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

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog