, and "her" skin is brownish. That's about all we get in the way of physical description.

“Well, not individuals.” Jen Shinnan seemed to sense , remotely, that she’d said something to make Lieutenant Awn angry, but didn’t seem entirely certain of it. “Not as such.”
“And of course,” interjected Jen Taa, oblivious, “they see what we have, and don’t understand that you have to work for that sort of life, and they’re envious and resentful and blame us for not letting them have it, when if they’d only work…”

Nope, not quite enough talking points just yet.

“Quite right,” agreed Jen Shinnan. “You blame me for ruining the fishing. But I gave those people jobs. Opportunities to improve their lives.”

Privileged assholes with an utter disdain for the underclass that they consider completely lazy and believe that they are entitled to profit from their products, and defend their environmentally destructive practices by heralding themselves as job creators.

No, I can't see any political checklists in use here. Needless to say, every one of these Tamarind people gets murdered in the name of karmic justice before too long.

...and then everyone with a personality, even one as copy-pasted from political cartoons of Republicans as these, ceases to exist, safely returning the plot back to the narrative's completely inoffensive, vague, smudgy inaction.

I'm supposedly 80% of the way through the book now and I'm not holding out much hope for improvement. The protagonist wants to assassinate one of the bodies of the Radchaai head of state, a fruitless gesture since they inhabit thousands of bodies. It's just a giant vague mess, and what isn't vague is directly confusing. It's not remotely interesting, entertaining, or cathartic. The pacing is so slow any development is telegraphed chapters in advance, and it's wrapped up in a box of futility and pointlessness.



Soooo... yeah. If this is what they think is good, somebody please point me in the direction of whatever they think is the worst. I'm sure it'll be outstanding.

*Often said about the Hard Magic series for some reason, almost as if they all decided to copy/paste it as a group despite how anyone who's read the books would know that this is absolutely not true

The integrity you showed in actually reading it before badmouthing it, is cancelled by the fact that you sent those fucks some of your money. You have the internet.... Next time you feel like taking one for the team, don't do that.

Well, at least some of it went to charity through the process.

The Hugos started getting weird in the late 90s...

Compare the 1971 winner with the 2001 winner....

Yup, there's a wholesale war going on in the SF writer's community.

Personally, I think the Classic SF crowd will win out. The Pink SF stuff is too much garbage.

Oh, I just figured I should mention that I finished the book.

There's precious little in the way of resolution. It's clearly meant as the beginning of a trilogy. The thing is, most trilogies spend their time being pointless filler in the middle sequel, not to begin with.

F-- would not recommend.

Crap like that is why I gave up on most sci fi a long time ago.

Actually, I threw up in mouth a little just from those excerpts, and want to issue a fatwa against the author(s) and any family, just on principle.

The last time I heard writing this bad, was in the Creative Writing class examples in Throw Momma From the Train, but those at least pulled a laugh.
...And then he pulled the thing, and the other thing, and the sub went down.
"We sure fixed 'em!" he said.

Mike OTDP wrote:Yup, there's a wholesale war going on in the SF writer's community.

Personally, I think the Classic SF crowd will win out. The Pink SF stuff is too much garbage.

Sales will be the ultimate judge.

Those excerpts were pretty much the life of the book. About as detailed as it gets, too, even with nonspecific words like "utensil." There is a lot of the protagonist having stilted conversations with people and drinking tea while she keeps internally noting that she can't be sure she's interpreted the other character correctly because she doesn't have access to that person's physiological data.

When you really get right down to it, this is the story of a cyborg that drinks tea. Nothing else is described in any appreciable detail.