Skip to main content

Translation State (SF) - Ann Leckie *****

It seems that Ann Leckie has won every SF award going, but this was the first of her books I'd read - and now I have, I can see why she has been so successful.

Translation State features three key characters: Enae, a dispossessed scion of a rich family who is given a make-work job to hunt for a lost fugitive and decides to make something of it and really commit to the search; Reet, an adopted young man who gets into murky depths when trying to uncover his origins; and Qven, an apparently alien lifeform who is coming to the end of a strange and dangerous upbringing.

The threads of those three characters' lives come together, with both Reet and Qven discovering they are not what they seem. All three are plunged into a dangerous political situation that is then made worse by terrorist action.

It's all beautifully written, and Qven's upbringing and nature as a would-be Presger Translator (beings who act as intermediaries between humans and the very alien Presger) is some of the best alien-feeling scenario building I've seen in science fiction. It's a book I had to read quickly because I needed to know what was going to happen - always a good sign. This book is set in Leckie's Radch universe, but not having read any other of the books previously wasn't a problem, this being a standalone story. 

I do find the popular style of having chapters alternating between, in this case, three main protagonists has become clichéd - it has been done so much it deserves a rest. I did also find the slew of alternative pronouns could be confusing, particularly when a character was first introduced and it wasn't clear what/who a sort-of word such as 'e' referred to. I also felt some of the abilities of the Translators verged on fantasy rather than science fiction. But that didn't prevent the book being hugely enjoyable.

Overall, reading this book was a great experience. Usually when this happens, I eagerly get hold of other books by the same author, but the descriptions I've seen of Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy didn't inspire me - I might still put a toe in the water, though, and I'll certainly be looking out for more of her standalone titles.

Hardback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...