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Ancestral Night
Apr. 1st, 2019 08:29 amOver the weekend, I read and enjoyed Elizabeth Bear's Ancestral Night. It's a honking big space opera, both in terms of page count and ideas. Set 500+ years in the future, the novel stars Hamley Dz, a human woman and one-third of a space salvage team. She's paired with Connla, a human male, and Singer, the shipmind / AI. The three of them "stumble" upon alien tech that's well-advanced from theirs. They also stumble upon pirates, corrupt bureaucrats, and mysterious aliens.
Bear has created a fascinating and well-crafted world, one that's as different as ours as our era is to Shakespeare's. But one can see the through-line from us to them, and it's an interesting line indeed. There's also a very interesting political and cultural interaction between Dz, our heroine, and the pirate Zenda Farweather. This interaction, while interesting, did run a bit long, which was my sole complaint about the book. Overall, I found it highly entertaining.
Bear has created a fascinating and well-crafted world, one that's as different as ours as our era is to Shakespeare's. But one can see the through-line from us to them, and it's an interesting line indeed. There's also a very interesting political and cultural interaction between Dz, our heroine, and the pirate Zenda Farweather. This interaction, while interesting, did run a bit long, which was my sole complaint about the book. Overall, I found it highly entertaining.
