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Ann Leckie
(Orbit, June 2023)
Review by Nick Hubble
LECKIE’S L;ATEST NOVEL marks a return to the Imperial Radch universe of the Ancillary trilogy and Provenance. Although not a direct continuation of those stories, Translation State is concerned with the shared context of the Human-Presger treaty and includes a number of scene-stealing appearances by a character previously encountered in Ancillary Mercy. While the action is not as intense as in her debut trilogy, the more deadpan style of writing here is deceptive. Underneath the sometimes cute, sometimes old-fashioned set-up, there is a steely grasp of power dynamics and a realistic sense of the kind of force that would be required to actually underpin social acceptance of radical difference. Above all, however, Translation State is a playful celebration of core genre tropes and their capacity to function as the building blocks for a utopian grammar.
Chapters alternate between the viewpoints of the three protagonists. The first of these is 50-something Enae, who until recently has devoted hir whole life to looking after hir grandmaman, but now sie finds hirself surplus to requirements and despatched upon a seemingly pointless search for a fugitive who fled from the Radchaii Translators Office two hundred years ago. Then there is Reet, an unassuming maintenance worker and obsessive fan of long-running serial Pirate Exiles of the Dead Moon, troubled only by his inexplicable desire to cut people up and the strange insistence of nationalist group, the Siblings of Hipkipu, that he is the lost descendant of their legendary Schan rulers. Last, and by no means least, is Qven, undergoing the disturbing rites of passage necessary to become a Presger translator. Qven’s sections are narrated in the first person and free of any gender associations until deep into the book. It would give away too much of the plot to outline how these main characters are eventually thrown together. However, when this does happen, as we inevitably know it will, it sets up a tense final third involving dramatic exchanges at a high-stakes tribunal and a very weird sequence of events following an unexpected rearrangement of the space-time continuum.
This range of action affords Leckie a broad enough canvas to show how the use of correct pronouns is not purely a question of etiquette but integral to fundamental questions of social organization and even, at a more basic level, who counts as human. One of the reasons gender is such a hotly contested touchpoint for the culture wars in our time is because it is central in an anthropological sense to how our society is organised. Once it becomes fully accepted both that biology doesn’t determine gender and that there are more—potentially many more—than two binary genders, then the symbolic order by which society is structured will inevitably change. That doesn’t mean that utopia will appear overnight. The societies depicted in Translation State are not utopian, but their hierarchies are not naturalised and therefore they are subject to open contestation and the real possibility of change. While this situation increases the potential for direct violent struggle between factions and communities, it also gives rise to better diplomatic protocols and systems of etiquette. In this respect, Leckie is a twenty-first-century descendent of Jane Austen, depicting profound struggles between deadly enemies taking place across the table within the tight constraints imposed by the social ritual of drinking tea, or, indeed (in the unexpected opening up of new binary front in the Ancillary universe), coffee.
So, for example, when Qven, after being introduced to the joys of Pirate Exiles by Reet, comes out as ‘a princex in disguise’, using e/em/eir pronouns, this is not a simple matter. For one thing, it is complicated by the fact that we know what Qven can do to a human with a knife in eir hands, not to mention eir capacity to alter spatial properties; factors which make em feared by even the most powerful actors on the scene, such as the Radchaii Ambassador to the Presger. Qven’s claim to be human is predicated not on biology but in eir claim to gender and eir decision to narrate eir own selfhood in terms of core genre, so that life becomes an adventure to be shared by friends and lovers. In these terms, being human itself becomes a matter of social practice rather than biology, and therefore potentially open to aliens and sentient machines. Speaking of the latter, the action does take us at one point for a welcome brief trip to the breakaway Republic of Two Systems and we are treated to some deliciously sardonic AI attitudes. There is also a sense that the machines think that their time is coming and, by the end of Translation State, it is starting to look as though the Imperial Radch is teetering on the edge of further implosion. Therefore, I’m fairly confident that Leckie will set at least another novel in this universe, rather than leave us all hanging. Personally, I can’t wait for the next instalment.