I learn how to speak a forgotten language

[sovay]

(In which I draw too many conclusions from etymology.)

Is the world of Ancillary Justice our far future? When people in this setting say human, do they mean Homo sapiens? It only occurred to me to wonder last night after I realized that Radch is cognate with Raj and Reich; before that I would cheerfully have assumed the story was taking place anywhere with comparably hominid sexual dimorphism, in the same way that secondary-world fantasies never worry about parallel evolution. I'm still not sure it's relevant. Nice way of embedding echoes, though.

Comments

[sovay]

--and when I realized that, I asked Ann if that had been her intention, and she said no! But who knows how the subconscious affects one's word choice.

Awesome.

In a part you'll get to, there's a joke about how difficult, or not, it is to find the home planet whence sprang all humans.

I've gotten there! I almost mentioned it in the post and then deleted the line for people who hadn't. (At first I took it as a commentary on the Battlestar Galactica finale.) But in the same way we are alerted to think critically about classifying terms like citizen, civilization—"To be Radchaai is to be civilized"—or the Presger concept of Significance, which makes a similar distinction between people and things it's all right to use and/or kill, human could have been an equivalence of translation, like Breq with default pronouns. (It's translating an important concept no matter what, since we know that the Radchaai definition of humanity is specialized: "She didn't mean [I was barely even human] because I was an ancillary . . . She meant because I wasn't Radchaai and perhaps because I might have implants that were common some places outside Radch space and that would, in Radchaai eyes, compromise my humanity.") It wouldn't make a difference to the story, but I was still curious.

[edit] Finished book; that was awesome; I hope it wins the Hugo.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Me toooooo!

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