LAKE OF SOULS
Say again…?
RELEASED 4 APRIL
448 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook
Author Ann Leckie
Publisher Orbit
Because her stories are so often full of characters with diverse and exotic identities, gender is often taken to be a defining theme in Ann Leckie’s work. Yet when reading Lake Of Souls, her first collection of short fiction (named after a new novella), this quickly seems like a misreading.
Why? Principally because, time and time again here, there are moments where characters say one thing and, whatever they mean to say, find their words interpreted in a different way. Set aside gender for now, fascinating as it is within Leckie’s work; the idea of communicating miscommunication runs far more deeply through her fiction.
That’s most immediately obvious in “Another Word For World”, a study of colonialism that explores the role of translation in discourse: just how do people connect if translations are loaded with political and cultural assumptions? It’s one of eight stories that make up the collection’s opening section.
Revealing Leckie’s range is the wry “Bury The Dead”, a reflection on grief, mourning and the irritations caused by older relatives, in which a Thanksgiving celebration is complicated by grandpa being a zombie…
The second section is given over to a trio of stories from her Imperial Radch universe. “Night’s Slow Poison”, a tale of a space voyage that takes long, dreary months, moves at an appropriately stately pace before suddenly coming into sharp focus – a neat trick few other authors could execute. But perhaps surprisingly, given that Leckie’s reputation is primarily as an SF writer, it’s the seven stories set in her Raven Tower fantasy world that linger longest, as Leckie shows us a world where small and capricious gods move amongst people.
As in the oldest human stories, a recurring plot device is that miscommunicating with one of these trickster deities can have dire consequences. As for gender, it’s front and centre in “The Snake’s Wife”, a tale of love and castration showing that, while the costs may be high, the gods can be bested. Jonathan Wright
The audiobook of Lake Of Souls is read by Adjoa Andoh, who played Martha Jones’s mum Francine in Doctor Who.