Russell Letson Reviews Translation State by Ann Leckie

Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit US 978-0-31628-971-9, $29.00, 432 pp, hc) June 2023.

Speaking of horror, Ann Leckie’s Radchaai world is one of terrible events, cruel forces, and human and inhuman cultures with conflicting agendas, attitudes, and epistemologies – right next to civi­lized social rituals and lots of tea. Translation State is set in this universe, but, like Provenance (2017), outside Radch space proper, though still within its considerable sphere of influence. And also like Provenance, this is a story of outsid­ers. The novel’s three viewpoint characters are emotionally and socially not-quite-settled people feeling their ways to their places in the world and comfort with themselves.

There is also a dollop of Austenian social machineries in the opening chapter. When the Matriarch of the Athtur family finally dies, lifelong caretaker Enae finds hirself not quite disinherited (as her aunts and cousins are) but displaced: ‘‘nearly sixty and no career, no friends, no lovers, no marital partners, no children,’’ and with no position in a completely reconfigured (via bankruptcy and takeover) family. What­ever hir sex/gender (and it is never explicitly explained), Enae codes ‘‘maiden aunt,’’ and sie is not so much unwelcome in the new dispensa­tion as a leftover, an anomaly, who is neverthe­less to be ‘‘provide[d] for.’’ So the new, nouveau riche Matriarch arranges a sinecure diplomatic position that amounts to an invitation for Enae to make herself scarce – ‘‘to travel, and maybe look into an old puzzle if you feel like it.’’ It’s a make-work project: to locate a fugitive for the Radchaai Translators Office, a two-hundred-year-old cold case that no one (other, perhaps, than the Translators) expects to go anywhere. But after decades of looking after her ill-tempered, dictatorial Grandmaman, Enae tends to take hir duties seriously, even if it means leaving home for the first time, seeing far worlds, and mixing with all manner of strangers.

On a station in another polity, Reet Hluid has also led a quiet, routine-dominated life, working his maintenance shifts and viewing episodes of Pirate Exiles of the Death Moons, until an exile activist group tags him as not only a fellow exile but a possible descendant of a leadership clan. Beneath their cultural preservationist facade, the Hikipi nurse a set of centuries-old grievances and resentments, and some of them engage in terrorism. Reet, an orphan taken in by a loving foster family in infancy, is tempted by the possi­bility of ‘‘the thing he had always wished for and always known he could never have: a history. An identity that was part of something else, not just Reet, solitary. Alone.’’ But the possible identities that he finds are not at all comforting.

Somewhere else entirely, Qvam is a first-person narrator, a juvenile who will perhaps grow up to be a Translator – unless he Fails or one of his crèche-mates eats him. Readers of Ancillary Sword who recall Translator Dlique will recog­nize the odd sensibility: ‘‘Eat with a spoon. Put clothes on your feet. Sit on the chairs…. Excrete into the special excretion receptacles!… And never, ever open anyone up.’’ Qvam’s chapters constitute a kind of nonhuman bildungsroman, a progress from Little to Small to Middle to Edge, along the way coping with the urge to ‘‘open up’’ a crèche-mate and investigate the organs and limbs and sometimes wondering, ‘‘Why can’t we just eat a Teacher?’’

As Enae’s, Reet’s, and Qvam’s chapters gradu­ally converge, the personal-scale conflicts and tensions in all three threads play out against a background of much, much larger problems. The big-picture issue at stake is the Treaty that defines the relationship between several species (including humankind) and the vastly powerful, enigmatic, never-seen Presger: who exactly is covered by it, and what might happen if its care­fully crafted species definitions and distinctions were to be upset? Enae’s gently persistent inves­tigation involves Reet in a Treaty jurisdictional issue, and then Qvam becomes part of it, and then a Radchaai ambassador and Presger Trans­lators and Teachers and additional interested parties (including the ancient ship AI Sphene from Ancillary Sword) join the negotiations, and then Hikipi partisans upset the game table quite dramatically. As the narrative machinery winds tighter, the narrative mode moves from life stories to courtroom (or diplomatic intrigue) drama to physical adventure before settling on a resolution.

One thing that holds together this complex mix of characters and species agendas is Leckie’s writerly chops – even in the face of very unpleas­ant possible consequences, there are moments when I had to smile or even laugh out loud. The ship-AI Sphene, with its detached, snarky truth­fulness about its nature, motives, and history, is one source – a voice that had me thinking (again) of Iain M. Banks’ ship minds. And Enae’s low-key, patient, empathetic approach puts eir at the book’s moral center. Reet and Qvam are beings in progress, with uncertain trajectories, but Enae is (though sie does not quite realize it) a stable and complete person, if one who is only now coming into eir full competence. And eir decency seems to crystalize and reinforce the better natures of those around eir.

It’s a story about nature, identity, role – the need to belong – and pathological versions of that need: to invent an identity or place in the world, and to deny or control roles and identities of others. And throughout, it’s a love story, and a story about love (which love stories are, implicitly or explicitly), and, up the abstraction ladder, it’s about relationships – familial, cultural, po­litical, affectional, cross-species – healthy and otherwise.

This review and more like it in the May 2023 issue of Locus.

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