Review: Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

I sustain myself on a diet rich in science fiction, and the genre is vast and much more varied than it is given credit for by people who consider it too nuanced for their taste, so you will perhaps forgive me if I say what I have to say about this book before I say why: This may very well be a modern classic.

Elizabeth Bear is a powerful voice in the realm of novels, having written more than a couple dozen thrilling and sage-worthy books with uncommon and uncanny main characters and worlds that are at once familiar and still entirely other. (Most recently, I've been impressed by her Karen Memory Adventures.)

Ancestral Night is itself a chase novel, a format classically built to entertain and keep the story as well as the audience focused as settings whiz by and characters sprint in and out, or else match stride with our heroes and villains, and it's a thrilling story! Set sometime-in-the-future, mankind has taken its place in the stars with other sentient races in a complex but seemingly generous collective (the Senarche) that permits the closest approximate to individual freedoms while maintaining necessary social responsibilities met or exceeded. Our narrator is one Haimey Dz, an engineer aboard a tugboat spaceship with a genetically-engineered-to-be-hot ace pilot named Connla and a lovable AI called Singer. They salvage space scraps for fuel, food, and money, far from the central seat of the Senarche, but close enough that they can still rely upon it for protection as well as purpose. One day, Haimey and her fellow crew score a salvage that is more dangerous than it even initially appeared! Now Haimey has an ancient alien parasite embedded in her arm and there's pirates after her and oh, hey, they did not even get the salvage they needed for food and fuel but there are pirates after them now and they have no idea how they're going to extricate themselves from this situation and still make enough money to survive as they have been. But nothing is as simple as it seems, and Haimey and friends soon find themselves swept up in the plottings of a mad rad pirate queen that will shake out everything Haimey has ever known to be who she is and, yeah, may or may not call into question the fate of the galaxy! 

Without saying too much about the plot of the novel, Ancestral Night does a brilliant job of narrating what would otherwise be a sprawling epic simultaneously verbose and void of character development as archetype and memes that consume the story for cheap emotional thrills and superficial attachments to immediate characters. There is a lot of heart in this novel, and my twitter feed is drowning in quotes I could not help but, perhaps, quixotically overshare. But you would too! Reading lines such as

• “We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A series of choices we have to make over, and over, and over again.”
• “Do we have to call it something?” “It's like an ent,” I said.
• “Anyway, one of the first things you learn in space is not to thrash. If you have nothing constructive to do, the most constructive thing you can do is often nothing at all. In a mindful sense, I mean. Thrashing is the thing that gets people killed. Not sitting still.”
• “Epiphanies are wonderful. I'm really grateful that our brains do so much processing outside the line of sight of our consciousnesses. Can you imagine how downright boring thinking would be if you had to go through all that stuff line by line?”
• “Busywork, they used to call it. There's absolutely no value to it. Economic value, or personal. There's value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There's no value in work for its own sake. It's just . . . churn. Anxiety. Doing stuff to be doing stuff (...)”

really encourages sharing. And let's not forget that this is a science fiction novel, and a stellar one at that! Gravity is a theme here, as well as a plot element. There's enough theoretical physics as well as immediately-comprehensible science in this novel to keep this from being another escapist fiction work. I found myself setting aside this novel a number of times to parse through encyclopedic explanations of things like black holes, current hypotheses on dark matter, solid-state electronics, spacewalks, the effects of lack of gravity on muscle mass and bone density, and, truly, maybe a few dozen other maybe-random things that helped enrich my knowledge base as well as give me better context for the things Bear tells us through Haimey and the others. Heck, we're given a very thorough and alien depiction of a giant mantis extraterrestrial cop, and very real psychological responses to that alien's actions and behaviors and somehow, as a reader, the focus is still on what is happening next. Which is a super-cool feat in any book, let alone a science fiction novel. A lot happens in this book, and this hardcover first edition clocks in at almost 500 pages, but it is a delight to read and has more than most novels' share of laughs and shocks. 

Now, I said this novel is a modern classic in the science fiction genre, and I stand by that, but as anyone who has ever read Dune or Lord of the Rings or a Cosmere novel or Neverwhere, it is difficult to explain why. Sometimes, we come a cross a book that is both intelligent and generous in its affection for the reader as well as everything the writer wanted to say, and we pore through its pages, awed by the scale of its plot and breadth of characters (in this case, all of outer space, with cats and space dragons and ancient sentient reference centers inhabiting stars and weaponized gravity), and become aware that we are holding something truly timeless and wonderful. We realize this, and we push our minds and hearts further into the pages before us because knowing we may have a classic in our hands is special.

- Frank

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