Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
There’s a scene in which the Presger translator, Zeiat, reveals by means of a metaphor involving fish-shaped tea cakes, that the Presger do not believe in qualia. It’s what finally explains the two translators’ seeming confusion of identity — which one is Dlique and which one is Zeiat — because the Presger do not draw invisible lines between things and say this is one kind of thing and this other is another kind of thing.
This is the most fun part of the book. The Presger translators don’t really care about their own existences because they don’t really believe in them; and are just barely able to understand that other human beings do. It’s actually very reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ ruler of the Universe. I think Douglas Adams had a lot of ideas that more ‘serious’ authors are still working on unpacking. They just struck us all as jokes because they were too new to have been rendered banal by repetition and endless explication.
Anyway, Ancillary Mercy is pretty good. The astropolitical resolution is a bit of a deus ex machina, I guess, but that’s okay. As somebody famous maybe said, no serious problem is solved within the terms of its original statement.
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