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This book follows Mahit, sent as ambassador from the small space station Lsel to a large empire, in order to investigate what happened to her predecessor and to try to prevent the Teixcalaanli Empire from inevitably absorbing that home station.

As you might expect, it's a story about empires (being terrible), but what I like about this book is that it gets at reasons why empires can be dangerously appealing apart from just raw power. Mahit simultaneously wants to protect her homeland but also wishes to be part of larger Teixcalaanli culture that is eating her own. But also, no matter how much poetry she's memorized, she will never truly be a part of this culture.

The reader quickly learns that Lsel secretly has machines that implant the memories of their predecessors, and has sent Mahit off with one of these devices. The extra internal perspective of Yskander commenting or just providing emotional memory on Mahit's experiences adds a fun additional layer to all of the events.

I love the politics; I love the writing; I love the characters. Highly recommended.

This is the book version of the theme-and-variations composition structure used in classical music and sometimes techno. The first chapter is a lovely and sad story in its own right; it almost feels like what Chekhov might have come up with if he'd been writing with today's gender and sexuality sensibility. Each thereafter takes mostly the same set of characters but with progressively larger twists - at first it's very much "what if protagonist had made a different choice at this key moment?", but it gradually shades over into wilder sci-fi speculations.

Strangely, it was the wilder variations that really made the book click for me. Before things got really weird I was starting to question how the book was going to sustain interest for 11 chapters, but North answered that question very effectively. I don't think it would have worked to go directly to those, the smaller variations feel needed for the coherency of the whole, but I loved the effect of the whole set together.

#SFFBookClub

Even though this isn't my first gender rodeo, Too Like the Lightning (and the rest of the Terra Ignota series) more than any other book broke my brain about gender a little. Ironically, this isn't necessarily even a series "about" gender; this is just an extra worldbuilding and characterization detail. I love it.

In world building Terra Ignota, I set out to imagine, not a future which no longer recognizes gender, but a future that pretends it doesn’t recognize gender, the long-term consequence of such a silence following a surface victory for gender, leaving old unconscious biases and systemic inequalities unaddressed.

This quote is from an incredible guest post by Ada Palmer that is well worth reading: web.archive.org/web/20211104030542/https://ninebookishlives.com/2021/11/02/book-tour-perhaps-the-stars-terra-ignota-4-by-ada-palmer-guest-post/. It's worth reading far more than the rest of my own post, so please go read it.

For me, it's hard to talk about Terra Ignota without also talking about Ancillary Justice and the Imperial Radch. In Radchaii culture, everybody gets an "ungendered" she as the pronoun they use. While reading the Ancillary books, I felt like I had to read "she" and then distance myself from my own cultural baggage of what "she" might mean while ALSO distancing myself from knowledge about physical gendered characteristics of some of the characters. The amount of work to keep it all straight^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H queerly differentiated definitely indicated to me how many internal assumptions I need to keep eliminating.

This book was like that, but ten times worse. Let me bullet point out the various layers going on here: - narrator deliberately and aggressively misgenders all other characters - very little textual information about what gender characters identify themselves as - narrator's gender choices are often done based on wild criteria - narrator also drops in information (often belatedly) about character's bodies - narrator is extremely unreliable, and also has been heavily edited

The worst part of it for me is that the narrator aggressively misgenders characters. This is an ostensibly "post-gender" world where people don't recognize gender, and Mycroft the narrator goes out of the way to use binary gendered pronouns for everybody. Especially with outside context, but even just in the text itself, I find this to be a deliberate choice, and it works to serve characterization and worldbuilding while also being deeply uncomfortable for the reader.

What's not fully clear is how much this misgendering bothers other people. Certainly, many characters find it extremely gauche, but textually it feels less like calling everybody the "wrong" gender, than just bringing up something that culturally should be unspoken. In one of the few chapters not narrated by Mycroft, Martin mentions editing Mycroft's language in previous chapters for "female MASONs" to restore the customary language. In another chapter, Thisbe is confused about Mycroft's choice of "he" for Dominic Seneschal. In both cases, it reads to me that Martin and Thisbe are making assumptions based on bodies here that they know the "real" underlying genders and are comfortable making those kinds of assumptions.

To say it differently, it is not as if the entire world of this book has suddenly decided to strongly identify as non-binary and so calling people by binary gendered pronouns is harmful; instead, it's a world where people mostly are trying to pretend that gender doesn't exist and are uncomfortable (like the reader!) when people bring it to the fore. That said, Sniper is the only character who I would put in a "non-binary" bucket, largely because we find out in a later book that it uses the pronoun it for itself. (There's also good reason for why it prefers this pronoun in how it wants to relate to the world.) That said, of course Mycroft also chooses misgendering here.

In terms of the reasoning that Mycroft uses to gender different characters, there's a wild set of reasons that are somewhat consistent even if unconventional. Here's a taste of this reasoning. Cousins exhibit female qualities, and therefore should be 'she'. However, Carlyle is a Cousin but is also a long-lost prince and therefore gets 'he'. Sniper is androgynous, but because Mycroft has chosen to make Sniper's rivals Ockham and Ganymede "he", then Sniper also becomes "he" to make their strengths feel parallel. Mycroft wants to make Su-Hyeon "she" based on their body, but because they are an apprentice to Vivien Ancelot, they get "he" so the apprentice matches the master. Dominic Seneschal dresses in 18th century curls and silks, and so "the woman Dominic Seneschal is the boldest and most masculine of men" and gets "he". Jean-Jacques Rousseu gets "she", also for reasons. Chagatai is "she" not because of their cooking, but because of their motherly protectiveness. And so on.

Finally, Mycroft is an unreliable and heavily edited narrator to boot. Book two early on says "Don’t trust the gendered pronouns Mycroft gives people, they all come from Madame". Martin says later that they have come back and edited out some of Mycroft's gendered language of MASONs. Mycroft has also been given a lot of instructions while writing this history, and some such are things like being ordered to give Carlyle "he" pronouns. It's an extra layer of narrative distortion on top of everything else. It makes me pay extra close attention to a text where I'm already trying to hold some gendered ideas at arm's length.

In this post www.exurbe.com/gender-in-terra-ignota-queership-repost/, Ada Palmer interestingly writes that she reread the outline for every character while imagining them with different pronouns to understand how it might change the reader's feelings and expectations. This entire book is intensely uncomfortable from a gender perspective, but it's also one that very clearly is trying to be productive rather than malicious with that discomfort. I could imagine that somebody could read this at a more surface level and wonder if they're smelling TERF somewhere in here. However, it's very clear to me that Palmer is not saying that binary gender is the true and singular reality that we cannot deny, but rather more that the weight of historical cultural gender can not be easily waved away and that there are pieces of ourselves there that we shouldn't abandon just because the whole thing smacks of gender.

In the end, it is hard to keep this layer cake of uncertain gender all together as a reader. Unlike the Imperial Radch, it's murky what these characters believe about themselves, yet I'm still trying to hold onto as much of unbiased view as possible. And yet, I'm bombarded by constant misgendering (maybe?) and also (unwanted!) details about bodies, both of which I'm trying to note as a careful reader but also not have these details color my view.

Does it distress you, reader, how I remind you of their sexes in each sentence?

Yes, oh god yes, please stop, Mycroft. This book feels like my own non-binary experience, where every pronoun feels like a slap in the face.

If anything, the true personal discomfort is how much work I have to do to try keep my own gendered thoughts at bay through all of this. Even if I (like the characters in the book) feel like I'm past language and bodies signifying anything past what they literally are, it's clear that I still have a lot more work to do to unlearn my own cultural constructs of gender and I can't pretend that baggage isn't there.

It's comfort reread season over here. This book has enough reviews and awards it doesn't need another general review from me on the pile, so mostly I'm wondering about what makes this book a comfort reread for me (and many others)?

Partially it's that thematically it hits really strong notes. It's a story about justice, and revenge against an empire. It's about not trusting empires, no matter who is running them at the time. But it's also about second chances, leaning on friends, finding new ways of being, and the value of small actions even when you can't solve everything.

And even if the tyrant’s protestations were insincere, which they ultimately had to be, no matter her intentions at this moment, still she was right. My actions would make some sort of difference, even if small.

The first time I read this book about revenge on an empire at war with itself, my expectations were that the next book would be some sort of escalation, but instead it went much smaller. In retrospect, I'm not sure the worldbuilding and the stakes could have been escalated without it becoming a heroic arc for Breq (or somebody else) defeating an empire and saving the universe. It just isn't that kind of story.

Instead, this book feels much more about the value of small and local actions. The mutiny at Ime is a news story in the background, but it carries so much thematic (and worldbuilding) weight and feels like part of a through line for the trilogy. In a world where I continually despair of my lack of leverage to make the world better, this message about doing what I can where I can is one I continually need to hear.

Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choosing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn’t need to do that here. I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was home.

I am always a sucker for a story with some gender in it, so I know this is part of why I come back to this book. I love the humor about Breq not understanding other culture's gender and getting it wrong. The quote above resonates for me in the trans sense of being in a space where you can drop the mental worry about people misgendering you; it's a reversed feeling of observer vs observee from the quote, but the mental relief at removing the mental gender work feels tangibly similar.

The first time I read this book, I could tell that my brain had to defend itself against bringing in extra gendered baggage for the she pronoun. I don't know if it's because this is a reread or if I've been tested by the much more gender adversarial Too Like the Lightning, but this time around my internal observation was that I didn't feel like I parsed "she" any differently than "they".