A less successful attempt at gender in science fiction: Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice
As promised/threatened last week, I think I'm doing more of this, after seeing Jacqueline Carey handle this one well. Yes, there were problems in Starless, but Carey did the sex/gender thing well. Now, though, I'm going to commit nerd heresy. I'm going to criticize Ann Leckie, and say that she was far less successful in Ancillary Justice.
You should read Ancillary Justice. Overall, it is a good book, with some good ideas. As a socio-political commentary on the whole sex/gender thing, though, Carey did it better. Remember my primary argument about why. Carey started with a world and the characters, and let the story and storytelling unfold naturally from there, even when it led to places that could, from an obstreperous audience, be taken as fodder for a fight.
Leckie started with a gimmick, motivated by modern political ideas about sex and gender, then tried to reverse-engineer a plot device to justify it. And it didn't work, logically. It undercut what was otherwise a really cool book.
The short version of Ancillary Justice is this. Far in the future, the Radch empire controls a lot of humanity. The Radch themselves are ruled by Anaander Mianaai. Radch ships are run by AIs, which often split their consciousnesses off into human bodies to run around performing various tasks. Some bad orders lead to a ship blowing up, but a piece of the ship's consciousness survives in a human body. That piece of the ship's consciousness-- Breq-- then goes after Mianaai for vengeance. That sounds simple, but it is actually far more complicated, and the story is told non-linearly. Most importantly, the novel isn't really about revenge. It is about the nature of military orders, unjustifiable orders, and the nature of consciousness and individuality.
Mianaai, after all, does exactly what the ships do. She splits her own consciousness off into bodies all over the place to be everywhere, overseeing everything. The omnipresent, omniscient dictator. However, Mianaai is a complex person. Mianaai is actually ambivalent about those immoral orders, but with a split consciousness, that means sometimes the immoral order is given, and sometimes not. If you are talking to Anaander Mianaai, you may be talking to a Mianaai who is more evil, or one who is less evil, not because they are a bunch of different cylon models with different personalities, but because Mianaai has within her all of those aspects. She is divided against herself, so to speak.
It's weird, and cool, and wrapped up in that are many meditations on orders in the military. There is a lot of good stuff in that book. Hopefully, that's enough to get your attention. There is a reason it won the Hugo in 2014, beating out Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood, which some of my students are actually reading in a class right now. Ancillary Justice is good.
I do think it has some flaws, though, and the flaws relate to something about which it has been lauded. The sex/gender stuff. Carey did it better.
You see, Leckie wanted to have the POV character, Breq, go around "misgendering" people. She also decided that, hey, wouldn't it be cool if in Breq's head, she just referred to everyone as "she," even when the characters are male? Leckie started with that-- clearly-- and then tried to work up a backstory to justify it. Here's what Leckie did.
The Radch language, according to Leckie, does not use gendered pronouns. So, since Breq's native language lacks gendered pronouns, Breq herself cannot understand the concept of male versus female. Hence, in her internal monolog, she just uses "she," and whenever she meets someone, and tries to converse in a language other than Radchaai, she can't tell if the person is male or female, screws it up as often as not, and "misgenders" the person, because while Breq can apparently learn the language, grammar and syntax as it relates to gender in another language, she just can't quite grasp what "male" or "female" actually are.
As for Breq's internal monolog, we can write that off as Leckie translating for us, and OK, sure, fine. Go with it. It's just that everything else about this falls apart on the logic.
Here's what a ship's AI does for the Radchaai. The AI clothes and bathes the officers, while acting through the human bodies that they control (and as for how they acquire those human bodies that they control... ick). There are, shall we say, certain physiological differences between males and females. Pronouns are only used when you are referring to a person when speaking to someone else. Third person. The existence of maleness and femaleness, at least as physiological traits-- sex, if not gender-- is there regardless of whether or not the pronouns are gendered, and the ship's AI has no possibility of not seeing the physiological given the ship's tasks as spelled out in the book.
Do you see where I'm going with this, people? The ship's AI winds up seeing male versus female physiology. And even when people are not bathing, there are secondary characteristics. The physiological, and those are noticeable.
So, what might have made some sense? Having a character whose native language is Radchaai screw up the grammar and syntax of gender in languages that have them, but having no difficulty understanding the concept.
Here's an exaggerated reference.
Latin is hard. Why is Latin hard, in particular for English-speakers? Basically, you have to modify everything in weird ways, contingent on lots of stuff. It isn't that it conveys more meaning than English, but you have to modify everything. Romans, go home! In English, we don't have to do anything to the word, "home." Why do you have to do anything to it in Latin? Because otherwise, John Cleese will cut your balls off. It isn't that we don't have the concepts behind the grammar. We just have a simpler structure.
Whether or not a language uses gendered pronouns has nothing to do with whether or not one can understand the concepts of maleness and femaleness, especially if that person-- and I'll call Breq a person-- is bathing men and women. That's before getting into the certainty that the ship must have, oh, medical records! Yes, folks, male and female physiology is different, and medical records must account for that. If you are the ship's AI, you gotta see that. Taking away the pronouns does nothing to affect one's comprehension of that concept.
There are words that don't translate across languages, and concepts that you will have a difficult time grasping without the language. Yiddish is great for words that just don't translate properly, and language can affect your thinking, but the idea that a language that lacks gendered pronouns will eliminate the capacity to understand the concept of sex... no.
There are those who would argue for the elimination of gendered pronouns. Personally, I think English would be cleaner and simpler! Give me a choice between a language with gendered and non-gendered pronouns, and I'd pick the latter. There's a bunch of stuff going around in which groups are trying to construct non-gendered singular pronouns, and... language is messy. I am sympathetic to the cause, but that runs up against my prescriptivist views of language, so... whatever.
However, suppose English altered to replace "he" and "she" with whatever people are trying to create as a gender-neutral, third-person, singular pronoun. Would we stop understanding maleness and femaleness? Seriously?!
No. Obviously not, and the idea doesn't even deserve to be taken seriously. OK, one might argue that it's different for Breq, as an ancillary rather than a normal person, but to repeat-- ships clothed and bathed officers. They had to have access to medical records 'n stuff. Nope. Me = not buyin' it.
What would be reasonable for characters whose native language lacks gendered pronouns? It could make it harder for them to speak another language that does use gender, particularly if it does so in a complex way. See Life of Brian. Leckie could have done that.
But she didn't. Why not? She also wanted to have Breq do this internal dithering about, "oh, poor me, I can't tell if this person is male or female because I don't get this whole male/female thing." Simply constructing the Radchaai language without gendered pronouns, though, doesn't justify that.
Leckie began with a gimmick, and she was bound and determined to use that gimmick. Then, she had the problem of reverse-engineering an explanation for that gimmick. That's a problem, because her reverse-engineered explanation didn't quite work, but she wouldn't give up the gimmick. Carey, on the other hand, started with the world, and let the characters flow from there. (See what I did there? Flow? "Fluid?" Go, read Starless. Overall, a lesser book, but more interesting on sex/gender.)
And if you want a more prominent example of the most basic point Leckie wanted to make with the internal monolog-- try this one. Alien. Ellen Ripley. You know how that character came about, right? Ripley was originally written as a man, but they decided during casting to have Sigourney Weaver play the part. The result? One of the coolest and most iconic heroes in science fiction movie history. The fact that she was a woman became important in the sequel-- Aliens. In Alien, though, it just didn't matter. They realized that, and said, hey! Let's cast Sigourney Weaver! One of the better corrections that a casting director has ever made. Leckie wrote in female pronouns partly because for the story, it didn't matter. But, the gimmick was a poorly-constructed gimmick. As opposed to, say, John Scalzi's Lock-In. Oy.
Could Ancillary Justice have been explained or fixed? Let's try. A culture could develop in which people present in at least somewhat ambiguous ways! That's been done plenty of times, and that would make Breq's challenge more understandable. But Leckie would have had to write that, and weave that into the language thing. She didn't.
Then, consider the secondary characteristic issue. Could Breq ever think to look for, you know, beards and things like that? A beard is kind of a dead giveaway, just as an example. Men don't always cultivate facial hair, and in America today, it's a minority among the non-hipster crowd, but that's just an example. Breq never looks for beards. Why not? Well... I guess... maybe in the future, everyone depilates, or something? Um, I guess? Leckie would have had to write that. Then there are certain aspects of... physique? Yeah, you see where I'm going. Anything could be written away, but you'd have to do it. Leckie didn't.
What that means is that Ancillary Justice is fundamentally a very cool book about the nature of consciousness and individuality, what it means to be internally conflicted about morality, the military, orders, chain of command and all sorts of very cool stuff... and then tacked onto that is an unnecessary and poorly constructed gimmick about sex/gender via pronouns because Leckie wanted to make some comments about misgendering people.
The thing is, the pronoun thing is so... ancillary to the book that you can read the book ignoring it and still get a lot out of it. It didn't need to be there, and it doesn't alter any of the plot or characters in any fundamental way. Perversely, that's actually kind of the point! Refer to everyone by "she," even when characters are male because it doesn't matter. That means you can remove the gimmick, and the book still stands. The gimmick is annoying if you overthink it as... well, I'm spending a Sunday morning ranting about a gimmick in a book I read a few years ago, so, yeah, I overthink the books I read. But, that also means that it is ancillary. You can ignore it and the book doesn't change, so the rest of the book can stand on its own. It is otherwise a good book. So you should read it.
It winds up being an interesting contrast to Carey's Starless, though, in the nuance and sophistication with which Carey handled sex/gender and the gimmicky nonsense in Ancillary Justice. Carey wrote the pronoun conversations with such insight that Leckie's ham-handedness comes across as laughable, on the gender issue specifically.
And yet, overall, I think Ancillary Justice was the better book! So, take that for what it's worth. I might do another one next week in which the gimmick actually undercuts the whole book, unless I get distracted by something else. Perhaps next week will be Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning. Maybe.
You should read Ancillary Justice. Overall, it is a good book, with some good ideas. As a socio-political commentary on the whole sex/gender thing, though, Carey did it better. Remember my primary argument about why. Carey started with a world and the characters, and let the story and storytelling unfold naturally from there, even when it led to places that could, from an obstreperous audience, be taken as fodder for a fight.
Leckie started with a gimmick, motivated by modern political ideas about sex and gender, then tried to reverse-engineer a plot device to justify it. And it didn't work, logically. It undercut what was otherwise a really cool book.
The short version of Ancillary Justice is this. Far in the future, the Radch empire controls a lot of humanity. The Radch themselves are ruled by Anaander Mianaai. Radch ships are run by AIs, which often split their consciousnesses off into human bodies to run around performing various tasks. Some bad orders lead to a ship blowing up, but a piece of the ship's consciousness survives in a human body. That piece of the ship's consciousness-- Breq-- then goes after Mianaai for vengeance. That sounds simple, but it is actually far more complicated, and the story is told non-linearly. Most importantly, the novel isn't really about revenge. It is about the nature of military orders, unjustifiable orders, and the nature of consciousness and individuality.
Mianaai, after all, does exactly what the ships do. She splits her own consciousness off into bodies all over the place to be everywhere, overseeing everything. The omnipresent, omniscient dictator. However, Mianaai is a complex person. Mianaai is actually ambivalent about those immoral orders, but with a split consciousness, that means sometimes the immoral order is given, and sometimes not. If you are talking to Anaander Mianaai, you may be talking to a Mianaai who is more evil, or one who is less evil, not because they are a bunch of different cylon models with different personalities, but because Mianaai has within her all of those aspects. She is divided against herself, so to speak.
It's weird, and cool, and wrapped up in that are many meditations on orders in the military. There is a lot of good stuff in that book. Hopefully, that's enough to get your attention. There is a reason it won the Hugo in 2014, beating out Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood, which some of my students are actually reading in a class right now. Ancillary Justice is good.
I do think it has some flaws, though, and the flaws relate to something about which it has been lauded. The sex/gender stuff. Carey did it better.
You see, Leckie wanted to have the POV character, Breq, go around "misgendering" people. She also decided that, hey, wouldn't it be cool if in Breq's head, she just referred to everyone as "she," even when the characters are male? Leckie started with that-- clearly-- and then tried to work up a backstory to justify it. Here's what Leckie did.
The Radch language, according to Leckie, does not use gendered pronouns. So, since Breq's native language lacks gendered pronouns, Breq herself cannot understand the concept of male versus female. Hence, in her internal monolog, she just uses "she," and whenever she meets someone, and tries to converse in a language other than Radchaai, she can't tell if the person is male or female, screws it up as often as not, and "misgenders" the person, because while Breq can apparently learn the language, grammar and syntax as it relates to gender in another language, she just can't quite grasp what "male" or "female" actually are.
As for Breq's internal monolog, we can write that off as Leckie translating for us, and OK, sure, fine. Go with it. It's just that everything else about this falls apart on the logic.
Here's what a ship's AI does for the Radchaai. The AI clothes and bathes the officers, while acting through the human bodies that they control (and as for how they acquire those human bodies that they control... ick). There are, shall we say, certain physiological differences between males and females. Pronouns are only used when you are referring to a person when speaking to someone else. Third person. The existence of maleness and femaleness, at least as physiological traits-- sex, if not gender-- is there regardless of whether or not the pronouns are gendered, and the ship's AI has no possibility of not seeing the physiological given the ship's tasks as spelled out in the book.
Do you see where I'm going with this, people? The ship's AI winds up seeing male versus female physiology. And even when people are not bathing, there are secondary characteristics. The physiological, and those are noticeable.
So, what might have made some sense? Having a character whose native language is Radchaai screw up the grammar and syntax of gender in languages that have them, but having no difficulty understanding the concept.
Here's an exaggerated reference.
Latin is hard. Why is Latin hard, in particular for English-speakers? Basically, you have to modify everything in weird ways, contingent on lots of stuff. It isn't that it conveys more meaning than English, but you have to modify everything. Romans, go home! In English, we don't have to do anything to the word, "home." Why do you have to do anything to it in Latin? Because otherwise, John Cleese will cut your balls off. It isn't that we don't have the concepts behind the grammar. We just have a simpler structure.
Whether or not a language uses gendered pronouns has nothing to do with whether or not one can understand the concepts of maleness and femaleness, especially if that person-- and I'll call Breq a person-- is bathing men and women. That's before getting into the certainty that the ship must have, oh, medical records! Yes, folks, male and female physiology is different, and medical records must account for that. If you are the ship's AI, you gotta see that. Taking away the pronouns does nothing to affect one's comprehension of that concept.
There are words that don't translate across languages, and concepts that you will have a difficult time grasping without the language. Yiddish is great for words that just don't translate properly, and language can affect your thinking, but the idea that a language that lacks gendered pronouns will eliminate the capacity to understand the concept of sex... no.
There are those who would argue for the elimination of gendered pronouns. Personally, I think English would be cleaner and simpler! Give me a choice between a language with gendered and non-gendered pronouns, and I'd pick the latter. There's a bunch of stuff going around in which groups are trying to construct non-gendered singular pronouns, and... language is messy. I am sympathetic to the cause, but that runs up against my prescriptivist views of language, so... whatever.
However, suppose English altered to replace "he" and "she" with whatever people are trying to create as a gender-neutral, third-person, singular pronoun. Would we stop understanding maleness and femaleness? Seriously?!
No. Obviously not, and the idea doesn't even deserve to be taken seriously. OK, one might argue that it's different for Breq, as an ancillary rather than a normal person, but to repeat-- ships clothed and bathed officers. They had to have access to medical records 'n stuff. Nope. Me = not buyin' it.
What would be reasonable for characters whose native language lacks gendered pronouns? It could make it harder for them to speak another language that does use gender, particularly if it does so in a complex way. See Life of Brian. Leckie could have done that.
But she didn't. Why not? She also wanted to have Breq do this internal dithering about, "oh, poor me, I can't tell if this person is male or female because I don't get this whole male/female thing." Simply constructing the Radchaai language without gendered pronouns, though, doesn't justify that.
Leckie began with a gimmick, and she was bound and determined to use that gimmick. Then, she had the problem of reverse-engineering an explanation for that gimmick. That's a problem, because her reverse-engineered explanation didn't quite work, but she wouldn't give up the gimmick. Carey, on the other hand, started with the world, and let the characters flow from there. (See what I did there? Flow? "Fluid?" Go, read Starless. Overall, a lesser book, but more interesting on sex/gender.)
And if you want a more prominent example of the most basic point Leckie wanted to make with the internal monolog-- try this one. Alien. Ellen Ripley. You know how that character came about, right? Ripley was originally written as a man, but they decided during casting to have Sigourney Weaver play the part. The result? One of the coolest and most iconic heroes in science fiction movie history. The fact that she was a woman became important in the sequel-- Aliens. In Alien, though, it just didn't matter. They realized that, and said, hey! Let's cast Sigourney Weaver! One of the better corrections that a casting director has ever made. Leckie wrote in female pronouns partly because for the story, it didn't matter. But, the gimmick was a poorly-constructed gimmick. As opposed to, say, John Scalzi's Lock-In. Oy.
Could Ancillary Justice have been explained or fixed? Let's try. A culture could develop in which people present in at least somewhat ambiguous ways! That's been done plenty of times, and that would make Breq's challenge more understandable. But Leckie would have had to write that, and weave that into the language thing. She didn't.
Then, consider the secondary characteristic issue. Could Breq ever think to look for, you know, beards and things like that? A beard is kind of a dead giveaway, just as an example. Men don't always cultivate facial hair, and in America today, it's a minority among the non-hipster crowd, but that's just an example. Breq never looks for beards. Why not? Well... I guess... maybe in the future, everyone depilates, or something? Um, I guess? Leckie would have had to write that. Then there are certain aspects of... physique? Yeah, you see where I'm going. Anything could be written away, but you'd have to do it. Leckie didn't.
What that means is that Ancillary Justice is fundamentally a very cool book about the nature of consciousness and individuality, what it means to be internally conflicted about morality, the military, orders, chain of command and all sorts of very cool stuff... and then tacked onto that is an unnecessary and poorly constructed gimmick about sex/gender via pronouns because Leckie wanted to make some comments about misgendering people.
The thing is, the pronoun thing is so... ancillary to the book that you can read the book ignoring it and still get a lot out of it. It didn't need to be there, and it doesn't alter any of the plot or characters in any fundamental way. Perversely, that's actually kind of the point! Refer to everyone by "she," even when characters are male because it doesn't matter. That means you can remove the gimmick, and the book still stands. The gimmick is annoying if you overthink it as... well, I'm spending a Sunday morning ranting about a gimmick in a book I read a few years ago, so, yeah, I overthink the books I read. But, that also means that it is ancillary. You can ignore it and the book doesn't change, so the rest of the book can stand on its own. It is otherwise a good book. So you should read it.
It winds up being an interesting contrast to Carey's Starless, though, in the nuance and sophistication with which Carey handled sex/gender and the gimmicky nonsense in Ancillary Justice. Carey wrote the pronoun conversations with such insight that Leckie's ham-handedness comes across as laughable, on the gender issue specifically.
And yet, overall, I think Ancillary Justice was the better book! So, take that for what it's worth. I might do another one next week in which the gimmick actually undercuts the whole book, unless I get distracted by something else. Perhaps next week will be Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning. Maybe.
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