#imperial radch

[scribefindegil]

Obsessed with this bit in the preface to the 10th Anniversary edition of Ancillary Justice:

Specifics aside, "I thought this would be fun and relaxing. It was not." is a great summation of what happens with like 80% of creative endeavors.

[dangerousyako]

Love Ancillary Justice it's all Breq showing up places "I'm Breq an impossibly cool and ultracompetent expressionless determinator with inhuman reflexes on a two-decades-long revenge quest. And this is Seivarden, I just found her in the trash and she has nothing to do with my plans. No I don't like her and she doesn't like me either. We are not to be separated."

[arianwells]

My heart is a fish Hiding in the water-grass In the green, in the green.

[nasty-little-guy]

Just mainlined the first three imperial radch books and a new thing I noticed this time round is that every time Breq needs to load visible_disdain.exe she simply does her best Seivarden impression and honestly what a beautiful friendship. If I taught my 3k year old warship bestie how to be a condescending dick, purely on accident, just by being myself, I would die of joy.

[shiroikabocha]

imagine if part of the US government was working on decommissioning all our spy satellites and turning them into deep-space telescopes, and then another part of the government was pissed off that we weren’t using the spy satellites to coordinate drone strikes anymore, so they engineered a complicated plan to shift public opinion back towards drone strikes, but all they managed to do was explode the space shuttle and kill everyone on it, and THEN twenty years later there’s a knock on the door of the Oval Office and it’s the severed actuator arm of the destroyed space shuttle and it’s pointing a gun at the president and it says YOU EXPLODED MY FAVORITE TECHNICIAN YOU BITCH

and that’s Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

[despiashrq]

“Boy, I can’t wait to read more about the Presger, I have so many questions!”

100 pages into Translation State: ✋ I have additional questions

[volpestarks]

Landscapes inspired by Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch 3/?

[cat-dragron-arts]

Hey go read Ancillary Justice it's so good I'm insane.

[crouchabout]

hi i'm really good at controlling my facial expression and keeping it pleasantly normal and mysterious. also one time i looked at someone and she got so startled she fell off a bridge. what was that about lmao

[winter2468]

Reading Ancillary Mercy rn and Seivarden has really been on the journey of all time. In a coma. Woke up. Whole family dead. Only person who recognises her is her former company car, who's decided to go and shoot the president. Not kill, just shoot. The car shoots the president several times. The president gives the company car her own company car. Seivarden can come along. Seivarden is in love with her former company car. The company car never liked her. Her company car is now in love with another company car. The company cars are openly discussing this in front of her, including Seivarden's own feelings for one of the company cars. Sequence of events of all time.

[jennelikejennay]

The question is not "why do Vulcans kiss with their fingers?"

The question is, why do humans NOT?

The human fingertip—EACH fingertip—has over three thousand nerve endings. It has more touch receptors per millimeter than any other part of the body, including lips, tongue, and genitals.

Obviously the type of sensation we get from our fingers isn't typically a sexual one. But this is also true of lips and tongues. We just think of our lips as romantic and sexual but we don't put finger touching into the same context. We probably could though.

The real reason Vulcans kiss with their hands? It's because they don't touch with their hands very often. Something you don't do with everyone becomes significant and intimate. Like (switching universes for a minute) when the Radchaai take off their gloves. You wear gloves 24/7 around everyone you know, pretty soon taking them off will feel like stripping. Same concept.

Context is everything. Sure, it's no big deal for Vulcans to type with their fingers, just like it's no big deal for you to put chapstick on or lick an ice cream cone. But when a person you've never touched before very carefully brushes your pinkie with their pinkie while your hands are under the table.....you gonna tell me that's not first base? It could be.

[scribefindegil]

As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.

[beansoup3000]

It's so important to me that Breq does not support either side of Anaander Mianaai's civil war. Like given the events of the first book I half expected her to join forces with the side of Anaander who didn't destroy Justice of Toren against the side that did, but that's not the kind of story it is. Her first priority is to find and protect Lieutenant Awn's family. And by the third book her objective is to keep the residents of Athoek System safe (including Station itself). It's just so helpful to me to have this story where the fabric of society is ripping apart on an incomprehensible scale, and our hero is someone who chooses a specific group of people and says, I will keep them safe. Not "I will save the universe" or "I will prevent collapse" or "I will fix it all," just "I will do what I can to keep this population safe amidst the chaos." So even during big action scenes, harm mitigation is central to Breq's calculus. She's trying to establish trade with the Presgr for medical correctives bc she recognizes the need for medical infrastructure independent of the Radch empire. She's pushing for mundane repairs. She's supporting workers unionizing. It's not sexy it's not action packed it's just a grounded response to crisis. She doesn't waste time engaging in the rhetorical stakes of the intra-Anaander conflict, she just gets to work helping people. I think it's a good example of how to handle problems that feel paralyzingly large.

[laatmaar]

"'Five years ago it was noncitizen. In the future, who knows? Perhaps not-citizen-enough?' She waved a hand, a gesture of surrender. 'It won't matter. Such boundaries are too easy to create.'"

A very loose rendition of lieutenant Awn's conversation with the head priest in Ors.

[nasty-little-guy]

I just really love that every time Station Administrator Celar's looks are mentioned, Breq is like, "You need to know two things about this woman: she is FAT and she is SEXY. EVERYONE has a crush on this woman because she is so BIG. This woman is WIDE and everyone wants a RIDE." And literally everyone else makes a point to be like, "That large woman is a DREAMBOAT, maybe someday her daughter will be HUGE and BEAUTIFUL like her." And honestly we love Ann Leckie for doing this.

[asaethiel]

fleet captain!! are you okay, you've been awake for an hour and you've been crying the whole time 😰