Review: Ancestral Night

Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Elizabeth Bear, for me, is a lot like Neil Gaiman.

That is to say, she writes extremely well; she shows deep knowledge in her worldbuilding without making the reader drink from the exposition bucket; she is what Neil himself describes as an "otter," meaning that she won't do the same trick over and over (like a dolphin) but will do a different trick each time; and a lot of her stuff is too dark for me to enjoy, despite everything else being in its favour.

This is one of the exceptions to the "too dark" issue. It's certainly tense, and there are dark deeds in it, but it's an essentially optimistic story.

It's space opera, but not the tropish cut-price space opera that kind of semi-updates Andre Norton's Solar Queen novels, Buck Rogers, or ST:TOS. It's more in the mould of Jack McDevitt or Ian M. Banks (the influence of Banks is particularly evident in the names of some of the ships). There are aliens that aren't just humans in rubber suits. There's technology by which people can perform emotional regulation and otherwise work directly with their own brains, including recording and transmitting their sensory experiences, which is a theme that's interested me considerably for the past 40 years. There's a society that isn't the usual galactic empire (seriously, why would anyone revive aristocracy as a way to regulate a technological society?), or vague clone of some poorly-grasped version of democracy and/or capitalism circa the 19th to 21st centuries, or note-for-note unreflective rendering of current US progressive thought (if "thought" is the word I mean). It's post-scarcity, and collectivist, but not Marxist; and it's definitely not libertarian, the libertarians (pirates) being the bad guys.

The book falls into several parts, each of which is good in its own way. The first part is the most reminiscent of what I would call old-style space opera, with a salvage tug and its crew encountering a mysterious deserted alien ship, leading to the first-person narrator, Hainey, gaining unexpected powers through alien biotech. The second part is a tense, extended confrontation between Hainey and one of the pirates while they're trapped together on a completely different kind of deserted alien ship, in which, with considerable skill, the author shows the confrontation of their two worldviews without it ever being a tedious talking sock puppet show. The questions that are being raised about identity, self-efficacy, self-definition, responsibility to others, the structure of society, and the modification of the mind are all deeply personal to Hainey, and she goes through a number of shocking revelations and has to cope with them as best she can in a far from ideal state.

The final part is somewhat of a return to the manner and themes of the first part, though transformed by Hainey's experiences through the middle of the book (which is how a really good novel should work). There are two more impressive, and completely different, alien encounters, a tense fight, and a resolution (partly through action) of the questions raised in the middle.

It's a bravura performance. The prose is capable, with plenty of quotable moments. The worldbuilding feels rich and deep. The story is multithreaded and expertly woven. The ideas about the mind and society are not just a layer of paint applied without thought, but are closely integrated into the story, and they're also somewhat original and thought-provoking in their own right.

Definitely one of the best books I've read in 2021 (so far, second only to Piranesi), and highly recommended.

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