![]() In my Philosophies of India course this week, we've been covering Buddhist theories of personal identity. If you could be in hundreds of places at the same time, would you get along with yourselves? Mild spoiler: one of the characters literally does go to war with herself, which is fascinating. These fractured identities can make the storytelling difficult, but it's also fascinating to think what it would be like to be such a creature. Several characters have identities spread throughout hundreds of individual human bodies as well as ships or stations, each with some degree of independence. This book gives an awful lot to think about concerning personal identity. The fact that the protagonist's language has only female gendered pronouns makes for some interesting reflections on gender, both in that the protagonist is constantly getting it wrong when speaking a dual-gendered language and in the reader often not knowing the gender identities of characters. Nonetheless, I will say that the basic idea is really cool: an AI that used to be a ship mind now in a single human body. ![]() The writing style didn't click for me (Leckie is no LeGuin or Banks), and I thought most of the first half of the book was extremely unclear (call me old fashioned or stylistically gauche, but some violation of the "show, don't tell" rule is allowable or even necessary, especially in science fiction). In the interest of fractured identities, here's my Amazon review as well. ![]() For more on the book, see my Goodreads review. ![]()
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