chomiji | Wednesday Reading: Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear (Reply)

Oh look, it's Wednesday. And I have bronchitis and am trying to work dayjob through it. Let's see how short I can make this review.

Elizabeth Bear is a pretty prolific author with whom I have rarely clicked. I keep trying to give her another chance, to the extent that I think I actually have an unread novel by her lying around the house somewhere. The only book of hers that I recall reading and liking (although I never went back for a re-read) was Karen Memory. But Ancestral Night is showing up on people's awards short list, so I read it.

Haimey Dz the engineer, Connla the pilot, and Singer the ship/AI, plus their two cats, run a tramp space salvage operation. When they discover a crime against intelligences and a Big Mysterious Object, one after the other, their lives become immensely more complicated. I would like to add "especially Haimey's," but she's the viewpoint; maybe Connla and Singer and the cats also feel that their lives have become uniquely complicated.

The large object features some previously undiscovered technology that could definitely change life as it exists for the beings of this part of the galaxy. The salvagers end up being chased around for a while and then make a fuel stop at a space station that also seems to be hosting the perpetrators (space pirates) of the crime mentioned earlier. Some of the station officials are corrupt. Our friends have to make another run for it. In fact, there is an amazing amount of distance covered in the story. Even when Haimey ends up on her own on another Big Mysterious Object, she ends up running around inside it for ages.

I didn't intensely dislike the book? Some of details of the societies involved were intriguing, as were the descriptions of Haimey's use of some newfound gifts. But Bear is clunky with languages/words. A device called a "fox" is mentioned early on, along with a bunch of other technobabble, and very little of any of it is well-explained, even by example. The fox thing particularly annoyed me because it's not like "fox" is an obscure word, and even when I finally got the basic idea of what it was and did (and it was mentioned over and over), I could not figure out why she had chosen this very common word to describe it.

It's quite possible that I missed some crucial bits because I was skimming heavily for large sections of the story. Haimey has Issues, she has an entire subscription in fact, and the society of which she is a part believes in voluntary mind control for handling a lot of things. Haimey has handed off a considerable portion of control of herself, piecemeal, to others. The only person who speaks forcefully against this practice is a brutal pirate who is not really quite evil but is a colossal jerk. Oy vey.

Also, at one point I came to what I assumed was the beginning of the end of the story. There was a moment much akin to that in LotR where Sam wakes up, discovered that Gandalf is still alive, and asks in bewildered joy whether everything sad was going to become untrue. And then I looked down at the bottom of my Kindle's display and saw I was only 80% of the way through the book. *sigh*

I also don't think I ever discovered why the book has that title.

Did someone else read this and like it? Can you maybe talk me back from the edge of deciding that Bear is just not for me? I mean, there were good things about the book. People are of varied sexualities! There is interesting practical body-modding! Bear has given thought to what you would do with your cat if your spaceship encountered a disaster! Haimey makes friends with a rather nice giant insect!

Help?

Nope, did not manage a short review.