You know, I just read Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, the book that won all the awards last time around. The thing you might miss in all the talk about its playing with language and gender roles is that that book is an old-time cracking space opera about a struggle for control of an interstellar empire, with adventure and intrigue. It has some experimental aspects concerning the psychology of distributed multi-body entities, but nothing less accessible than, say, Vernor Vinge.
...Ancillary Sword looks to be less wide-screen, so that might be more open to "this is just a literary novel" complaints, though I'm only a few pages in. But, nevertheless, the book that won big last year was a book full of fightin' and spaceships and revenge and stuff. Which makes me suspect that any objections to its sweep would have had more to do with Girl Cooties.
Ancillary Justice was moderately ambitious in multiple ways that, added together, made it seem more complex than it was. It's a good book, but (and?) it's good in the way genre likes: it's a space opera from a contemporary perspective. In short, yes, Girl Cooties was the motivation.
Ancillary Sword is more straightforward and smaller-scale—not as widescreen, but not as literary/New in its affect. It's more like a "merely" solid SF novel. Not a criticism, I enjoyed it a lot. But as an award recipient, its aura is both less remarkable and less objectionable, to people who might have objected to the first.
I expect that most of the criticism from the Sad Puppies and their ilk is that it's not a book by Men for Men doing Manly Men Things with other Manly Men.
This is a group of people where "normal" = White Heterosexual Men as I learned when I was castigated for using the term "cisgender" (the opposite of "transgender;" it's not a terribly new usage and it's quite in keeping with similar usages such as "Transalpine Gaul" and "Cisalpine Gaul") by people who said, "Oh, you mean 'normal.'"
It's quite possible that the fact that you often can't tell whether some of the major characters are male or female (because the POV character can't, and also calls everyone "she" because her primary language doesn't grammatically mark it) seriously disturbed some readers, though you'd think that for science-fiction readers circa 2014 this kind of detail ought to be old hat.
Leckie’s gender choices are actually a little bit more complicated that that.
For personal pronouns, yeah, she uses the English feminine pronouns. For terms relating to close family relations, she also uses the feminine terms, even though gender-neutral terms are available: mother, sister, and daughter instead of parent, sibling, and child.
For terms relating to military and political hierarchy, however, we get the masculine: sir and lord, instead of ma’am and lady.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2015-01-10 09:10 am
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Ancillary Sword is more straightforward and smaller-scale—not as widescreen, but not as literary/New in its affect. It's more like a "merely" solid SF novel. Not a criticism, I enjoyed it a lot. But as an award recipient, its aura is both less remarkable and less objectionable, to people who might have objected to the first.
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This is a group of people where "normal" = White Heterosexual Men as I learned when I was castigated for using the term "cisgender" (the opposite of "transgender;" it's not a terribly new usage and it's quite in keeping with similar usages such as "Transalpine Gaul" and "Cisalpine Gaul") by people who said, "Oh, you mean 'normal.'"
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For personal pronouns, yeah, she uses the English feminine pronouns. For terms relating to close family relations, she also uses the feminine terms, even though gender-neutral terms are available: mother, sister, and daughter instead of parent, sibling, and child.
For terms relating to military and political hierarchy, however, we get the masculine: sir and lord, instead of ma’am and lady.
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--Dave, will verbally smackdown without needing to think