`TRANSLATION STATE'S' LECKIE ON OCTAVIA BUTLER, AI AND MORE
“I feel like science fiction and fantasy are using different sets of toys to examine some of the same things. Not always, frequently.” — Ann Leckie, novelist
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There's something almost otherworldly about Ann Leckie's success.
After the publication of her first book, 2013's “Ancillary Justice,” she won the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards — something no other novel had ever achieved — as well as other top honors. That Leckie's wins came as the science fiction community was experiencing its own version of the culture wars — some of it quite unpleasant — made her sweep that much more impressive.
Since then, she's completed the Imperial Radch trilogy, the stand-alone “Provenance” and 2019's fantasy, “The Raven Tower.” And now she returns to the Radch universe with “Translation State,” out from Orbit Books.
This new novel blends mystery, science fiction, family drama and a bit of horror in which a low-level maintenance worker, a translator for a dangerous alien race and a diplomat become enmeshed in an interspecies incident that could threaten the peace treaty currently keeping the universe safe.
While her rescue dog Van Buren was downstairs with her husband, the St. Louisbased Leckie generously made time to discuss creating a fictional universe, experimenting with pronouns in fiction, writing fantasy vs. sci-fi and more.
Our Zoom conversation, which was wide-ranging and full of laughter, has been edited for space and clarity.
Q
In the new book, “Translation State,” you have action, suspense and even horror, but you also create relationships between characters who are adopted — or are attempting to make a new family — that are gentle and very moving.
A
Thank you. My mom was adopted. One of the things that I experienced, and I'm sure my mom did when she was younger and it would infuriate her, people would say to me, “But do you know who your real grandparents are?” I'd be like, “I don't know who my biological grandparents are, but my real grandparents are those folks in Toledo, Ohio, who are my mom's parents.” I got kind of sensitive to that. That's part of why I'm like, adoption is a thing and those are real families. I wanted a positive portrayal of that.
Q
You said you wrote this novel during the pandemic, when it was a struggle for many to focus on reading and writing. What did you read during that time?
A
I must have read Martha Wells' Murderbot books, like, five times over the past couple of years. First of all, they're awesome. Secondly, there's also something very comforting about Murderbot.
A lot of times we talk about the best and most important art as being rough, with edges, and disturbing, and that's a thing that art can and should do. But I think sometimes we look down a bit on art that's comforting. And there's something about Murderbot that's just very comforting. I found myself reading Murderbot over and over again — that and Katherine Addison's “The Goblin Emperor.”
[Editor's note: The admiration is mutual. In 2021, Wells talked to me about Leckie's novels: “Her books are a big influence on me. And have you read her fantasy novel, “The Raven Tower”? That's really good.”]
Q
You created an entire universe for your Imperial Radch books. What's it like to construct a universe?
A
I ran across a quote by somebody several years ago and I thought it was hilarious because it was right: They said being a professional writer is like having homework for the rest of your life. Which is true, but you only have to do the fun parts of the homework.
When I get stuck, I love to go to the library and walk up and down the history and anthropology shelves and just pull off any titles that call to me. There's usually something in there that will help me. So that's part of why the universe is so big, because I just love to look for all that stuff. To me, that's the fun part.
Actually, it's an illusion of the universe being really big. A trick to make the universe seem big is to have lots of sort of ragged edges trailing off in different directions that I never tie up. And so it looks like if you'd peer around the frame, there would be more picture — but there isn't.
Q
In your original Imperial Radch trilogy, the main character, Breq, who speaks a language without gendered pronouns (like Finnish), refers to most characters as “she.” In “Translation State,” there are more pronoun variations.
A
As I wrote the trilogy, I was using “she” as the default term, which made sense in that cultural context. But doing that made me really interested in the kinds of things people said about pronouns and gender out in the real world and how people experience their gender and how they do or don't have pronouns used and what pronouns they like to use. And I said, well, this is science fiction, right? We can imagine a world that maybe isn't exactly like our world where this is a thing.
What other neopronouns are there? What other setups of gender can we have? What would happen if you've got different cultures outside the
Radch who think about gender in a slightly different way? I decided, why not lean into that because that's kind of interesting — that's a thing that people I know are talking about and are experiencing in their lives. And so I decided to just go ahead and continue to do that in this book.
Q
Let's talk about your fantasy novel, “The Raven Tower.” Did you always see yourself writing both fantasy and science fiction?
A
The majority of my short fiction pieces are set in that same universe as “The Raven Tower.” And there are folks who read my short fiction who were surprised that I wrote science fiction — they were waiting for me to write a fantasy novel.
I don't personally see a huge difference between science fiction and fantasy, and I know there are people who would take very large issue with my saying that, but my opinion is they're so closely related that they're impossible to separate.
Q
That's interesting. How so? A
They're both based on the idea of counterfactuals, right? The world isn't like this, but what if the world were like this? I know folks who feel very strongly that science fiction is not only different, but better, because it's based on science.
I was raised by scientists and they never understood my love of science fiction. Part of it was because they thought it was just kid stuff, but part of it was because some of the science would be ridiculous. Biology, in particular, gets very short shrift.
For the most part, science fiction is sciencey rather than scientific. I understand wanting to work with realistic science. I do try to when I can. I try and make most of the physics realish. But in the end, it's about the story. And if I have to violate that for the story, I'm going to violate that for the story.
I feel like science fiction and fantasy are using different sets of toys to examine some of the same things. Not always, frequently. The most popular kinds of fantasy are looking to the past — like Tolkien, in particular, was explicitly writing mythology that was meant to take place in the distant past. He was thinking in terms of the origins of things, and science fiction often is thinking in terms of the consequences of things, but that's not always the case.
Q
Can you talk about your influences? A
Probably the biggest influences on me as a writer have been Andre Norton, Jack Vance and CJ Cherryh, and Cherryh in particular. There are a couple of explicit nods to Cherryh in the text of the trilogy. Die-hard fans notice them right away.
Q
When you were starting out at the Clarion West writers workshop, you spent time with the legendary Octavia Butler. Can you talk about that?
A
The workshop administrators told us in advance she's very shy, and sure enough, that was absolutely the case. But she was also awesome.
She pulled (my story) out and said, “This is exactly like oldschool space opera stuff; I really like it.” When we had our one-on-one conference, she said, “Now you are not under the misapprehension that this is a short story, are you?” And I said no. She's like, “I thought so. You're a novelist.”
She was very kind; she understood where we were at; she was tremendous. And oh, what a loss.
Q
You've written about artificial intelligence, and now it's become a larger part of the cultural conversation. Has that affected your writing about AI at all?
A
I don't think it affects it much, because I don't think what we've really got here is actual AI. What we have is a large languagelearning model. And people are making a lot of noise about how it's AI and oh, it's gonna take over writers' jobs. We've trained it to spit out phrases in statistically likely orders, but it's not thinking. It's not even close to thinking. It's producing random output, or output from a seed, which a random number generator does the same thing only slightly less complicated. That's kind of my take on it.
I don't think what everybody's talking about is really AI, certainly not in the science-fictional sense. I don't think we're even close to science-fictional AI at this point.
We're in far more danger from large corporations who are making profit at any cost than we are from actual artificial intelligence at this point. And we are in a great deal of danger from corporations who are doing profit at any cost.