Skip to main content

Week Fifteen: Future Tense - Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (# 5 points)

 


This week, I read Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Overall, It was hard to read because there are a lot of characters in a story. The relationships between the characters keep increasing and get complicated, so sometimes it was a bit hard to follow the story. The view of the world and the characters the writer created are very fresh and unfamiliar as well.

The new words like Fleet, Ancillaries, Nilt, and Radch pop up from the first page of this novel.

At first, I needed time to get used to this new world, but at some point, I found myself empathizing with the speaker and experiencing the vast universe. 


A first-person narrator of this story is artificial intelligence, Breq, who still thinks that there are a lot of incomprehensible behaviors humans do, although it has been living 19 years with a human body. Breq must follow the command of her creator, the Radch’s monarch, 

but by a series of events, now she acts by her own free will. It can be read just as the error of artificial intelligence, but along the story, it feels like Breq has an ego. 


The interesting thing about artificial intelligence in this work is, they have feelings like humans. Breq said even making minor decisions could be painful work that has to compare trivial matters without feelings, so it is easier to handle things with emotions. She logically thinks having feelings is just for practical purposes, but at the same time, she is also the character of passionately loving someone in the story. 


The world and characters that Ann Leckie created are very delicate, especially when the writer depicts the Radch culture. The Radch people unify the pronoun for gender as ‘she’, and don’t use the word for a specific gender. It blurs the boundaries of gender, and for me, this is a very interesting attempt. As a reader, I usually read novel imagining 

However, while I read Ancillary Justice, I was surprised when the characters that I thought were men were actually women. I think this setting extends the imagination of the characters. 


The story keeps raising interesting questions about the role and coexistence of humans and artificial intelligence. Until now, I thought ‘Art’ that is far from the technology and requires feelings and thoughts is an area where only human beings could do, but if machines have a sensibility, maybe the moment when machines can really surpass humans is very close. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Eight: Contemporary Fantasy - Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanna Clark (# 6 points)

  Jonathan Strange and. Mr. Norrell is a fantasy novel that is very realistic to call it fantasy.    The background of the story is England, so that made me compare this story with Harry Potter, while I read it. In Harry Potter, the theme of magic and wizard was expressed in a more unrealistic and imaginary way, but in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, two characters who can do real magic were actively engaged in real-life events like the war between Great Britain and France, and the real historical figure like Napoleon appears in the story, so the writer combines the history of the United Kingdom and the magical world. It’s like the history of the magical world that the writer created flows away with the real history of England. And I think this makes me feel like the magic in this story could be possible or exist.    Featuring wizards and fairies, this work tells a very dark and fantastic story, and, of course, it is fiction. However, the author do...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 2: Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice (#6 points)

      I grew up watching movies and was enthusiastic about Vampires, invisible men, wizards, and goblins, so they are like childhood friends in my imagination.     Among these imaginative creatures, my favorite is a vampire, because they have special abilities surpassing humans. Furious power, and immortal ability to live forever while maintaining youth. They can sustain life only by drinking human blood. This vampiric act may be scary, but also feel like a fatal temptation. They are attractive because of their distinction, but at the same time, I like vampires due to their familiarity. The fact that they have the same appearance as humans (except the colors of eyes and skin) and that they were humans in the past make vampires more intimate. They can fall in love with a human, and they can even make children with a human. These characteristics of vampires make me feel that they might exist.     Louis, who unwillingly became...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 3_1: Confessions by Kanae Minato (#5 points)

   The main background of ‘Confessions’ is a normal school. The homeroom teacher, Yuko, says her four-year-old daughter is murdered by her class at the school where she works. The story begins with the teacher confessing this murder case like a speech in front of her students on the day of the closing ceremony. Yuko is the parent who lost her daughter and couldn’t protect her daughter, and at the same time, she is a teacher who has a duty to guide her students in the right way. She confesses about the law and order, ethics, and moral ideas in a calm and grim tone, in front of the criminals in her class who killed her daughter. Everyone is quietly holding their breath.  The incident begins with the death of Yuko's only four-year-old daughter, Manami. Manami was found drowned in the pool, but in fact, it was done by Yuko's students Naoki and Shuya. Shuya wanted to get his mother's attention by killing Manami, and Naoki pushed Manami into the pool to show Shuya, who i...
Post a Comment
Read more