Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe. And then whoever I’m recommending this to would probably complain I’m not taking this seriously and I’d end up recommending The Fictional Man by Al Ewing instead.
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because of the pronoun thing
Yes, but even if the story reasons for it come from a worse place, it achieves a LOT. The readers outside the book will only see it in modern context, or think that she’s the first author to do it since Le Guin in the 60s.
And inside the book there’s much more which builds from it: someone discusses dating another person and the reader has no idea what gender this other person is, and none of the characters seem to care, except for possible differences in military rank. No-one mentions physical indicators or gender ever. So I do think the culture is wider than the imposed pronoun.
(I said the world “Culture” so now I have to wonder how many Iain M Banks would be in my list. Player of Games for certain).
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Yes, but while that’s actively good in itself it’s still the thing I put in the spoiler because most of the other cultures in that setting do still care about gender. So if an Imperial person meets non-Imperials they will be inevitably putting their foot in it because they simply don’t get gender as a thing people care about. And that is a deliberate policy by Miaanai, to make Imperial people uncomfortable about leaving.
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I read this after it won the Hugo. It left me with no desire ever to read anything else of hers. Not a feeling of faint disgust, as I felt after reading both of the two Culture novels I’ve read; just total indifference. And looking back, I have no idea what it was about—in particular, I couldn’t describe either its internal or its external conflicts.
I got on much better with Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota novels, one of the recent series that approach the Enlightenment through the French Revolution (the Baru Cormorant novels are another, or perhaps the other). I find the worldbuilding unconvincing, and the theological elements in the story don’t appeal to me, but I do remember the books, and I expect I will read the fourth one when I can get it through the local public library.
That seems like it’s relying on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. And of course that has a long history in SF—both Stranger in a Strange Land and Babel-17 are based on it (and I understand that The Languages of Pao is as well). But I don’t think it’s either well supported generally or relevant here. There are languages without gendered pronouns, right here on Earth, but it doesn’t seem to me that, for example, either the Japanese or the Turks are noteworthy for their lack of culturally defined sex roles.
The lack of gendered pronouns is just one facet of the way the culture has been constructed not to have, not just gender roles, but genders at all.
Did that play a part in the plot? I’m afraid I no longer have any idea what the story was about, if indeed I ever did.
Well, I think it’s a fairly important part of Breq’s change in attitude as things go on - and a lovely example of how someone can change attitudes while remaining the same person. But I’m not trying to persuade you to read the book again - you didn’t get on with it, fair enough.
(In some years I definitely feel as though I am out of tune with the the Hugo-nominating and -voting readers, in others less so. This year’s nominated novels are, to my mind, mostly pretty darn good; there’s only one I really didn’t want to read, and since I’m not voting this year I’m not going to.)
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Yeah, I think you’ve convinced me this is deliberate. Especially since Imperials / Non-Imperials is looked at later by the author in Provenance, and it was both really funny and interestingly dark.
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Stranger in a Strange Land / Babel-17 / The Languages of Pao
Yes! Also China Miéville’s Embassytown, which is I think is one of his best, and looks at what happens if you teach lying to aliens who literally cannot lie 
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No, I didn’t assume that.
I’ve read fiction that premises non-standard-US ideas of sex and/or gender since the 1970s, and I’ve done things with that theme in my own campaigns since at least the 1990s; I don’t have a problem with it as a theme. But I barely noticed it in Ancillary Justice, and in fact I never fell into thinking in terms of the culture there (as I did, for example, in Courtship Rite, one of my favorite SF novels ever). For one thing, I had no sense of involvement with any of the characters, and couldn’t see the point of their actions, which left me with no purchase on the setting. I don’t remember even noticing that the main character underwent any sort of change. They weren’t a person to me on the first page and they still weren’t a person on the last page. I’m not able to say whether this was because the novel was badly written (though I don’t rule out that possibility) or because of the peculiarities of my own outlook; I would need it to have come together for me as a story before I could make such a judgment, and as you note, it didn’t.
I got maybe a third into Embassytown and bogged down, which I’m afraid has happened to me with his novels since The Scar. One day I’d like to finish one of them—maybe Kraken, which has elements that I like. But yes, now that you mention it, I remember that Embassytown has linguistic themes.
Ooh, that might be my choice for @Name1ess’s question checks publishing date, yup, it qualifies.
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I picked this up from reading about it on your blog and can offer a hearty second.
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I have done on occasion. But my tendency is to get a bit overexcited to find out what’s going to happen and read even more, or saddened by the fact that I am enjoying so much the book that it will end soon, but still punish myself in a way and keep reading.
Tricky, because most books I read are older, but maybe The Heroes from Joe Abercrombie still fits within the last decade…?
That depends very much on the language. In Spanish, all words (or 99.99%) have a gender. You can do that in English, but in Spanish the chair and the table are female, and the piano is male. Not much you can do about that…
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I’ve been thinking about best books, and I think my first choice to recommend for others is Graydon Saunders’s The March North, the first of a series of fantasy novels. It’s a departure from common fantasy in that it’s not set in a monarchy or aristocracy; its setting, the Commonweal, is a republic in the original Roman sense, a res publica. Magic has been around for many millennia, and has greatly reshaped the world and its lifeforms, and the political system outside the Commonweal is a chaos of competing Dark Lords, which the Commonweal is organized, above all, to resist. The approach to magic is highly rationalized, though we never get an idiot lecture explaining it, happily. In fact this series makes high demands on the reader’s intelligence and attention; I think it might best be characterized by saying that where Campbellian SF relies on indirect exposition to convey the background, Saunders largely relies on indirect narration to convey the foreground, as well. I find it a really fascinating project, and it seems not to have a large readership; I hope some of you may take a look at it.
Oh, and FYI, The March North is military fantasy, as the title might suggest. The story is about one of the Commonweal’s military forces being sent to stand off a Völkerwanderung . . .
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It’s one of the few examples that come to mind of forward-looking fantasy (i.e. the past was generally worse than the present, and people hope the future will be better); I’ve read that first book, and enjoyed it greatly.
As for the size of the readership… I do find the writing style needlessly obscure, with incorrect pronoun referents and such like that cause me to stop and think “aha, OK, what he meant to write was…” Combine that with deeply-nested sentences and inadequate punctuation, and someone mentioned by name but not actually introduced until half the book later even though everyone in the book knows who they are… and it’s much more work simply to read than it ought to be. It’s the sort of thing that an editor would have fixed, back when fiction books got edited.
My first hunch was The Lies of Locke Lamora (no dice, 2006), but the next stab landed: The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi (2017).
Scalzi is my writing patronus. He writes exactly the kind of fiction I write in my head… and I hope that as I develop as a writer I will continue to be more and more like him. He’s funny, he’s clever, he does smug arrogance and humble brilliance equally well, and the underpinnings of the story are engaging without being overwhelming.
It’s just good, solid, funny, very thoughtful sci-fi done really well. Scalzi is a craftsman, and I respect his work a lot.
I will say I loved Ancillary Justice (the sequel, Ancillary Sword, was a little weaker, but was okay), and The Guns Above was a fun little romp that I enjoyed a lot. Good steampunk is incredibly satisfying (and rare), but Bennis does a very respectable job with it.
Other than that… ooh, Leviathan Wakes sneaks in (2011), and I think it’s a solid bit of N-FTL inter-solar system sci-fi with some really well written characters and a setting that never feels like it gets away from Corey.
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Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series is very good. And Dreadnought, the second
and best (IMO) in the series, fits in the “last 10 years” window.
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Gosh, has it been that long??? That is a cracking good book, I love the Gentlemen Bastards series, but nothing like that first book fo how fresh and cheeky it was
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