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Guest Post by Ann Leckie: Personhood and Song
Ann Leckie has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, a lunch lady, and a recording engineer. The author of many published short stories, and secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband, children, and cats.
What does it mean to be human? It’s a really difficult question to answer, and one that science fiction and fantasy are particularly well-suited to tackling. Not that there’s ever been any sort of simple answer even (especially?) through fiction, but SF&F can present us with a range of characters that test the boundaries of what it means to be a person, and what that might imply about what it means to be human.
Androids and artificial intelligences are a favorite vehicle for this sort of exploration. If you build a machine that looks or acts just like a person, what’s the difference? Is there one? Is that difference important? Why? It was a question I was going to have to consider, a question that was, in some ways, going to be crucial to my novel, Ancillary Justice.
The narrator of Ancillary Justice is the troop carrier Justice of Toren. And also a unit of twenty bodies slaved to Justice of Toren, the ancillary unit Justice of Toren One Esk. My narrator is an artificial intelligence that’s also made up of human bodies. What sort of being is this?
WoGF Review: The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski
Allie McCarn (Allie), reviews science fiction and fantasy books on her blog Tethyan Books. She has contributed many great book reviews to WWEnd including several Grand Master reviews featured in our blog. Allie has just kicked off a new blog series for WWEnd called New Voices where she’ll be reviewing the debut novels of relatively new authors in the field.
Editor’s Note: This review counts for September.
The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski
Published: Tor 2011
Awards Won: John W. Campbell Memorial Award
The Book :
“Jennifer Ramos Kennedy, a girl from a rich and politically influential family (a distant relation descended from the famous Kennedy clan), whose twin brother has died in an accident and left her bereft, is about to enter her freshman year at Frontera College.
Frontera is an exciting school built with media money, and a bit from tribal casinos too, dedicated to educating the best and brightest of this future world. We accompany Jenny as she proceeds through her early days at school, encountering surprises and wonders and some unpleasant problems. The Earth is altered by global warming, and an invasive alien species called ultraphytes threatens the surviving ecosystem. Jenny is being raised for great things, but while she’s in school she just wants to do her homework, go on a few dates, and get by.” ~WWEnd.com
Book Giveaway: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
It’s been awhile since we last had a contest and the folks at Orbit have given us the chance top rectify that by providing us with an autographed copy of Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice to give away to one lucky winner. You’ve likely already heard about this one. It was just released yesterday in the US and UK and has been making the rounds all over the blogosphere with much fanfare. This one looks a winner, folks, and I was sorely tempted to keep it for myself. This is another re-tweet this tweet, share on Facebook or post in the comments below contest so you know what to do. We’ll run this ’till next Wednesday when we’ll announce our winner.
In addition to the contest we’ll be featuring an author interview and a guest post from Ann Leckie herself later this week so stay tuned for those.
Ancillary Justice
by Ann Leckie
JUSTICE WILL COME TO THE EMPIRE
On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.
Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren–a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.
An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. And only one purpose–to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.
Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge: August Review Poll Winners
The Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge August review poll is now closed and we have our three winners! We let this one run to the end of September because we got a wicked late start after WorldCon.
August WoGF Review Poll Winners:
Congrats to Rob, Nadine and Pat and thanks to everyone who participated in the poll. Our winners will find an Amazon gift card, $25, $15 and $10 respectively, waiting for them in their email inbox.
There are still 4 more months of prizes to be awarded so if you didn’t win this time there are still more chances.
Month of Horrors / Hell is Adaptations: Manhunter
Watching Michael Mann’s Manhunter is something like watching a now-famous actor in a commercial filmed at the beginning of his career; except that here the actor is a character, and the character is Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Yes, this year’s Month of Horrors will feature a crossover with our Hell is Adaptations series in an overview of all the films adapting the Hannibal Lecter novels.
What is especially noticeable to fans of later Lecter films is the scarcity of the popular cannibal in this 1986 crime thriller. It seems a little silly to assume that anybody would need an introduction to the character of “Hannibal the Cannibal,” but perhaps a quick overview is in order for the few newcomers. Originally created for Thomas Harris’ 1981 crime novel Red Dragon, Dr. Hannibal Lecter is an extremely intelligent serial killer from Eastern Europe who ate his victims and avoided detection and arrest for many years before being caught almost by chance by FBI agent William Graham, a man who has the ability to empathize with killers and figure them out from the inside. Dr. Lecter worked both in an emergency room and later as a psychiatrist, and used his medical knowledge to commit and hide his violent crimes. In many of the media adaptations of the Lecter novels, the cannibal doctor often serves as a guide to help the FBI apprehend other serial killers, though usually with the intention of playing both sides of the game.
WoGF Review: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente
Alix Heintzman (alixheintzman) recently earned herself a graduate degree in history from the University of Vermont, and has circled back to her Old Kentucky Home with her partner Nick Stiner. She spends her time semi-desperately repairing the abandoned house they just bought, writing history high school curriculum, and reading fantasy books. She’s dipping her toes into the blogosphere at The Other Side of the Rain to sharpen her writing skills and also not-incidentally talk about the books she loves. And to spare Nick from endless discussions of plot details in books he hasn’t read.
In the Night Garden is essentially Arabian Nights, if Scheherazade had been a feminist literary critic with a working knowledge of world mythology and a wicked sense of irony. Certainly, this Scheherazade wouldn’t have ended up marrying the Sultan who put his first 1,000 wives to death.
It starts with a young girl with dark tattoos around her eyes: tiny, black letters spelling out hundreds of fairy tales. A young prince becomes obsessed with the girl’s stories, and very soon the reader and the young prince are both sitting in rapt silence in the night garden, listening. For maybe five pages, you feel you’re in comfortable, predictable territory. The tattooed girls tells of a prince who runs away from home and discovers a witch’s hut in the woods. Ah, you think, if he doesn’t watch his mouth he’ll be set three impossible tasks. Or he’ll be transformed into a pig, or a beast, or wind up living in an enchanted castle waiting for his true love to see past his ugliness and marry him. But the rules are different in the night garden. Instead, the witch woman emerges, horribly scarred, and tells the prince her story. The nesting stories continue, each one more unearthly and brilliant and unpredictable than the last.
