#Lake of Souls

[annleckie]

Hey, you all know that Lake of Souls, which is a collection of, well, not all but much of my short fiction, is coming out April 2?

And you all know that Adjoa Andoh is reading the audiobook.

But did you know that you can listen to a sample of that audiobook????

[ilikereadingactually]

Lake of Souls

Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie

what can i even say about this?? i have already established my deep love for Ann Leckie's work, and this collection lives up to all possible expectations. it's spectacular. every single story is an absolute BANGER.

the first section, standalone stories unrelated to her novels, is brimming with surprises and delights. each new premise and scenario presented me with characters i understood and loved immediately, and took me on a journey of unexpected turns. fabulous for any speculative reader honestly, but so particularly wonderful to me and my adhd brain! the imagination and unpredictability of each story kept me absolutely glued, and opened doors into worlds that felt fully realized. i could easily read a novel in every single world Leckie created here, but the stories are also satisfying--i don't NEED a novel in any of them, they are perfectly satiating morsels of lembas bread.

and in the second section we get stories in the Imperial Radch universe, two of which i had actually read before during the deepest dives of my Radch obsession, but which were fantastic to revisit. again, the worldbuilding and character development both stand out as Leckie's greatest strengths, giving insight into times and places outside the scope of her novels with tantalizing bits of in-universe history and folklore. i spent some time yelling out loud about them.

the third section, i now have to confess, i haven't read yet--because they're stories set in the universe of The Raven Tower, which i also have not had time to read yet in between galleys and library books with due dates, and i'd prefer to go into the novel not knowing anything about the world. but i can't imagine, at this point, that any story in this section is going to somehow alter my love for this collection, which is already deep and abiding. looking forward to sneaking in a read of The Raven Tower and then coming back to this!!

the deets

how i read it: an e-galley from NetGalley, which i wanted to read immediately but had to prioritize other deadlines first, so it was sitting approved on my shelf for months calling to me T^T

try this if you: love SFF at its most speculative and imaginative, are compelled by well-developed characters, dig themes of language and translation and the meeting/clashing of cultural norms, or are into Leckie's other work (obv)!

some bits i really liked: it was super hard to choose, so here's connected bits that made me laugh and one that made me holler "BREQ PLEASE" out loud in my empty apartment

"And you left me behind," continued Great Among Millions. "Alone. They asked and asked me where you were and I did not know, though I wished to." It made a tiny, barely perceptible stomp. "They put me in a storeroom. In a box." ... "Eye of Merur," said the first of the Thirty-Six. "We're glad you're back." "They're glad you're back," whispered Great Among Millions, just behind Het's right shoulder. "They didn't spend the time in a box."

---

"She commands me," said Seven-Brilliant-Truths. "And I obey. Sister understands." "Yes," said Sister Ultimately-Justice, not even blinking.

pub date: April 2, 2024! That's tomorrow!!!!! Go get your copy!!

[crouchabout]

guys. has anyone read ann leckie's lake of souls??? this is a spoiler but the story "she commands me and i obey" - that character (you know the one) - she!!! her!!!!!!! ❤️🌟🌈🙆🙏🙇‍♀️😍🌟✨💫❤️

[whispersmith]

Anne Leckie’s short story collection is splendid. There’s one about raptors going to Mars

[parsleysagerosemarytimemachine]

Hey, Ann Leckie is great, and if you already enjoy her books you'll really be rewarded here. Also if you're just looking for an interesting collection of short SFF stories, this is great too. The titular story is a great fun exploration of an alien planet, and also I did really enjoy getting more stories from the Raven Tower universe - love weird little gods, and wow does this have a lot of them. :)

[nzbookwyrm]

April 2024

[arayaz]

I wanna write Lake of Souls fanfic … I have the ideas and inspiration but I just can’t make myself do it

Writers of tumblr where do you get your ability to write

[rhetoricandlogic]

Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie

April 7, 2024Gary K. Wolfe

In a Locus interview last year, Ann Leckie noted that, prior to Ancillary Justice, “Nobody paid much attention to my stories,” and she was nei­ther complaining nor being falsely modest. While a few of the stories in Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction made the Locus recommended read­ing list or best-of-the-year anthologies, it seems fair to say that Leckie was hardly a widely discussed writer before her stunning first novel. None of this has anything to do with the generally fine quality of those stories, though. Another reason might simply be that the “collected stories” of a career dating back to 2006 consists of only 18 selections (omitted are a handful of stories, three of which were collaborations with Rachel Swirsky), and more than half of those take place either in the “Imperial Radch Universe” or the fantasy world of The Raven Tower. None of those novels are in any sense prerequisites, however, and in fact all seven of the Raven Tower tales were published before that novel appeared in 2019, giving us a clear sense of how Leckie developed this world and its rules, and dispelling the notion (which briefly made the rounds back then) that Leckie had somehow made an abrupt left turn from SF into fantasy.

Almost as if to show us that she’s far more than a two-universe pony (okay, that’s admittedly a metaphor that doesn’t mix), Leckie opens the col­lection with eight stories that demonstrate a broad grasp of SF and fantasy themes and forms. Her first published story, “Hesperia and Glory”, adopts the slightly formal tone of post-WWI ghost stories in telling of a strange visitor who claims to be an exiled prince from an ancient Martian civilization with distinctive echoes of Burroughs and Brackett. Two of the stories invoke the old space-opera chestnut of the sole survivor of a crash landing on an alien planet, but “Lake of Souls” – original to the volume – counterpoints the spaceman’s point of view with a surprisingly moving coming-of-age tale of Spawn, the “lobster dog” alien who encounters him, while “Footprints” is a short but chilling vignette involving an illusory little girl and her teddy bear. Another short-short, “The Sad History of the Tearless Onion”, is a slight if clever parable of unanticipated consequences. Far more substantial are “The Justified”, a far-future adaptation of the Egyptian tale of Sekhmet, in which the powerful Het is called back from exile to root out threats to the elite of the story’s title, particularly among the “single-lived”, but whose brief encounter with a pair of small children shifts her perspective. “Another Word for World” begins as a familiar-looking tale of ostensible enemies forced to depend on each other to survive (after another crash landing!), one a Sovereign of a planet’s native population, the other an emissary of refugees who have settled there. The title may echo Le Guin, and so does what emerges as the story’s central theme – communication, and how dependence on a faulty (or misprogrammed) auto-translator (another old favorite SF gadget) can change history.

Readers of the Ancillary series might find a few Easter eggs in the three stories set in the Imperial Radch Universe – unlike the Raven Tower stories, all of these were published after Ancillary Justice – the best of which are “She Commands Me and I Obey”, in which a space-hockey sort of sports competition in a vast space habitat reveals com­plex political rivalries, and “Night’s Slow Poison”, a classic space opera in which a months-long voyage slowed down by a mysterious region called “the crawl” highlights further political intrigue. But it may be the seven Raven Tower stories that most clearly show Leckie’s skill at deploying various techniques in the service of incremental world-building. Having given herself a set of ground rules – thousands of gods can inhabit anything from frogs to horses to rivers, but they depend on prayers or sacrifices for their power and are incapable of lying – Leckie gives herself leeway to range from the comic to the almost gruesome. A frog-god in “The Unknown God”, for example, partly makes a living marketing excretions as a skin moisturizer (though the story itself focuses on a god of horses trying to reverse an earlier, ill-advised curse). The most delightful story in the collection, “Saving Bacon”, is an almost Wodehou­sian rom-com in which the scion of a privileged family goes to great lengths (and enlists the aid of some of those small gods) to avoid an arranged marriage. But another arranged marriage, in “The Snake’s Wife”, results in a grim but powerful tale involving castration, rape, and the dark side of some of those same gods. “The Nalendar” is very nearly a caper story involving the search for the lost treasure of a river god, while other stories explore the various ingenious ways in which humans and gods negotiate for power within the tricky confines of those ground rules. Throughout, there’s a sense of a restless imagination at work, and of a writer exploring her options, often in ways that will surprise the admirers of her more famous novels, and often in ways that will reassure them they were right in the first place.

[hellenhighwater]

Whereabouts do you live, roughly speaking, and what drew you to that place in particular?

I'm in Michigan, and that's as specifically as I will answer that question! We have really lethal lakes.

[allbookedupblogstuff]

Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie

Source: NetGalley – Many thanks to the publisher!TL;DR: A really fantastic collection, some more challenging than others but nearly all were winners for me. Plot: Each plot was well drawn and worked within the confines of the story. Ann Leckie has a real knack for short stories.Characters: A good variety of characters existed here, all of them were fairly similar on reflection but they stood out…

[lostsoulsparadise]

Lost Souls Paradise | Instagram

[wedarkacademia]

But don't forget who you really are. And I'm not talking about your so-called real name. All names are made up by someone else, even the one your parents gave you. You know who you really are. When you're alone at night, looking up at the stars, or maybe lying in your bed in total darkness, you know that nameless person inside you.

― Louis Sachar, Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake

[notxon]

the thief

[ashinaisshin]

Arriving at Anor Londo

[mishidefresa]

Can I ask for 5C and 8C with Jesse and Lake from infinity train? 🥺 💕

[entropicquilibriumofchaos]

Sam Lake, Destroyer of Coffee and Creator of Dreams