I quite enjoyed the ride. I liked its experimentation with genders, its dealing of nature versus nurture, what it means to be human, and what it means to be alien.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Your description reminds me of Octavia E. Butler. Added to reading list!
It's actually a spin off of her earlier Imperial Radch trilogy, if that helps! Her debut novel which is the first book in the trilogy was really spectacular.
So far i've read only the first and second one and loved them. The german translator chose to use female pronouns as default, making it a very interesting reading experience besides the story and the great worldbuilding. (in german everything is grammatically gendered and the default is usually male) I just had a look at bookwyrm. A story about the Presger envoys looks highly interesting!
Oh yeah, I read Ancillary Justice and its sequels in English and I can confirm that the original used she/her pronouns for all Radchaai. My first language doesn't use gendered pronouns, so I wonder how the book would work in languages where pronouns are ungendered.
Ah, i was a bit unprecise (still a bit early). The use of pronouns is actually the same as in english, but the nouns are gendered and for people (like pupil, driver, teacher) the male form is mostly used by default. e.g. the default for doctor is Arzt (m) as in "i go to the Arzt", even if it is a woman who'd correctly be called Ärztin. And the translater chose the female forms as the standard.
A language without gendered pronouns sounds great! How do nouns like rock or table and nouns for people work?
Btw i've read a fascinating article about the Great Andamanese languages yesterday. They name their kids before birth, therefore all names are gender neutral.
In the English version of Ancillary Justice the use of gendered nouns is mixed. All Radchaai children are daughters while all Radchaai parents are mothers. But for officers and nobility, Ann Leckie still uses "sir" and "lord," the male gender instead of the female gender. Interesting that the translator for German also mixes it up.
That's really cool actually.
Tagalog just doesn't gender these things haha. Well there are still some things that are gendered, like nouns referring to people. Spanish and English loan words also add additional gendered words. For example, we have doktor and doktora to refer to doctors.