Fiction Reviews
Lake of Souls
The Collected Short Fiction(2024) Ann Leckie, Orbit, £10.99, pbk, 403pp, ISBN 978-0-356-52346-0
All eighteen of multiple award-winner Ann Leckie’s short stories are here collected for the first time, with the volume divided up between three sections: the first consists of eight disparate pieces, with the last of those – ‘The Sad History of the Tearless Onion’ – just a page and half long. The second section, comprising just three stories, is set in the universe of the Imperial Radch trilogy, which began with Ancillary Justice, Leckie’s debut novel which won the Hugo, the Nebula, the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her 2019 fantasy novel, The Raven Tower, then provides the setting for the final seven of the third section.
All but the opening novelette (from which the volume takes its name) have previously been published elsewhere. A first encounter tale which alternates between alien and human perspectives, this, for me, was one of the less successful contributions. Much more engaging, I felt, was the LeGuinesque ‘Another Word For World’ which effectively bounces both different generations and different cultures off one another while exploring issues of immigration and, ultimately, the nature of leadership. Also examining that last theme, albeit in a less weighty manner, is ‘The Endangered Camp’, featuring a group of what seem to be velociraptors heading off to Mars, just as ‘a stone from the void’ plummets into the Earth, leaving them to face a crucial decision. ‘The Justified’ likewise focuses on the decisions that must be made by those who seek to rule, or not, this time in a world where only an elite few get to be resurrected.
The tone here resonates with that of the subsequent trio of Imperial Radch stories, of which my favourite is ‘She Commands Me And I Obey’. Set on a cylinder-world, where elections to the governing Council are decided on the ball court, it focuses on novice monk Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe. Apparently unassuming, he discovers that if he bows his head at the base of a particular statue in the monastery, he can overhear what’s being said in the conference room three-hundred metres away. And on this particularly crucial game day, what he hears dramatically alters the course of his young life and of those around him. Yet again, what Leckie does here, so expertly, is draw the reader into a labyrinthine political drama whilst not losing sight of the personal element.
‘Night’s Slow Poison’, on the other hand, is a more straightforward tale of betrayal in space, whereas ‘The Creation and Destruction of the World’, written as it is in the style of a creation myth is less absorbing. It does, however, serve as a bridge to the final part, comprising stories about gods being bested by humans, or by other gods, and which tend to be both charming and alarming in more or less equal measure. ‘The God of Au’ represents the latter aspect with its dark, Lovecraftian elements, whereas ‘The Nalendar’, with its resourceful female lead outwitting both the sexist heir to a kingdom and a much-reduced god, definitely lies more with the former. The best, however, is ‘The Snake’s Wife’ in which the narrator is brutally castrated in order to be married to the son of a powerful king, thereby allowing a curse on the latter’s lineage to be finally lifted. Here, again, Leckie skilfully blends the political machinations of both gods and humans into a narrative of queer love that is both disquieting and, ultimately, very moving.
That last story stands as a worthy representative of Leckie’s work in both its ingenuity and its humanity. Of the many short-story collections that I have read over the past few months, this stands out as one of the very best.
Steven French
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