Humming Betrayal

Title:

Ancillary Justice

Author:

Ann Leckie

Publisher:

Orbit, 2013

ISBN

ISBN 031624662X

I don't particular like war stories. Futuristic war stories are no exception. Typically authors who indulge in military scifi focus on weaponry, and they love to write about how fast a missile flies, or how quickly a defense reacts. There is obviously a market for that sort of thing, but it ain't me. So when I realized that Ann Leckie's book Ancillary Justice was about a soldier I was a bit disappointed.

But I judged too soon.

One Esk is a troop of slaves, human bodies that were killed for any number of reasons and harvested to become ancillaries, slave soldiers ridden by the omniscient AI that runs the warship Justice of Toren. Everyone treats ancillaries as if they were mindless, with no will of their own, but maybe everyone is mistaken. As One Esk is forced to be party to two monstrous acts of betrayal it decides to test its freedom to act, and exact its justice for the betrayals. This will be a bit of a challenge, since the target is the empire's omnipotent tyrant.

So, no, it's not military scifi. While Leckie has to mention weapons and armor in the course of the story, they aren't the featured characters that I worried about. Instead Leckie concentrates her attention on the real character: a slave, newly freed, who must discover that she is as human as anyone she meets, and has the freedom to act, and, more importantly, be responsible for her actions. It's a marvelous examination of moral responsibility and what it means to be human.

The story takes place against the background of an empire on the cusp of rebellion. It's the first book of a loose trilogy, and Leckie allows us to glimpse beyond the frame of her story, giving the feeling of a larger story waiting to be told. I particularly enjoyed her description of the starting setting, a small town, recently conquered, and divided against itself by tradition and prejudice. It's the background against which we get to know One Esk, and realize that there may well be more to these slave soldiers than their masters guess.

Ancillary Justice is the third of the 2014 Hugo nominees that I've read. It is Leckie's breakout novel, and it fully deserves its nomination. I strongly recommend it, and I'm looking forward to reading its sequel, Ancillary Sword

Cousins

Title:

Parasite

Author:

Mira Grant

Publisher:

Orbit, 2013

ISBN

ISBN 0316218952

In her first foray into the land of zombies (Newsflesh), Grant proposed a scientific reason for zombies that seemed scarily plausible. She did her homework then, and now she's done even more homework. If you haven't heard of the idea that too few parasites are bad for us, you might read up on Helminthic Theory. Yep, sounds legit.

But seriously, there are people looking into the question if there is such a thing as being too clean. Whether this turns out to be anything other than a crackpot notion I have no idea. While I'm not about to start swilling sewer water, it's also true that bacteria compete with each other, even in places like our mouth and our gut, and if not enough of the good or at least harmless bacteria are around, then nasties will take over and wreak havoc.

In Mira Grant's book Parasite (book one of the Parasitology series), Doctors Banks, Cale, and Jablonsky have developed a genemod variety of tapeworm, the Intestinal Guardian (TM), which, if ingested by a human being, will keep the host healthy, supplying drug dosage if needed, and suppressing excessive immune responses like dog or cat allergies. The story's main character, Sally Mitchell, also has one of these tapeworms when she gets into an accident. She's in a coma from brain damage, and her family is about to disconnect her, when she sits up in bed.

As far as anyone knows, the tapeworm will not resurrect you from the dead.

The action catches up with Sally six years later. She has by now relearned to speak. Reading is still very difficult, but from all appearance things are looking up. She even has a boyfriend who cares for her. And then people start getting the sleeping sickness (a lovely euphemism for turning into zombies), and SymboGen, the makers of the tapeworm, seem to be hiding something.

I kind of started suspecting what was going on almost from the beginning - this is a story by Mira Grant, after all. Still, rather than making everything predictable, Grant kept me on the edge of my seat for all five hundred pages. Sally is a recovering amnesiac, and her recovery may strike people who know a little bit about, for example, retraining TBI patients or stroke victims, as if Sally is doing far too well. The mystery ingredient is obviously the tapeworm, but we don't know quite what role it is playing until about halfway into the story (when it's still a mystery to Sally and her friends).

Yes, from that point on you'll probably know what is really going on, and you'll be wondering how Sally and her boyfriend Nathan haven't caught on yet. Well, there are perfectly good reasons, of course. Meanwhile the mere fact that you know will not at all detract from the story.

Grant's story takes place in a near future California. We're not told what all has happened, but a fair amount obviously has. Maybe some of that backstory will be featured in the sequels, but it doesn't really matter. It's a believable version of the future. You will feel right at home, I'm sure.

This is the second of the Hugo nominees I've read. It is definitely a worthy nominee, and I highly recommend it.