melannen: Romulan Commander Ael T'Rllailleiu, in casual clothes, drawing the Sword From The Empty Chair (sword)
[personal profile] melannen2017-04-17 09:20 am

Happy Independence Day!

Let's celebrate the pending overthrow of tyrants everywhere!

Meanwhile, can we have a singalong?

A thousand eggs all nice and warm
Crack, crack, crack, a little chick is born.
Peep peep peep peep! Peep peep peep peep!
kaberett: A painting of a ship, taken from the cover of Ann Leckie's novel Ancillary Justice. (ancillary justice)
[personal profile] kaberett2017-03-08 12:19 pm

My tumblr reading this week

The hilarity of Breq and Seivarden are married??? plus some meta on what actually happened, in a legal sense.

What Even Are The Presger: some meta on how Presger society might be structured, that I at least found fascinating.

Meta on Breq.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett2016-04-10 01:08 pm

La Justice de l'Ancillaire

Yet more on pronouns in translation! The thing that's pulled out in this review that I particularly enjoy is in fact who uses tu and who uses vous when, and how that changes over the course of the book.

(no subject)

Hey folks, here are some Imperial Radch fan things you might be interested in!

Drunk History: Birth of the Imperial Radch (2281 words) by Eccentric_Hat
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie, Drunk History
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Anaander Mianaai, Lieutenant Tisarwat, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen | Breq
Summary:
My name is Lieutenant Tisarwat, and today I’m going to tell you about the rise of Anaander Mianaai.

(If you've never heard of Drunk History, no worries, I just stole the concept of someone getting drunk and talking about history--though the story is funnier if you've watched the very first one.)

The story is also available as an expertly and hilariously read podfic by my pal [personal profile] caminante, which from my completely biased position I recommend wholeheartedly. She recently recorded a really lovely podfic about Mercy of Kalr too.
ekaterinn: (Default)
[personal profile] ekaterinn2016-01-29 12:10 am

Questions for a book club meeting?

My sci-fi book club is reading Ancillary Justice, at my suggestion. Several of them are seemingly having trouble with Leckie's storytelling and stylistic choices, so I'm trying to come up with some questions to frame our discussion. Does anyone have any suggestions?
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett2015-12-19 10:14 pm

... I totally missed the awesome meta post when it went live last summer

Here we go!

That takes you to the start of the second cut. The beginning of the post is about Fury Road. Came across it because Ann Leckie refuses to either confirm or deny.

(For the record I am 100% on board with point 1 and... have been since Justice, I think.)
kaberett: A painting of a ship, taken from the cover of Ann Leckie's novel Ancillary Justice. (ancillary justice)
[personal profile] kaberett2015-10-07 02:51 am

Ancillary Mercy

Well, that is definitely a book that's been released, and I would love to know your thoughts!
kaberett: A painting of a ship, taken from the cover of Ann Leckie's novel Ancillary Justice. (ancillary justice)
[personal profile] kaberett2015-09-05 04:58 pm

Ancillary Mercy: Chapter 1 discussion!

Don't have Chapter 1 yet? You can get it by signing up for a low-traffic Ann Leckie-specific mailing list. (Warning: that link takes you to her 17th post in a series that's parcelling out chapter 1 in advance of publication. It is very nearly an essentially spoiler-free sentence, however.)

SO. What are your thoughts? :D
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett2015-09-03 10:22 pm

Bits and pieces!

As much of the morning prayer as exists (the flower of justice is peace); and in case you weren't aware, if you've pre-ordered Ancillary Mercy you can get Chapters 2 & 3 as a preview. (If you haven't, and if you haven't read chapter 1, that page also contains the place where you sign up for the mailing list to get chapter 1.)

Would folk like a discussion post for chapters 1-3, or to wait until the book comes out?
kaberett: A painting of a ship, taken from the cover of Ann Leckie's novel Ancillary Justice. (ancillary justice)
[personal profile] kaberett2015-04-11 01:18 pm
Entry tags:

aaaaaah more books announced :D

Over at io9 there's a pointer to a press release about more Ann Leckie books - one more in the Ancillary universe, to be released in autumn 2017, and then a whole new set of worlds after that!
nanila: little and wicked (mizuno: lil naughty)
[personal profile] nanila2015-01-30 12:13 pm

A random observation after finishing Ancillary Sword...

...Did anyone else find that their tea consumption increased whilst they were reading it and/or immediately afterward? I went from 2-3 cups a day to 5-6 in the last week.

The Radchaai drink a lot of tea. :P
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
[personal profile] kaberett2015-01-20 11:31 am

AAAAH

ANCILLARY MERCY IS FINISHED :D (but we don't get to see cover art yetttt)
damerell: (reading)
[personal profile] damerell2015-01-14 02:32 pm

Two Captains Meet

I wrote a drabble. It won't make any sense if you have not read C.S. Forester (or Leckie, but we can probably take that as a given). Because I am a monstrous egotist, I'm going to link to it here in case you like it:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3154466

It is entirely safe for work.
mirrorshard: (Default)

Tisarwat (disconnected thoughts)

Anaander Miaanai's motivation is interesting. In order for her plan as Breq tells us she understands it to make sense, AM would have had to be entirely convinced that the implants and the download would take in a host not genetically identical, that her own personality would continue to dominate, and that AM(T) would either not be discovered, or would be allowed to continue unhindered. It's a plan with multiple points of failure, no graceful fallback, and no contingencies, which seems uncharacteristic.

More interesting, though, is that AM deliberately sent AM(T) out of communication with the rest of herself. We can probably safely assume that fragments which are physically close find their identities hybridising—AM, and for that matter Justice of Toren, can probably be usefully modelled as a scale-free network. But AM(T) has no other selves there to reinforce them and correct for personality drift, even before Breq starts in on her. So my feeling is that (some of) AM expected to end up with a third-at-least actor, partly because not all of AM('s knowledge) went into AM(T), who becomes a stripped-down, rebooted, possibly even uncontaminated, version.

It's pretty clear that Breq is not correct in her assertion that the cooption process murders the victim—the whole narrative logic demands that—so what we end up with is a Tisarwat who does not fit Breq's judginess preconception of her character, an unpredictable free agent (insofar as Radchaai are at all free agents) with three millennia of political experience and some really bad poetry. And while Breq confines herself to acting on the smallest possible scale and with the shortest possible range she can manage (and it's still not very short) Tisarwat won't.
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc282014-12-16 04:57 pm

Accents in the audio book

I am (fairly slowly) working my way through the audible.co.uk version of Ancillary Justice which is read by the actor Adjoa Anjoh.  I am impressed both with her delivery of different accents for different characters, but also the selection of accents.  To this British reader listener, those accents are very well chosen to bring out the colonial and class themes of the book.
  • Breq-as-narrator and Breq/Justice of Toren One Esk as speaker, are RP English. Polite, formal, establishment, but not aristocratic.
  • Awn has a mild Yorkshire accent, not as strong as Sean Bean as Sharpe, but reminiscent. 
  • Skaaiat has a very upper-class slightly nasal English accent.
  • The Orsian characters, especially the high priest, have an African accent.  (and here I am, ignorant child of a colonising nation, unable to tell by ear if it is Kenyan, Nigerian, Ghanaian or other country; just "African")
  • The Tanmind characters have Afrikaans accents, which is fairly pointed given the Orsian accents.
  • The Nilters have USian accents, that go well with the "Frontier Western" feeling of Nilt.
  • Strigan has a German accent, playing into the fussy-German-doctor stereotype. edit but also lends some uncomfortable historical resonance to her discussion with Breq about genocide and refusing to follow orders.
The interesting choice is Anaander Mianaai, whose accent to my ears is rather closer to Breq's than Skaaiat's, at least in the body that visits Ors, though rather flatter, less pitch-variable.  Which given the other similarities between the two characters is, well, interesting.

(I haven't got enough through the book to meet any other Mianaai bodies and their voices, so maybe I'll come back with more thoughts then.)

So yes, I don't know who chose those accents, whether it was Anjoh or an editor, but I'm impressed by the understanding it shows.