★★★★ (4.4 of 5)

• Full Title: Ancestral Night
• Author: Elizabeth Bear
• Year: 2019 (mine was library hardcover)
• Pages: 499
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Saga Press
• ISBN 978-1-53440-298-0 (library hardcover)
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

One of just a handful of people to win multiple Hugos after winning the Astounding Award for best new writer (others include Orson Scott Card and Spider Robinson), Elizabeth Bear’s latest novel Ancestral Night continues to make the case that she’s deserving. Ancestral Night is epic in scale, far-reaching both in distance and time, and explores the boundaries of what it means to be human and sentient. It is also a tale of moral exploration, with a load of political philosophy thrown in for good measure.

Haimey Dz, the first-person narrator, is an engineer on a salvage ship crewed only by herself, the pilot Connla, an AI named Singer, and two Terran felines. When they happen upon a shocking scientific discovery, get attacked by space pirates, and Haimey is infected with an alien parasite — all during the same incident — it sets in motion a chain of events that takes them across the galaxy, and even outside of it, in order to solve some of the deepest mysteries known to sentient beings.

 

Points For...

I identified solidly with the primary character, despite Haimey being a technologically-altered, brown-skinned lesbian woman with four hands. Her neurotic second-guessing of her past/current/future actions; her resentment of (and yet longing for) the clade (cult) that raised her; her lifelong struggle to define herself; and even her hesitancy to medicate herself based on past experiences with addiction and overmedication. Thinking back, I could not come up with another fictional character that I’ve ever identified with as much as Haimey Dz. (And it helped me realize that many of the characters I had thought I identified with were actually characters whom I wanted to identify with.)

Plenty of other characters were developed, and there were even minor arcs in some of them too — including her pilot Connla and the pirate Zanya Farweather. The fictional setting was amazingly well-developed. The primary government in the Milky Way is the Synarche, a jointly-ruled conglomerate of several “syster” sentient species, a handful of which were described in detail — like law enforcement officer Cheeirilaq who loosely resembles a two-meter praying mantis with some spiderlike features and more limbs than either, or the plant-based sentient Colonel Habren, who runs an out-of-the-way space station. Maybe the most interesting were the Ativahikas, ancient ship-sized creatures who subsist in the spaces between star systems. Humans, and presumably other sentients in the Synarche, are “rightminded” — have had their biochemistry and thinking adjusted to curb their more anti-social instincts — while pirates and non-Synarche folk like Farweather go completely without adjustment of any kind. The tension between these two ideologies is a source of constant inner dialog for Dz.

Plot-wise, one thing I liked was the regular interference of events with Dz’s plans — plans she had painstakingly overthought and reconsidered — because real life is like that. It reminded me of how many times I’ve set out a goal or plan for myself only to go through unexpected events that make all the previous plans irrelevant.

 

Points Off For...

I found little to dislike in the book. One irritation I bumped into was the narrator referring back to “when I decided” or “when I realized” as if it was something I had recently read, but I didn’t remember those decisions or realizations because they had been only minor parts of previous narration, hidden inside paragraphs of intropection and inner dialog. Or because in the midst of the decision process I got the impression that the opposite had been decided. I’m not describing this phenomenon well, maybe because I don’t often see it (and it didn’t happen often here). I also second-guessed myself here, wondering whether I was mis-remembering the previous pages or had misinterpreted the previous text. I also wondered if this was intentional on the author’s part — because this author is clearly brilliant — as a way to show how real humans do this: believe they have previously decided or realized something a certain way as part of the post-act self-justification process. I know I’ve done it.

There were a few obvious editing errors, like “I just had to keeping Farweather from winning” (should have read “keep”) and a couple of places where I’m certain the author/editor mixed up the non-human species, saying “Koregoi” when they meant “Jothari” (or vice versa).

These were minor and did little to diminish my enjoyment of the book.

 

Conclusion

Parts of the story went over my head, I think. I remember from reading a previous story by Bear that she is sharp and knows her stuff intimately, or at least writes well enough to give that impression without being overbearing. But most of it was just flat-out fun, mixed in with thought-provocation, grim peril, heart-stopping nick-of-time escapes, and a heroine who is overtly relatable.

It felt a lot like “pure old-school sci-fi” but without the atavistic old-school vibe where everyone of importance is a white male.

 

 

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