Ancestral Night (White Space, #1) by Elizabeth Bear
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi, Space Opera
Representation: Lesbian MC, bi/pansexual secondary character, queernorm setting
PoV: First-person, past-tense
ISBN: 1534403000
Goodreads

“Outstanding…Amid a space opera resurgence, Bear’s novel sets the bar high.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from Hugo Award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.

Halmey Dz and her partner Connla Kurucz are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law...usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence—with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically big—just once—to keep them coming back for more. They pilot their tiny ship into the scars left by unsuccessful White Transitions, searching for the relics of lost human and alien vessels. But when they make a shocking discovery about an alien species that has been long thought dead, it may be the thing that could tip the perilous peace mankind has found into full-out war.

Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton—“Bear's ability to create breathtaking variations on ancient themes and make them new and brilliant is, perhaps, unparalleled in the genre” (Library Journal, starred review).

Highlights

~who needs feet when you could have aft-hands?
~kitties in zero-gravity!
~let’s taste space
~space socialism > space pirates actually
~can I sign up for a fox in my brain too?

Friends, I was GLUED to the pages of this one. Any break, no matter how short, in Other Things saw me reading. A website’s slow to load? Reading. Waiting in line at the pharmacy? Reading. Shoving something in the microwave for two minutes? Propped against the kitchen counter, reading while the little plate spins around.

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that I fell so in love with Bear’s sci fi, since I’ve always loved her fantasy books, but WOW I was not expecting to fall this hard! This is a far-future setting that gives me everything I want out of far-future settings, the most important being that it is wildly weird, radically different to how humans run things in 2026! The Synarche is a sort of civilisation conglomerate, all the sentient species living and working together – and how do they manage that? By deliberately altering and managing their brain-chemistry. Everyone has something called a ‘fox’ in their head (or, for the not-humans, wherever their brains are) which among other things allows them to see and manipulate their hormones and whatnot. Emotional regulation via fox is seen as a basic, fundamental skill/responsibility of adulthood; if you don’t manage your temper/stress/anxiety sensibly, people are going to side-eye the hells out of you. Naturally this doesn’t mean that everyone is super pleasant and well-behaved all the time, but I’m SO GLAD Bear wrote Ancestral Night in first-person, because getting a front-row seat to ‘bumping’ (what it’s called when you adjust your body’s chemicals to manage your emotions) was not just fascinating, but I think really necessary in order for us to understand how people work in this setting.

Then there’s the fact that the Synarche will step in and ‘rightmind’ you if you happen to be wired in ways that make you harmful to society. The kind of narcissists that make up the 1% in our world? There’s far less of them in the Synarche, and they can’t be nearly as destructive, because above a certain threshold they’ll be rightminded. Antisocial Personality Disorder? Rightminded. Pyromania? Rightminded. Clinical narcissism? Rightminded. You get the picture.

And I love this not just because I am extremely jealous and would like a fox of my own, thanks very much (I do wonder if Bear had the idea for this after her own struggles with depression) but because it’s so viscerally horrifying to a modern, raised-in-a-democracy reader. Western democracy values individual freedoms over just about everything, and here’s a pan-galactic civilisation that looks at that and goes ‘lol no’. THIS IS WHAT I WANT FROM MY SCI FI! Worlds, ways of being, that are so different from what I know! YES GREAT THANK YOU!

I’ve noticed that quite a lot of excellent sci fi introduces a small number of changes or ideas – sometimes a single piece of technology – and then explores the chaos-theory butterfly effect of them: in the Vorkosigan Saga, it’s the uterine replicators; the Teixcalaan duology has the imagos; in the Foreigner series, it’s an idea, ‘what if aliens didn’t love?’ Like all of those, Ancestral Night digs deep into the effects and implications of its premise. If humans had total control over our hormones, what would that look like? What would it mean for sex and romance? Friendship? What is personhood or identity in a world where you can basically customise your personality at will? When would people not ‘bump’ their feelings, even if they could? How does governance work in a multi-species civilisation that believes the common good is more important than individual freedoms? Or how about all the ways rightminding could be so extremely dodgy? As a worldbuilding nerd, I could not have been happier with the answers to all these questions, and all the other questions Bear thinks to ask and explore. If you’ve ever seen a cat bodily rolling around in catnip, that was me, revelling in all this incredible worldbuilding!

“Malingerers. People who don’t pull their weight. How do you drive them to work harder?”

“Why do they need to?”

None of this worldbuilding is background – the antagonists of the novel are the ‘Freeporters’, aka space pirates, who completely reject this whole ‘individual freedom shouldn’t come before the common good’ model, and our protagonist Haimey has a complicated history that has left her with struggles around managing herself via fox. Ancestral Night is a high-stakes treasure hunt, but it’s also a vicious clash of ideologies, and various reveals and Shenanigans force Haimey (and thus the reader) to re-examine everything she’s taken for granted about what she believes is good.

And possibly my joint-favourite thing about this book? That View Spoiler »that re-examination doesn’t end with Haimey rejecting her fox, deciding that her ‘real’ emotions are the ones with value; the book does not go with the neat little moral of individualism being The Best Thing Ever. After being forced outside of the Synarche without her fox, Haimey…immediately goes back and gets her fox fixed. Because she (rightly!) decides that she wants to be a person who cares about other people. (And that, since managing your emotions is a mandatory part of being a decent person, you might as well have a much easier, more comfortable time managing them with a fox than white-knuckling it without!)

Anger is an inoculant. It gets your immune system working against bullshit.

Honestly, I say she ‘decides’, but she never really considers not choosing working for the common good. At no point does she want to become a pirate, even if she has very understandable moments of envy/jealousy re these assholes living their lives without caring about how their actions affect other people. Anyone can see the appeal in not caring about other people! But Haimey, like most of us, doesn’t ever want to stop caring. Because she knows what it would make her: someone she doesn’t want to be.

Gods, I was so relieved that this book rejected the individualism thing. It would have been so classic to have Haimey reject the Synarche in the end – even to have the Synarche revealed to be horrifically corrupt and Completely Bad Actually to justify that rejection. But that’s not at all what Bear was doing and I am SO GLAD. « Hide Spoiler

Not unusually for one of Bear’s novels, the cast here is vividly alive. Haimey’s first-person narration is equal parts wry self-awareness and genuine passion, and her deep hatred for gravity is a running joke throughout the book. (She lives 99.9% of her life in zero-gravity! At that point I’d start hating gravity too!) The ship she lives in is Singer – or rather, Singer is the ‘shipmind’, a sentient AI who is adorably geeky about science and political philosophy; also living in Singer is Connla, Haimey and Singer’s business partner, who was raised in a pretty repressed culture but is better at using his fox than Haimey is because of it. The friendship between the three of them, and particularly Haimey and Singer, is UNQUESTIONABLY the heart of the book, and equally unquestionably one of the best things about it. The banter is screamingly funny – particularly Singer teasing the other two about the downsides of being ‘organics’ – but there’s so much more to them than that: the mutual caring is deep and heartfelt, the three of them are there for each other through anything and everything, and together they form an incredibly wonderful whole. Which is extra-necessary because with their lifestyle, they are the only sentients each of them see for months at a time – so if they didn’t mesh so well, they’d probably have murdered each other years ago!

Also, they have cats. I love the cats. They are a constant thread of delight winding through the whole novel. I approve of the decision to include the cats so hard.

Hell, I thought, I’m already a walking war crime. How much more ethically compromised can I get?

Okay but the PLOT, Sia, what is the PLOT? Well, it’s a little hard to explain without spoilers! In the most general sense, it’s a high-stakes treasure hunt through space, with the prize being both ancient artefacts from the long-gone Most Advanced Aliens, and Haimey herself. But that’s only the smallest part of it, really. Ancestral Night is so beautifully long – almost 600 pages on my ereader. Every time I thought this has to be the climax, I realised there was so much book left to go. As you can imagine, this heightened the tension to truly ridiculous levels, because I was constantly freaking out wondering WHAT THE HELLS IS LEFT TO HAPPEN?! A lot! A lot, is the answer! Haimey and her family aren’t just racing pirates to the treasure; they’re also being hunted by the pirates, with no idea why. Monstrous crimes entangle with ancient history; jaw-dropping discoveries are made; and somehow Haimey’s past is tangled up with all of it, which makes no sense at all because there’s nothing in her past! And like I said earlier, Ancestral Night is fundamentally a conflict between ways of looking at the world, ways of being, and I cannot underscore enough how validating and hope-full that ended up being, what a wonderful contrast it was to the *waves vaguely at Everything*. This is escapist and inspiring as hells, is what I’m saying, okay?

Revealed before us was a ballet of stars swathed in nebulae like layers of tulle and chiffon illuminated from within.

I’d like to wax endlessly poetic about the freaking PROSE, about Bear’s stunning imagery and wickedly clever turns of phrase – but I hope the quotes I’ve chosen have made that point for me. Bear has always had a gift for voice (just look at her book Karen Memory!) and I truly adored Haimey’s; beyond that, I’m so impressed that we got so much beautiful imagery in first-person. Not many authors can pull that off, can craft a voice that can be poetic while still sounding natural, but Haimey’s is perfect. The moments when we get lines like the one above feel organic and real, but she still sounds like what for lack of a better term I’ll call a ‘normal person’. She never comes across as fake; sometimes she’s so genuine it hurts – and I mean that as the highest of praise.

As a final note – one of the small but beautiful details that really elevated this book is the sheer love Haimey (and the rest of the cast) has for space. Often in sci fi that’s not really a thing, and you can understand why; it’s easy to imagine that characters who regularly travel through space, maybe even live in it, would end up taking it for granted. But that’s not the case here, and Haimey’s passion for space, her awe of it, her wonder in the face of it, is woven throughout the book. And it’s actually really plot-relevant, given the effects of the Spoiler Thing, but also – I’m a sucker for wonder. I want to feel it, and Bear made me feel it. As an earthbound reader who should NOT be taking space for granted, I appreciated it enormously.

I knew it with a lucidity like stained glass with a light behind it.

I’m sorry it took me so long to get to Ancestral Night; on the other hand, now there are two more books (standalones, but in the same setting!) that I can immediately dive into! And while I obviously can’t speak on them yet, you can expect this one on my Best of Year list come December.

It’s already won its spot on my all-time favourites shelf.

Related Posts