For this post I’m going to slap my editor’s hat on, adjust it until its angle achieves jauntiness, and talk about the bane of my editorial existence! So many times I begin reading a story, full of hope for what’s to come, only to be met with a wall of bland facts, pale character introductions, narrators who want to introduce me to everyone they’ve ever met before they’ve even introduced themselves, or even…genealogies. As a writer, I completely understand this urge: you love your characters. You’ve spent time creating a world, deciding everything from the color of its sky to what your characters eat for second breakfast—naturally you want to stuff all of this knowledge into your reader’s eyeballs as quickly as possible. Unfortunately this can very easily become an infodump—per TV Tropes: “exposition that is particularly long or wordy”—and speaking as en editor, infodumps are the worst.
In the interest of slaying this monster, I’m going to walk you through the opening pages of Ann Leckie’s Hugo Award-winning Ancillary Justice—which gives the reader the perfect amount of info, without becoming too dumpy.
Think of this like going on a date, or grabbing coffee with a new friend—you give a few details, sure, but you don’t narrate a bullet list of your whole life. When you’re writing, you’re on a date with your reader. Ideally, your story will charm them enough that they lose track of time and hang out with you until you both suddenly realize that the restaurant has closed, all the other diners have left, and an annoyed busboy has to unlock the front door to let you out.
Buy the Book
Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch)
To get a feel for how to include lots of worldbuilding without killing your story’s momentum, let’s look at an example of a great opening. The first four pages of Ancillary Justice introduce us to a mysterious narrator, a harsh world, and two different conflicts right away, all while seeding in enough questions about the book’s world to keep us turning pages. You can read the first chapter over on NPR; below, I’ll pull the text apart (roughly half of NPR’s excerpt) paragraph by paragraph and unpack how and why it works.
Of course, it’s possible this story doesn’t work for you—and that’s fine, because you can still learn a lot from the way Leckie has balanced her worldbuilding with her plot and character development. Let’s dive in!
The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it. It was minus fifteen degrees Celsius and a storm had passed just hours before. The snow stretched smooth in the wan sunrise, only a few tracks leading into a nearby ice-block building. A tavern. Or what passed for a tavern in this town.
There are few ways more compelling to open a story than with the words “the body”. It immediately calls up death, violence, horror, grief—it puts the reader on edge before they even know what they’re reading. But Leckie doesn’t stop there, she also lets us know that the body is “naked and facedown” and in snow. She’s just ratcheted up the body’s vulnerability by stripping it, and established that it’s exposed in sub-freezing weather. We still don’t know who this is, or if they’re alive, but we’re already concerned for their welfare—and we’re not even out of the first sentence yet!
Leckie quickly gives us facts—temperature (-15 degrees Celcius), time of day (sunrise), setting (desolate, freaking cold), and then pulls the classic RPG trick of showing us a tavern. Anyone who’s ever read fantasy knows that taverns are where adventures start, and they also imply warmth, relative safety, and human connection. So there’s the promise of help for this frozen person, if they’re still alive.
There was something itchingly familiar about that out-thrown arm, the line from shoulder down to hip. But it was hardly possible I knew this person. I didn’t know anyone here. This was the icy back end of a cold and isolated planet, as far from Radchaai ideas of civilization as it was possible to be. I was only here, on this planet, in this town, because I had urgent business of my own. Bodies in the street were none of my concern.
First, Leckie tightens the focus on the body. Our narrator thinks they know this person, but rather than using the common phrase “achingly” familiar, Leckie says that something is “itchingly” familiar, which unsettles us and gives us a sense of irritation. (If you’re a particularly suggestible reader, it’s even possible you just scratched when you read that.) Here we also get our first mention of “Radchaai”, and the fact that whatever it is, it has an idea about what “civilization” is supposed to look like. Our narrator’s current surroundings do not meet that idea. We also learn that our narrator has “urgent business of my own”—which lets us know that the narrator is preoccupied, but also that even we, the readers, aren’t allowed to know what that business is. Our narrator doesn’t trust us yet.
Sometimes I don’t know why I do the things I do. Even after all this time it’s still a new thing for me not to know, not to have orders to follow from one moment to the next. So I can’t explain to you why I stopped and with one foot lifted the naked shoulder so I could see the person’s face.
Frozen, bruised, and bloody as she was, I knew her. Her name was Seivarden Vendaai, and a long time ago she had been one of my officers, a young lieutenant, eventually promoted to her own command, another ship. I had thought her a thousand years dead, but she was, undeniably, here. I crouched down and felt for a pulse, for the faintest stir of breath.
Why doesn’t the narrator know why they do the things they do? Why are they used to following orders, and how long is “all this time”? But before we can dwell on that moment of oddness, the narrator has turned the body over, recognized her, revealed that both they and the owner of the body served in a military together, revealed the body’s gender (female) and casually stated that while she might be dead now, she should have been dead a thousand years ago. Now we know that we’re dealing with a military veteran, that the military allows women to serve, and that both our narrator and the body are very old—at least by human standards. How is the narrator still alive? Next we learn:
Still alive.
Paragraph breaks can be gimmicky, and can get annoying if overused. (I say that because I tend to overuse them in my own writing.) But note that there wasn’t a paragraph break for the narrator’s “urgent business” or the fact that there are two characters who are over 1,000 years old in this book. The fact the Seivarden Vendaai is alive is the first thing that Leckie has decided to highlight. We’re supposed to care about Seivarden’s life, whether our narrator does or not.
Seivarden Vendaai was no concern of mine anymore, wasn’t my responsibility. And she had never been one of my favorite officers. I had obeyed her orders, of course, and she had never abused any ancillaries, never harmed any of my segments (as the occasional officer did). I had no reason to think badly of her. On the contrary, her manners were those of an educated, well-bred person of good family. Not toward me, of course—I wasn’t a person, I was a piece of equipment, a part of the ship. But I had never particularly cared for her.
Leckie could have dropped us into a flashback here, and given us a full scene between the narrator and Seivarden. Instead we get the sense that our narrator is ticking off facts like a bullet list. Buried in this list is the revelation that our narrator isn’t human. “I wasn’t a person, I was a piece of equipment, a part of the ship.” So is our narrator a sentient robot of some sort? Are we in a world with androids? Leckie could have dwelled on this moment and given us more worldbuilding, but she chooses to move right along with the action.
I rose and went into the tavern. The place was dark, the white of the ice walls long since covered over with grime or worse. The air smelled of alcohol and vomit. A barkeep stood behind a high bench. She was a native—short and fat, pale and wide-eyed. Three patrons sprawled in seats at a dirty table. Despite the cold they wore only trousers and quilted shirts—it was spring in this hemisphere of Nilt and they were enjoying the warm spell. They pretended not to see me, though they had certainly noticed me in the street and knew what motivated my entrance. Likely one or more of them had been involved; Seivarden hadn’t been out there long, or she’d have been dead.
“I’ll rent a sledge,” I said, “and buy a hypothermia kit.”
Behind me one of the patrons chuckled and said, voice mocking, “Aren’t you a tough little girl.”
Finally, we get to go into our tavern! But this is not a place of relief, warmth or comfort after all. The walls themselves are made of ice, and that ice is coated in filth and smells like vomit. The patrons are ignoring our narrator—are we in a “We don’t serve your kind here” situation? But then the narrator addresses them, and the whole scene shifts. This isn’t a fantasy tavern, it’s more like a Western saloon, and our narrator is being mocked by people who seemingly don’t realize she’s not human. Also, the barkeep is a woman, as is Seivarden. So we’ve met two female characters so far, and one at least is being described as a “barkeep” not a wench or a waitress.
I turned to look at her, to study her face. She was taller than most Nilters, but fat and pale as any of them. She out-bulked me, but I was taller, and I was also considerably stronger than I looked. She didn’t realize what she was playing with. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain. It wouldn’t have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak—my own first language—doesn’t mark gender in any way. This language we were speaking now did, and I could make trouble for myself if I used the wrong forms. It didn’t help that cues meant to distinguish gender changed from place to place, sometimes radically, and rarely made much sense to me.
I decided to say nothing. After a couple of seconds she suddenly found something interesting in the tabletop. I could have killed her, right there, without much effort. I found the idea attractive. But right now Seivarden was my first priority. I turned back to the barkeep.
Here, we finally learn that our ideas of gender have been upended. The narrator is referring to everyone as “she”, but doesn’t actually know what gender any of these people are. The Radch don’t regard gender as important—is that part of their idea of “civilization” that was touched on earlier? Our narrator is completely casual about his or her own physical superiority, and even toys with the idea of cold-blooded murder without too much drama. So we learn that casual murder might be fine in this world.
Slouching negligently she said, as though there had been no interruption, “What kind of place you think this is?”
“The kind of place,” I said, still safely in linguistic territory that needed no gender marking, “that will rent me a sledge and sell me a hypothermia kit. How much?”
“Two hundred shen.” At least twice the going rate, I was sure. “For the sledge. Out back. You’ll have to get it yourself. Another hundred for the kit.”
“Complete,” I said. “Not used.”
She pulled one out from under the bench, and the seal looked undamaged. “Your buddy out there had a tab.”
Maybe a lie. Maybe not. Either way the number would be pure fiction. “How much?”
“Three hundred fifty.”
I could find a way to keep avoiding referring to the barkeep’s gender. Or I could guess. It was, at worst, a fifty-fifty chance. “You’re very trusting,” I said, guessing male, “to let such an indigent”—I knew Seivarden was male, that one was easy—“run up such a debt.” The barkeep said nothing. “Six hundred and fifty covers all of it?”
“Yeah,” said the barkeep. “Pretty much.”
“No, all of it. We will agree now. And if anyone comes after me later demanding more, or tries to rob me, they die.”
Silence. Then the sound behind me of someone spitting. “Radchaai scum.”
“I’m not Radchaai.” Which was true. You have to be human to be Radchaai.
“He is,” said the barkeep, with the smallest shrug toward the door. “You don’t have the accent but you stink like Radchaai.”
“That’s the swill you serve your customers.” Hoots from the patrons behind me. I reached into a pocket, pulled out a handful of chits, and tossed them on the bench. “Keep the change.” I turned to leave.
“Your money better be good.”
“Your sledge had better be out back where you said.” And I left.
Our first extensive chunk of dialogue! Honestly, I’d say that this is the one section that bogs down a bit, where Leckie skirts the closest to the dreaded infodump. The reason I think she avoids it is that we learn more about our narrator than, say, the money system in this world. We see that our narrator is savvy enough to know that they’re being cheated, but that they’re naive enough about this culture that gender is a mystery. Despite their superior physical strength, they seem truly concerned about misgendering anyone. Is this because they don’t want to deal with a fight, or because it’s ingrained in them that this is a faux pas? We learn in a throwaway moment that Seivarden is male, and that the narrator knows this, but continues to use the pronouns “she” and “her”—which, given the concern with gender, must mean that this is proper to either Seivarden’s culture, or the narrator’s, or that they are in fact from the same culture. We also learn that whatever the Radchaai are, (a) they’re hated, and (b) this world is far enough away that the patrons can openly insult them without fear. Even more important, we get definitive proof that the narrator isn’t human, and a large hint that the patrons don’t realize that.
The hypothermia kit first. I rolled Seivarden over. Then I tore the seal on the kit, snapped an internal off the card, and pushed it into her bloody, half-frozen mouth. Once the indicator on the card showed green I unfolded the thin wrap, made sure of the charge, wound it around her, and switched it on. Then I went around back for the sledge.
No one was waiting for me, which was fortunate. I didn’t want to leave bodies behind just yet, I hadn’t come here to cause trouble. I towed the sledge around front, loaded Seivarden onto it, and considered taking my outer coat off and laying it on her, but in the end I decided it wouldn’t be that much of an improvement over the hypothermia wrap alone. I powered up the sledge and was off.
In the final piece of this excerpt we get some very simple science. Leckie tells us only what we have to know about the hypothermia kit—there’s a wrap for warmth, and an “indicator” that lights up green, presumably to let you know that your hypothermia victim is still alive. Rather than throwing technobabble at us, Leckie gives us the bare minimum of detail to keep us focused on what she considers most important: Seivarden’s life reading. She also gives us a brief window into our narrator’s personality when we learn that the narrator is self-sacrificing enough to consider giving Seivarden their coat—but also practical enough to keep it. Is this a hint that despite not being human, the narrator can be affected by cold? Exactly what is the narrator? And where are they going on the sledge now that Seivarden has been rescued?
In only a few opening pages, Leckie has woven a ton of information around enough action and suspense to keep us reading. By hooking each piece of information to an action, she’s given us tantalizing hints about the world of this book, but by directing us back to the freezing body, the angry tavern patrons, the tense narrator, she keeps our focus on the human element of the story. She’s also given us a portrait of a non-human protagonist who is willing to put their own “urgent business” on hold to help someone in need. In only four pages, Leckie has already created two opposing cultures, subverted gender expectations, and woven a theme into her work: an obsession with identity.
Most of all (assuming that this opening works for you) she’s written an exciting opening that leaves you asking immediate questions—What comes next? Will Seivarden live? What is the narrator’s business, and why is it urgent? Are they about to get jumped by the tavern keeper?—as well as big picture questions—What is the deal with gender in this society? If the narrator isn’t human, what is he/she/it? Are the Radchaai evil? Because Leckie kept her focus on her characters while implying a large and complicated culture, we’re left hungry for more answers rather than exhausted by too much detail.
What do you think? Do you like the balance Leckie achieves? Are there ways she could have made this opening even more compelling? And what are your favorite instances of infodump-avoidance?
In addition to writing for Tor.com, Leah Schnelbach edits prose for No Tokens and the Fairy Tale Review, and sometimes she can’t turn Editor Brain off, hence this post. She also tweets!
I absolutely love it. Ancillary Justice is one of the greatest science fiction novels, full stop. As far as other infodump-avoidance examples, Steven Erikson wrote an entire series that is more or less a masterclass in that.
A great book, with a great opening, for precisely the reasons you have spelled out, Leah. Thanks for the careful analysis–it is a good primer for those who aspire to write. I could list a few examples of the dreaded infodump to contrast with this tale, but as my mom always said, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything.
I loved this book but I also learned how gender specific a mindset I have. Even realizing the author’s intent I often felt a low level of discomfort throughout the book over the gender uncertainty. It surprised me, as I think of myself as open minded and flexible enough not to be constricted by gender roles.
#3: I’m just putting this question to you and I’m not trying to catch you out – did you feel the same level of discomfort by Ursula Le Guin’s use of the male pronoun in the left hand of darkness?
This book was a breath of fresh air and a relief to read. I really enjoyed the play on gender, and that, as far as the Radchaai empire is concerned, gender or sex literally does not matter. Leckie described a universe for which I desperately wish I could exist in… minus the Radchaai drama and intergalactic colonialism, of course. ;-)
I read about two thirds of the novel and then put it down.
It has a lot of plaudits, however it just did not excite me at all. The gender issues just seemed to be a narrative stunt, fun for a bit but ultimately pointless in terms of engaging me as a reader. So much description for nothing at all.
I’ve read plenty of non-human POV stories and novels which worked so much better for me.
Wow, I completely missed the hint about Sievarden’s gender. I’m not sure there was a second chance to get that information. Pretty sneaky.
I really like the hypothermia wrap. It would have to be idiot-proof, because a person with mild hypothermia is starting to get stupid. If one person in a group has hypothermia, it is a good bet that the others do, too. “Green, wrapped up, and switched on” is about a complicated as it could be and still be effective.
I remember a three page infodump that was a continuous internal monologue during a meeting. Just kill me now, don’t bore me to death. I kept hoping that author would get more skilled with more novels, but they got the success without the skill.
At the end of the Hugo excerpt I still didn’t know what the story was supposed to be about and had no interest in finding out. Reviews only talk about the pronouns, the story (if it exists) doesn’t seem to be interesting.
It was a great story even outside of the pronouns. Ship AI, ancillaries (horrible, but oh what a brilliant idea), the Radchai (as victors but still monsters). The pronouns were really just clever worldbuilding on top of an already great storyline.
Honestly, those specific lines about gendered language were one of the first places I started to turn off in this novel. While it’s true that most languages mark gender, it’s very rare for the 2nd person pronoun to be gendered. This threw me straight out of the worldbuilding in a way that, to answer @4’s question, The Left Hand of Darkness does not–not because the other pronoun is used, but because it’s used by an author who clearly lacks Le Guin’s background in linguistics. Not a fan of authors who use linguistic arguments in-world without extensive knowledge of languages other than English, unless it’s a joke.
Like @6, I just couldn’t get into any of the Radch novels. I’ve just read imperialism, nonbinary gender, and AI POV done so much more compellingly, and the characters don’t grab me. I realized at about the 2/3 point that I had lost the thread of who was saying which line, and that the reason was that the characters were not sufficiently well defined.
I do think Leckie has improved greatly with Provenance, which I found much better in terms of character and plausibility.
I didn’t really notice the pronouns apart from this first part (and other places where Radchai interact with other cultures), I just sort of imagined everyone as female aliens and didn’t give it much thought.
@10 lots of languages have gendered adjectives. In any of those, the narrator would need to choose the correct one, regardless of the second person pronoun being gendered or not.
I love this method of introduction. Drops you right into a character’s reality without any easing-in. Also, it really gave me a sense of who the VP character was: abrupt, alienated, but capable of deep feeling.
The starkness of the setting really helped, too. It’s an easy thing to envision, a body lying naked in a place so cold and desolate. That initial image sticks throughout the story, at least for me. An expressionless figure standing over an abandoned body, with no reason to even check if it’s alive or not–and knowing she will trouble herself to save this person she does not even like without fully understanding why.
@8 – Story is the classic deeply-hurt protagonist who seeks revenge on immeasurably more powerful adversary against all odds, but with a whole bunch of additional twists (including the nonhuman nature of the protagonist). I really enjoyed it, irrespective of the gendering/nongendering issues.
It took me a couple of tries to get into the book. Fortunately, it was a library copy, so I didn’t feel cheated when I just.simply.couldn’t the first time around. I just returned it to the library. I tried again a few months later and loved it. Then I bought a copy and reread it before reading “Ancillary Sword,” to remind me of what was going on in that world. I reread them both before reading “Ancillary Mercy.” I think I had the same problem with the beginnings of all three of the books. I don’t want an infodump, but the things that make Leckie’s worldbuilding absorbing and thought-provoking once you’ve found your way in also made it hard for me to get past that initial wall of “Huh?” I admire that she was willing to leave readers off balance and feeling around for something to hang onto, because it all pays off if you can get past that wall (IMO), and because it’s something of what the characters experience throughout the book, but I found the openings of all three books to be pretty challenging–in a good way, for the most part, but you have to be willing to spend some energy on it. I think when I first picked up “Ancillary Justice,” my energy was being sapped by other things in my life, and it felt too hard. Second time around, I powered through the “wall of Huh?” and was glad I had.
@15 Your summary just made me realize how much the structure Ancillary Justice resembles the plots used in a number of Raphael Sabatini novels, like Captain Blood or The Sea Hawk, for example. He was a master of tales of revenge.
I really, really appreciated the lack of ‘technobabble’ also. Nothing more annoying than “He consulted his portable wrist mounted chronograph”. No, dummy, “He looked at his watch”. Or another not favorite “He partook of liquid refreshment from a portable beverage container”. Uh, how about “He took a drink from his canteen”. No one cares if it was a carved wooden bottle or a nuclear powered AI controlled display encrusted flask. Both of those overblown gems were on the first page of some Star Wars spinoff paperback I struggled through years ago. Don’t remember the author’s name.
I did find the gender thing confusing at times but thoroughly enjoyed the series.
@10 As someone who’s studied a major world language which does necessitate gendering of second-person pronouns (and adjectives, and verbs), it didn’t throw me in the least. Sure, plenty of languages with grammatical gender don’t require it for the second person pronoun, but there are absolutely ones that do. (Though, as @12 says, even those that don’t might require gender for an adjective like “trusting” — all the romance languages I can think of would, for instance.) I really don’t think one can critique Leckie for a lack of linguistics research for using something that’s a fundamental part of grammar in Arabic and Hebrew, not to mention various less widely spoken languages around the world.
To more broadly address the original post, I’ll admit that the “and then I went into the local tavern” kind of opening didn’t work super well for me; it set me up to expect a different genre than Ancillary Justice actually is, and one that I like much less. (It took me until the bridge scene to really get 100% into the novel, but then I was hooked, from there through the rest of the series. It’s one of my very favorites.) However, none of that is a quibble about the infodump handling. I think that Leckie does a great job, here and all through the series, of doling out information in a smooth and organic way, so that the reader is never bored and never too confused, just eager to learn more.
@14/RobMRobM: Thanks for the plot summary, you just saved me a few hours of my time. I can’t stand revenge plots.
For anyone who likes having their pronouns upended, I can recommend talking to people whose native language doesn’t have gendered pronouns. My Finnish friends tend to mix up “he” and “she”, “her” and “his”. They say things like “Our son won’t be here tonight, so you can sleep in her room.” It’s great.
Concerning infodumps, I prefer a concise, well-written infodump to the awkward spreading out of information I’ve seen in some books. Both can be done well, and both can be done badly.
I tried to read it a couple of times. It just didn’t hold my interest.
I generally like female main characters but I found the gender stuff just pedantic. Using “she” as the default pronoun would have been more interesting and impactful if the author had just done it with no explanation or apologies.
Instead we were treated to endless, repetitive exposition both by the narrator and by the main character herself about why gender didn’t make sense to her and why the pronoun choice was made, over and over.
It just started to feel like a gimmick pretty quickly, and the story didn’t pick up enough that I cared to continue. The seeds of a great novel were here, if all the pedantry hadn’t gotten in the way.
I absolutely loved these books. And although the lack of infodump made the first half of this book confusing to get through, it also kept me turning pages, excited by each new sliver of information I got, until the narrator’s story started making sense.
I also loved her unusual approach to gender and pronouns. It was refreshing in a way that I never would have thought I would really appreciate all the way up until I finished the book. By effectively removing gender from all the characters, it also removes all gender stereotypes that get used and reused and overused in every single other story out there, both consciously and subconsciously, both by the author and by the readers. Characters in this story can no longer be judged at all by their adherence or departure from expectations according to their sex, but are now seen as individuals whose most defining characteristics are their eye color, the decisions they make, or their attitude towards tea.
It made me, the reader, pay attention to them more. It made me question my own biases when I assumed a gender based on certain descriptions. And it also gave me hope that the rest of the world can eventually move towards an interaction where people judge other people less for how closely they adhere to gender roles and more for their actual choices as human beings.
I think this is another case of YMMV. German has a word that means “the different way you think when you think in different languages”. I can’t remember the word itself, but the concept is one that stuck with me. It took me about a third of the way into the book to figure out the protagonist was using single-gender pronouns to describe all genders because that’s how her native language works. Whether that’s down to me or a limitation of using English as a substitute for another language is an interesting thing to consider. I picked up in those opening paragraphs her new companion was male, and assumed the language use was due to whatever was causing the other oddities in her behaviour (be it trauma or whatever led to her considering herself non-human). Interestingly I don’t think we find out what plumbing her current body has, so we only think of her as female because that’s the protagonist’s cultural default.
It’s interesting how language use affects and conditions our thoughts. I find the English strikes the right balance between gendering everything and gendering nothing. Some languages are gender neutral (Nigerian is the one that springs to mind), and some gender everything. Yes, French, I’m looking at you. Why does that table need a gender? Why are mice inherently female? In English a group is inherently genderless. In French, a group inherits its gender from the creature (so a group of mice would be female) unless the group is entirely of the opposite gender. Does Ancillary Justice work better or worse when translated to other languages? I guess it depends on the language.
@22/WillMayBeWise: When a language genders all its nouns, like the Romance languages or the Germanic languages with the exception of English, gender is more like the noun classes employed by languages all over the world. It doesn’t mean that us Germans perceive our hands as female, our arms as male, and our legs as neither. Nor do we sexualise cutlery when our spoons are masculine, our forks feminine and our knives neutral. We simply have three noun classes we take for granted, and the sexes happen to be distributed among them.
I don’t know why noun classes exist; English seems to do fine without them. But since they’re so widespread, they’re probably good for something.
I think the info dump is useful in some story-telling mediums – I mean, the Star Wars opening scrawl is just one big info dump! In roleplay games, the GM tends to give info dumps to set the scene, then reiterates details as the players interact. Computer games tend to do the same thing. I suspect this is influencing a lot of writers, even though it doesn’t really work in a novel.
It also seems to crop up a lot in military SF. I suspect the source of this is that’s how the military train people to deliver and receive briefings, and so that training crops up in the writing of ex-military and their imitators.
@23/JanaJansen – it wasn’t so much a complaint as a observation on how I find languages that do this frustrating (and there’s so many that do). It was more about my character flaws than anything else. It’s true it must express some kind of need as it’s so common. It’s interesting to note that English doesn’t use it, given how (to paraphrase a famous quote) English forcibly acquires anything it finds useful from other languages. Which is why it tends to be such a horrible language to learn. :)
@25/WillMayBeWise: Hmm, English had such a system in the past and discarded it. And the Romance languages discarded one of the original three genders, and most of the Germanic languages merged two of the others. So perhaps it isn’t all that useful after all, if languages keep trying to get rid of it.
My daughter tells me that English is much easier to learn than French.
@26/JanaJansen – English is my first language, so I have no experience on how easy it is as a second language compared to other languages. I also have no access to empirical data on what the general opinion is. Your daughter is the first I’ve heard that thinks English is easier to learn (though that could just be the people I know of). <shrugs> Learning a new language is an art, and with any art people have different strengths and different things they struggle with. I’ll point out that just about everywhere I’ve travelled, whatever the native language the radio plays American songs and the TV has American shows. Even if they’re dubbed (a lot of them are subtitled), there’s enough English language signs / notices / newspapers in the background to give them a head start (simply by Osmosis) over other languages…
@17 / Skylane5sp – there’s nothing inherently wrong with renaming everyday items to give them a flavour of the exotic, affirming to the reader “we’re not in Kansas anymore”. I think the true misdemeanour in your examples was made against brevity. I wonder if the author was paid by the syllable or letter? I wonder what the chats with the publisher were like, and how much editorial effort was invested into it?
What I like about this article is how positive it is. You often get writing maxims like:
* “Drip-feed world-building.”
* “The author should always know more about the world than the reader.”
* “Don’t let the narrative get bogged down in detail.”
Too often when I see an article like this, the practical examples used are how not to do it. The blog post will take a best-selling author and tell you exactly what they’ve done wrong. Suzy Bright (I think) said something like “It’s easy to say what you don’t like. It’s much harder to say what you do like, and why.”
Here we have an editor doing just that. Showing us what they think of as good writing, and why. Telling us what Anne Leckie did right, not wrong. It’s refreshing.
Other non-native speakers have told me that spoken English is easy. It’s our spelling that is extremely difficult, though nothing is as absurdly complex as Japanese writing with its three or four different systems of symbols. (Katakana and hiragana are syllabaries, kanji are Japanese adaptations of Chinese logographs, but often written and pronounced differently than any actual Chinese usage, and of course romaji, the Latin characters used for some foreign words [but pronounced and spelled differently from Western usage, as in romaji meaning the Roman alphabet].)
Except apparently Tibetan writing is super-complex in its own way ….
@30/Carl – fair points.
@22 in fact, we are told in the quotes this article used the sex of the body the main character has (though I missed it in first reading and spent the entire rest of the trilogy trying to figure it out.)
Put together the facts that the POV character mentions: A. To people on this world, gendering correctly is direly important B. In conversation with one of the world residents, the POV character’s (perceived) gender is mentioned and you find out the character’s gender.
@32/Kaerlani – I’m not confident we do. On one hand, Leckie uses an economy of words. On the other hand “Tough little girl” isn’t an accurate description. We know don’t know the height of the victim, but we know the protagonist carries, not drags, him into the bar, with an arm sling over their shoulder. So they are strong. We then don’t have any suggestion the protagonist is shorter or taller than the bar patrons (no looking down or up to meet their gaze). So we’re kind of 50/50 on the first two words. They are tough, but they aren’t little.
Then there’s the attitude of the speaker: they’re being agressive, challenging the protagonist. We also know (as you point out) that using the wrong gender is considered insulting. To me that means the whole phrase is meant to be taken as an insult, to try and get a rise out of the protagonist. On that basis “girl” could be applied equally to each gender in this context.
It’s worth noting that the local language is so gender-specific using the wrong genderised word for “you” could be considered insulting. That leads me to think the protagonist’s gender is male, since we don’t know (but modern society interactions infer) whether calling a female a “boy” would be as considered as challenging as the “girl” part. <shrugs>. It’s not conclusive, though, which (at least for me) leaves the protagonist’s gender unknown.
It occurs to me that this kind of slow-drip worldbuilding is one of the things I love about anime –unlike Western TV (which is far more prone to getting cancelled week-to-week, whereas most anime is contractually guaranteed to be broadcast), there’s no need to “hook” the viewer in the first ten minutes of the first episode, so mysteries and details can be strung out across an entire series.
@30. I’ve heard (from people who’ve learned English as a second language) that English is easy to learn through exposure, but really tough to learn well. I think it’s because English is so error-tolerant. Even someone with a minimal grasp of English can usually make themselves understood alongside people who are fully fluent (so, arguably, there’s no drive to become fully fluent, which is why typoes and malapropisms are so common even in official/published materials).
@34/Cybersnark: I think the reason why English is so easy to learn, at least in the beginning, is its lack of a case system and its paucity of verb forms. To form a simple sentence, you only have to put one word after the other in the required order. You don’t have to pause and think about word forms. The fact that it has no grammatical gender (see discussion above) also helps.
I haven’t read these book yet. I want to read this article but will it spoil them ?
@36 – not much. Just focused on what happens in the first chapter without really any discussion of where the story goes. Dig in.
For avoided infodumps, try Graydon Saunders’s Commonweal books.
@33, there is always “She Commands Me And I Obey,” then, which is a short story that stars Breq pre-events of this trilogy but after separating from the ship, and Breq’s sex is not left up to question.
You make excellent points, though, that I also pondered.
@39/Kaeriani – I’m assuming Breq is Ultimately-Justice-Shall-Prevail? Huh. Just found (and read) it and wouldn’t have realised that was a prequel (never mind starring Breq) if you hadn’t lampshades it. Thanks for pointing it out.