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A review by nikomedes
Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear
2.0
Desperately needed a firm editor who wouldn’t baby the author. So much of this book is repetitive, first-person digressions repeating concepts or thoughts explained chapters, pages, and even scant paragraphs before. The density of this book is totally pointless.
Setting that aside, this book aspires to be a character study as much as a scifi novel, but unfortunately works from the perspective of a character who spends so much time picking herself apart she makes the moral and conceptual ramifications of a humanity able to manage their own brain chemistry at a whim boring.
This book has also been touted for its diversity, but recent revelations about the author’s past and current troubled history with race only serve to make this diversity obviously shallow. (Search for “racefail fanlore” for past info, and look to the accounts of mentees of color who worked with Bear for current info.) The protagonist is supposed to be a black lesbian, but aside from a few mentions of her brown skin (in one instance likened to cocoa), you could be forgiven for finding nothing authentic in her character as a black woman considering how much she fawns over ancient (in her time) British literature and finds past humanity on the whole to be “atavistic and barbaric primates.” Her lesbianism boils down to a disinterest in men and repeatedly calling her antagonist throughout the book a “sexy bad girl pirate.” As a lesbian myself, I saw nothing to relate to here. “Diversity” has become a kind of meaningless buzzword, but please, have higher standards for representation— for yourself and others.
I give two stars because I do like a bit of hard scifi and a lot of the tech and phenomena in this story at least have an intriguing skin of scientific jargon. There are interesting concepts too: “rightminding” and mental biochemistry self-regulation, the extremes to which that could be taken, a galactic government built on social debt, white space drives, and surgical modification to optimize for zero G environments, to name a few. Unfortunately, that’s all swimming in a sea of repetitive, self-anxious rambling and blunt force attempts at examining moral relativism. I cannot recommend this book.
Setting that aside, this book aspires to be a character study as much as a scifi novel, but unfortunately works from the perspective of a character who spends so much time picking herself apart she makes the moral and conceptual ramifications of a humanity able to manage their own brain chemistry at a whim boring.
This book has also been touted for its diversity, but recent revelations about the author’s past and current troubled history with race only serve to make this diversity obviously shallow. (Search for “racefail fanlore” for past info, and look to the accounts of mentees of color who worked with Bear for current info.) The protagonist is supposed to be a black lesbian, but aside from a few mentions of her brown skin (in one instance likened to cocoa), you could be forgiven for finding nothing authentic in her character as a black woman considering how much she fawns over ancient (in her time) British literature and finds past humanity on the whole to be “atavistic and barbaric primates.” Her lesbianism boils down to a disinterest in men and repeatedly calling her antagonist throughout the book a “sexy bad girl pirate.” As a lesbian myself, I saw nothing to relate to here. “Diversity” has become a kind of meaningless buzzword, but please, have higher standards for representation— for yourself and others.
I give two stars because I do like a bit of hard scifi and a lot of the tech and phenomena in this story at least have an intriguing skin of scientific jargon. There are interesting concepts too: “rightminding” and mental biochemistry self-regulation, the extremes to which that could be taken, a galactic government built on social debt, white space drives, and surgical modification to optimize for zero G environments, to name a few. Unfortunately, that’s all swimming in a sea of repetitive, self-anxious rambling and blunt force attempts at examining moral relativism. I cannot recommend this book.