An interview with Ann Leckie
Mar. 3rd, 2014 07:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyumeAs you may know, I really loved Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice--loved it so much that I wanted to get Ann in a room and talk with her for at least 36 hours about ALL THE THINGS the book made me think about. That's not possible, but Ann *did* let me send her a bunch of interview questions, which she's kindly answered.
Because your main character, Breq, comes from a society that doesn’t distinguish gender, she uses female pronouns for everyone she encounters. This affects our initial images and impressions of the characters: in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it’s natural to assume they’re female. I’ve been fascinated by what I found my brain doing when hints came up that a character might not be female—and by what that revealed about my biases and assumptions regarding gender.
You’ve said that once you started using female pronouns for all the characters, your sense of their gender slid from your initial conception, and that some characters never even acquired a gender in your mind. What kinds of insights has this given you into what an ungendered society would be like? How has it affected how you look at or think about people’s gender in everyday life?
So, the question of what an ungendered society would look like was, of course, a pretty important one to the way I was going to portray the Radchaai. In some respects, just the process of doing that has been very much a learning experience.
I don't think it's possible to have a literally "ungendered" society, that is, a society with no gender at all--no recognition of it, no awareness. For one thing, gender is a real thing--or rather, there's something real that US and European society are attempting to describe and categorize. It's just, the US/Europe has a map that says there are two and only two categories, and that everyone must fit unambiguously in one or the other. That map is very much not the territory--though of course, like a lot of things, it's the kind of map that strongly affects the way we interpret the territory.
I'm not sure it's possible to not have a map. I think, then, that the closest thing to an "ungendered" society would be one where the map is a great deal less restrictive. I came to think of it--and largely still do--as sort of analogous to the way we think of hair color. The color of our hair is a matter of our genetics (barring sun-bleaching, aging, or a bottle of dye). People can (and do) sometimes identify as a redhead, or a brunette, or a blonde, or what have you. Sometimes people's hair color changes during their lifetime. Sometimes people decide they'll be happier if their hair is auburn, or purple, or whatever. With certain exceptions (some places you'll get more stares for purple hair, say) nobody else really cares, except perhaps to say "Wow, that color really suits you." And we don't need to call out hair color when talking about someone--unless we specifically want to describe them. We would be baffled if we ran into a culture that insisted there were only two categories of hair color and everyone fit in one or the other, and probably have linguistic trouble if their language assigned a hair color to everyone. But our bafflement wouldn't stem from our being unable to understand the concept of hair color--it would stem from our unfamiliarity with the map in use.
We're not a hair-colorless society. It's not that we have no concept of hair color. We do, we see it, it's a thing, but we just don't care much. (Actually, there are restrictions, and some of the weird "either/or" categorizing you see with gender. When you fill out a passport application you have to check a box--is your hair black, brown, blonde, red, or gray? As though those are all the options. Except, you know, when people go gray, often they're partly gray and partly another color. And there are lots and lots of people who have a sort of middling, light brown/dark blonde color hair that could leave them in doubt as to which box to check. Not to mention the number of people who are on a line between blonde and red. But this isn't a big deal, doesn't cause a lot of angst or distress or efforts to make oneself fit more clearly in one category or another.)
So I think a society that didn't care much about gender would have a similar attitude. Some people would have more or less strong gender identities of various sorts, some of which might be "no gender," some people might find they've changed how they identify over time, or might want to try something different.
Your protagonist starts out as a troop transport, Justice of Toren, a single AI based in the core of the ship, but also spread out among ten subunits, each comprising 20 ancillaries—reanimated human bodies fitted with AI and other enhancements. The main antagonist, the Lord of the Radch empire, similarly is a single consciousness operating through myriad clones of an original individual. Although she’s one mind, Justice of Toren’s subunits have what you might call personality variations--at least, the one we follow, One Esk, does. She likes to sing. And the Lord of the Radch demonstrates what, in an ordinary person, we’d call a divided mind--on a large scale, with huge consequences. What were the biggest challenges in conceiving these entities with distributed consciousnesses? Where did you reach for your insights?
Writing a character with lots of different bodies was very intimidating to me, for a long time. Especially once I realized that the story really needed to be in first person. The scariest thing, the thing I wasn't at all sure I could do, was figuring out a way to convey the experience of being several places at once, talking or doing many different things. The next biggest was trying to convey anything from the point of view of a character who isn't human. I am sometimes frustrated with portrayals of AIs that make them more or less a human being in a box, or that do the "emotionless, utterly logical machine" thing. It was easy enough to avoid the second, but the first? I'm human, my experiences are human, I think that we're more or less built to ascribe human-like motivations to other actors than ourselves, even when they're not human (they're fish, or the weather, or a car, or what have you). So I knew that would be difficult.
Eventually I decided to just do it very straightforwardly. "This happened, in this other place this other thing happened, and meanwhile in a third place..." and try to make it very, very clear what was happening where, as simply as possible. It was kind of the writer version of worrying I had no idea how to do a fancy dive, and instead just holding my nose and jumping off the board. And I figured I'd just have to trust my character to be what she was going to be.
In two of the most dramatic moments in the book, not only is the outcome awful, but the main actors are directly implicated in the awfulness--they carry out terrible orders. Since one of the things the book does is explore the issues of colonialism and freedom, at all levels, that storytelling decision seemed extra apt. Are there any aspects of the concept of freedom that tend to get overlooked, or need more attention? What elements are problematic or difficult?
Freedom's really slippery, isn't it. I mean, in theory we're free to choose all kinds of things, but in fact the system is set up to make certain choices nearly impossible (sometimes for everyone, sometimes for certain sorts of people). Sometimes it's obvious--I can't actually choose to levitate six feet using nothing more than my thoughts. But sometimes it's not obvious, sometimes everyone agrees that, yes, you could totally choose to do X. Most people choose to do Y, of course, entirely because they want to. When in fact, most people choose to do Y because whatever structures are in place make it much, much easier to do Y (and strongly encourage you to want Y), and pretty difficult to do X.
In theory, [Spoiler] could have refused to [spoiler]. But in fact, that's a very difficult choice to make. In theory, we can all choose not to be complicit in the various injustices around us--but in fact, the only way to do that completely would be to withdraw from society almost entirely, and give up quite a lot of technology that not only makes our lives easier, but saves lives.
This is, by the way, a peeve of mine about a reaction I ran into one time, to LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." Someone on a panel I was attending said something about how readers of that story ought to have learned a lesson, that we should be the ones who walk away. And I found that very frustrating--I don't actually know what LeGuin intended for certain, there, but I don’t think the point was "be like the ones who walk away!" Because in the real world, we can't really. None of us have walked away. Not in the US. Many of us in the US are, in fact, living in Omelas.
And that sounds like a terrible pronouncement of doom and condemnation, but here's another reason I find I'm not sure what LeGuin intended by that story: do we really want to emulate the ones who walk away? What does their walking away do to remedy the situation for the poor child who suffers so that Omelas may live in luxury? What but assuage their own guilt? It is, in some ways, the easiest choice to make, once you've decided that situation is intolerable. Of course, telling yourself you can't help and you might as well enjoy Omelas is even easier. But isn't there anybody who decides the whole thing needs to come crashing down? Isn't there anybody who thinks, "Well, I can do something to help, anyway," and tries? Nothing's really going to change such an entrenched system--but surely it's worth trying?
We get to know a fair amount about a couple of societies in Ancillary Justice, and others are mentioned in passing with just enough tantalizing details to make readers wish we could go back and visit someday. Was it that way for you, too? If you had worlds enough and time, which societies would you like to explore further?
Oh, with anything to choose from I'd have to choose randomly! Though just now I'd prefer somewhere warm. Brrr.
Reader reactions: Have there been any reactions to the overall book, or to individual characters or plot elements, that you didn’t foresee?
I'll be honest, nearly the entire reaction to the book has completely surprised me. I mean, I wouldn't have even submitted it if I didn't believe it was the best work I could do at the time I wrote it, right? But I didn't expect quite the reaction it's gotten. So, what I didn't forsee was pretty much all of it.
Well, I expected there to be readers who would encounter the pronouns and go, "Oh, this is stupid" or "I can't read this." I just thought there would be more of them.
I am also kind of intrigued by the number of different interpretations of Breq's attitude towards gender. I had thought I was fairly straightforward about what was going on, but I've seen several reviews guessing that she can't see or doesn't understand the concept of gender at all. Which isn't the case. It's a linguistic and cultural problem, not a question of gender being an unfamiliar concept. Regardless of how people interpret that, though, I'm glad to see the discussion, and glad to see people thinking about it.
I'm also finding it really interesting the way that some readers seem to be hooked by Breq/One Esk's emotional situation right off, while others have trouble connecting with her because they find her cold and emotionless. It just reinforces for me how personal reading is--how much any reader's reaction to a book depends on where they are, who they are, their experiences and reading history. There's no right or wrong about that, it's just a thing that is, and it's very interesting to me, how different responses can be.
Food! Which of your invented dishes would you most like to try, and which would you most like to avoid? Some are clearly modeled on food we know well, others I’m not so sure of--are they all based on real-life analogues?
Most of the food is based on real-life analogues. On Nilt, for example, the food that's mentioned is mostly food that you could grow or produce in such a cold climate. The prevalence of fish in the meals at Omaugh Palace is based on my assumption that if you're already recycling water and probably using much of it to grow oxygen producing plants, there might as well be fish in that cycle.
I don't think the kinds of things we eat have changed all that much. I went looking once for descriptions of Sumerian food, and the very first book I found, the very first thing mentioned was lentil soup (with onions!) and bread. A flat bread, of course, and I don't have the kind of clay oven they'd probably have used to make it, but still, I could get up from my computer right now and prepare that meal. I know several restaurants where I could order basically that. Come to think of it, I haven't used any beans in the books, and there really should be quite a lot of lentil soup and similar in the Radch.
Skel, though, isn't based on anything. It's the cheapest thing, the Sufficiently Advanced source of oxygen and nutrition in space. I'd be curious to try it, but I think of it as one of those things that doesn't taste particularly appealing unless you grew up on it, and in that case it can almost be a comfort food.
I love food. I'm up for trying almost anything. Well, I'm not sure about insects. Last year, while I was traveling, I went out with some friends to try a restaurant where they served ants and crickets. We were disappointed to find the place not open that day--but I was also a bit relieved. Still--I'm up for trying nearly anything once!
And there you have it! Any aspects of these questions or responses that you'd like to dig into further? Leave a comment, and maybe when she has a free moment, Ann will swing by and share more thoughts.
ETA: (Okay, spoiler is gone and the comment will go back up (spoiler free) when Carlton is able to access LJ next.)
Because your main character, Breq, comes from a society that doesn’t distinguish gender, she uses female pronouns for everyone she encounters. This affects our initial images and impressions of the characters: in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it’s natural to assume they’re female. I’ve been fascinated by what I found my brain doing when hints came up that a character might not be female—and by what that revealed about my biases and assumptions regarding gender.
You’ve said that once you started using female pronouns for all the characters, your sense of their gender slid from your initial conception, and that some characters never even acquired a gender in your mind. What kinds of insights has this given you into what an ungendered society would be like? How has it affected how you look at or think about people’s gender in everyday life?
So, the question of what an ungendered society would look like was, of course, a pretty important one to the way I was going to portray the Radchaai. In some respects, just the process of doing that has been very much a learning experience.
I don't think it's possible to have a literally "ungendered" society, that is, a society with no gender at all--no recognition of it, no awareness. For one thing, gender is a real thing--or rather, there's something real that US and European society are attempting to describe and categorize. It's just, the US/Europe has a map that says there are two and only two categories, and that everyone must fit unambiguously in one or the other. That map is very much not the territory--though of course, like a lot of things, it's the kind of map that strongly affects the way we interpret the territory.
I'm not sure it's possible to not have a map. I think, then, that the closest thing to an "ungendered" society would be one where the map is a great deal less restrictive. I came to think of it--and largely still do--as sort of analogous to the way we think of hair color. The color of our hair is a matter of our genetics (barring sun-bleaching, aging, or a bottle of dye). People can (and do) sometimes identify as a redhead, or a brunette, or a blonde, or what have you. Sometimes people's hair color changes during their lifetime. Sometimes people decide they'll be happier if their hair is auburn, or purple, or whatever. With certain exceptions (some places you'll get more stares for purple hair, say) nobody else really cares, except perhaps to say "Wow, that color really suits you." And we don't need to call out hair color when talking about someone--unless we specifically want to describe them. We would be baffled if we ran into a culture that insisted there were only two categories of hair color and everyone fit in one or the other, and probably have linguistic trouble if their language assigned a hair color to everyone. But our bafflement wouldn't stem from our being unable to understand the concept of hair color--it would stem from our unfamiliarity with the map in use.
We're not a hair-colorless society. It's not that we have no concept of hair color. We do, we see it, it's a thing, but we just don't care much. (Actually, there are restrictions, and some of the weird "either/or" categorizing you see with gender. When you fill out a passport application you have to check a box--is your hair black, brown, blonde, red, or gray? As though those are all the options. Except, you know, when people go gray, often they're partly gray and partly another color. And there are lots and lots of people who have a sort of middling, light brown/dark blonde color hair that could leave them in doubt as to which box to check. Not to mention the number of people who are on a line between blonde and red. But this isn't a big deal, doesn't cause a lot of angst or distress or efforts to make oneself fit more clearly in one category or another.)
So I think a society that didn't care much about gender would have a similar attitude. Some people would have more or less strong gender identities of various sorts, some of which might be "no gender," some people might find they've changed how they identify over time, or might want to try something different.
Your protagonist starts out as a troop transport, Justice of Toren, a single AI based in the core of the ship, but also spread out among ten subunits, each comprising 20 ancillaries—reanimated human bodies fitted with AI and other enhancements. The main antagonist, the Lord of the Radch empire, similarly is a single consciousness operating through myriad clones of an original individual. Although she’s one mind, Justice of Toren’s subunits have what you might call personality variations--at least, the one we follow, One Esk, does. She likes to sing. And the Lord of the Radch demonstrates what, in an ordinary person, we’d call a divided mind--on a large scale, with huge consequences. What were the biggest challenges in conceiving these entities with distributed consciousnesses? Where did you reach for your insights?
Writing a character with lots of different bodies was very intimidating to me, for a long time. Especially once I realized that the story really needed to be in first person. The scariest thing, the thing I wasn't at all sure I could do, was figuring out a way to convey the experience of being several places at once, talking or doing many different things. The next biggest was trying to convey anything from the point of view of a character who isn't human. I am sometimes frustrated with portrayals of AIs that make them more or less a human being in a box, or that do the "emotionless, utterly logical machine" thing. It was easy enough to avoid the second, but the first? I'm human, my experiences are human, I think that we're more or less built to ascribe human-like motivations to other actors than ourselves, even when they're not human (they're fish, or the weather, or a car, or what have you). So I knew that would be difficult.
Eventually I decided to just do it very straightforwardly. "This happened, in this other place this other thing happened, and meanwhile in a third place..." and try to make it very, very clear what was happening where, as simply as possible. It was kind of the writer version of worrying I had no idea how to do a fancy dive, and instead just holding my nose and jumping off the board. And I figured I'd just have to trust my character to be what she was going to be.
In two of the most dramatic moments in the book, not only is the outcome awful, but the main actors are directly implicated in the awfulness--they carry out terrible orders. Since one of the things the book does is explore the issues of colonialism and freedom, at all levels, that storytelling decision seemed extra apt. Are there any aspects of the concept of freedom that tend to get overlooked, or need more attention? What elements are problematic or difficult?
Freedom's really slippery, isn't it. I mean, in theory we're free to choose all kinds of things, but in fact the system is set up to make certain choices nearly impossible (sometimes for everyone, sometimes for certain sorts of people). Sometimes it's obvious--I can't actually choose to levitate six feet using nothing more than my thoughts. But sometimes it's not obvious, sometimes everyone agrees that, yes, you could totally choose to do X. Most people choose to do Y, of course, entirely because they want to. When in fact, most people choose to do Y because whatever structures are in place make it much, much easier to do Y (and strongly encourage you to want Y), and pretty difficult to do X.
In theory, [Spoiler] could have refused to [spoiler]. But in fact, that's a very difficult choice to make. In theory, we can all choose not to be complicit in the various injustices around us--but in fact, the only way to do that completely would be to withdraw from society almost entirely, and give up quite a lot of technology that not only makes our lives easier, but saves lives.
This is, by the way, a peeve of mine about a reaction I ran into one time, to LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." Someone on a panel I was attending said something about how readers of that story ought to have learned a lesson, that we should be the ones who walk away. And I found that very frustrating--I don't actually know what LeGuin intended for certain, there, but I don’t think the point was "be like the ones who walk away!" Because in the real world, we can't really. None of us have walked away. Not in the US. Many of us in the US are, in fact, living in Omelas.
And that sounds like a terrible pronouncement of doom and condemnation, but here's another reason I find I'm not sure what LeGuin intended by that story: do we really want to emulate the ones who walk away? What does their walking away do to remedy the situation for the poor child who suffers so that Omelas may live in luxury? What but assuage their own guilt? It is, in some ways, the easiest choice to make, once you've decided that situation is intolerable. Of course, telling yourself you can't help and you might as well enjoy Omelas is even easier. But isn't there anybody who decides the whole thing needs to come crashing down? Isn't there anybody who thinks, "Well, I can do something to help, anyway," and tries? Nothing's really going to change such an entrenched system--but surely it's worth trying?
We get to know a fair amount about a couple of societies in Ancillary Justice, and others are mentioned in passing with just enough tantalizing details to make readers wish we could go back and visit someday. Was it that way for you, too? If you had worlds enough and time, which societies would you like to explore further?
Oh, with anything to choose from I'd have to choose randomly! Though just now I'd prefer somewhere warm. Brrr.
Reader reactions: Have there been any reactions to the overall book, or to individual characters or plot elements, that you didn’t foresee?
I'll be honest, nearly the entire reaction to the book has completely surprised me. I mean, I wouldn't have even submitted it if I didn't believe it was the best work I could do at the time I wrote it, right? But I didn't expect quite the reaction it's gotten. So, what I didn't forsee was pretty much all of it.
Well, I expected there to be readers who would encounter the pronouns and go, "Oh, this is stupid" or "I can't read this." I just thought there would be more of them.
I am also kind of intrigued by the number of different interpretations of Breq's attitude towards gender. I had thought I was fairly straightforward about what was going on, but I've seen several reviews guessing that she can't see or doesn't understand the concept of gender at all. Which isn't the case. It's a linguistic and cultural problem, not a question of gender being an unfamiliar concept. Regardless of how people interpret that, though, I'm glad to see the discussion, and glad to see people thinking about it.
I'm also finding it really interesting the way that some readers seem to be hooked by Breq/One Esk's emotional situation right off, while others have trouble connecting with her because they find her cold and emotionless. It just reinforces for me how personal reading is--how much any reader's reaction to a book depends on where they are, who they are, their experiences and reading history. There's no right or wrong about that, it's just a thing that is, and it's very interesting to me, how different responses can be.
Food! Which of your invented dishes would you most like to try, and which would you most like to avoid? Some are clearly modeled on food we know well, others I’m not so sure of--are they all based on real-life analogues?
Most of the food is based on real-life analogues. On Nilt, for example, the food that's mentioned is mostly food that you could grow or produce in such a cold climate. The prevalence of fish in the meals at Omaugh Palace is based on my assumption that if you're already recycling water and probably using much of it to grow oxygen producing plants, there might as well be fish in that cycle.
I don't think the kinds of things we eat have changed all that much. I went looking once for descriptions of Sumerian food, and the very first book I found, the very first thing mentioned was lentil soup (with onions!) and bread. A flat bread, of course, and I don't have the kind of clay oven they'd probably have used to make it, but still, I could get up from my computer right now and prepare that meal. I know several restaurants where I could order basically that. Come to think of it, I haven't used any beans in the books, and there really should be quite a lot of lentil soup and similar in the Radch.
Skel, though, isn't based on anything. It's the cheapest thing, the Sufficiently Advanced source of oxygen and nutrition in space. I'd be curious to try it, but I think of it as one of those things that doesn't taste particularly appealing unless you grew up on it, and in that case it can almost be a comfort food.
I love food. I'm up for trying almost anything. Well, I'm not sure about insects. Last year, while I was traveling, I went out with some friends to try a restaurant where they served ants and crickets. We were disappointed to find the place not open that day--but I was also a bit relieved. Still--I'm up for trying nearly anything once!
And there you have it! Any aspects of these questions or responses that you'd like to dig into further? Leave a comment, and maybe when she has a free moment, Ann will swing by and share more thoughts.
ETA: (Okay, spoiler is gone and the comment will go back up (spoiler free) when Carlton is able to access LJ next.)
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Date: 2014-03-03 05:32 pm (UTC)(Also, yeah: the sex of the original body would probably have no bearing on the programming, as the programming overwrites the original brain… I think?)
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