Translation State

I hadn't heard that this one was coming until it appeared, and it was a delightful surprise. To my mind Leckie is the greatest produce of space opera since Iain M. Banks. In some ways this book was the most like a Culture novel to date, but it's an injustice to discuss her work just by comparison.

The story, which cycles through three points of view, wrestles with the slippery, dynamic notions of boundaries, relationships, and identities. These three things are part and parcel of one another - you cannot have one without the others. We cannot systematise these things, but only live through them and work at them, rather than fix and determine them for good. The whole story is a process of grappling with that fact.

Most of the characters are pleasant and sympathetic. This is refreshing in a field which, to this reader at least, so often makes a virtue of cynicism. That's not to say they don't have their flaws, nor are they entirely unproblematic, but they are not out to wow you with how gritty and uncompromisingly grim they are.

Leckie is brilliant.

It feels like there must have been piles more POV characters in this book than the others but now trying to remember after the fact there were only three? Regardless, I sometimes had trouble tracking what was happening and integrating events into the core thread of the story.

Whereas I tend to classify the Ancillary trio as stories about consent that use gender and identity as world-building color, much of Translation State struck me as the inverse— a story fundamentally about identity where lack of consent is used to highlight or intensify the characters’ struggles to know themselves. The denouement however ties everything together: /informed/ consent, or gtfo.

Bonus brain-bending geometry puzzles and backstory for some of the weirder moments from translators in previous books.

CN for squick-inducing body horror (experienced by someone not expecting it), non-squick-inducing body horror (experienced by someone for whom it is normal), and neutral/normalized gore and violence. Brief analogue to sexual assault, sustained analogue to SA-induced PTSD.