Review: Radiant Star, by Ann Leckie
| Publisher: |
Orbit |
| Copyright: |
May 2026 |
| ISBN: |
0-316-29068-8 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
359 |
Radiant Star is a science fiction novel set in the Imperial Radch
universe without being a direct sequel to the other books in that
universe. It will badly spoil the end of Ancillary Mercy, and I recommend reading that trilogy first, but
it's independent of the other books in the same universe.
In the 3,008th year after the manifestation of the Radiant Star (the
1,024th since the founding of the Consorority itself), Zaved, a newly
minted consoror, disappeared a mere two days after the ceremony that
elevated her to womanhood. She left a note that read, Bored.
Back whenever. This was not normal or even remotely acceptable
behavior in a consoror, particularly one who held as much promise as
Zaved had, but what could the consorors do?
Zaved, faced with the unpleasant prospect of running out of money during
her galactic tour, plied a rich benefactor with tales of how talented,
polite, and obedient the boys of the Consorority are. Her plan worked
brilliantly. After funding further non-boring adventures, she arrived home
in Ooioiaa with a chest full of money and a pregnancy. Great for Zaved and
the Consorority; kind of a shame for her son Jonr, who is to be delivered
to her benefactor after proper training. Oh well, telling Jonr about that
is a problem for future Zaved.
After a strained childhood in which he convinces himself he is a misfit
with few redeeming qualities, Jonr ends up in a suspension pod. Before
shipping can be arranged, however, external events intervene, leaving Jonr
sitting unnoticed in a warehouse.
The planet of Aaa is in a highly inconvenient location, drifting as it
does through interstellar space unattached to any star. It would be as
irrelevant and overlooked as any other random interstellar object except
for two critical properties. The first is that Aaa and its sole city of
Ooioiaa are sacred to a religion of obscure origin. Its primary population
are members of a religious cult who believe the Radiant Star manifested in
the Temporal Location on Ooioiaa and will eventually return to bring light
to the galaxy. The second interesting property of Aaa is that it is
drifting ever so slowly towards a strategic system of military importance.
The first property brings pilgrims and their accompanying bounty of money,
food, and other resources necessary to dig a small city out of rock, make
it habitable, and supplement the sparse and strange native edible life.
The second property brings the Radchaai, who easily conquer the city of
Ooioiaa and are now faced with the unpleasant task of running it.
Some decades after the Radchaai conquest, having never left Aaa, Jonr is
woken up. He will not be sent off into the broader galaxy as a slave to
pay off a vacation debt. Instead, he will be one of the many protagonists
in this novel about the perils of living through supply chain disruptions
on a planet full of status-obsessed religious fanatics who would drown in
a rain shower.
The other books set in this universe make abundantly clear that the Radch
is a voracious colonial power that enslaves native populations and
enforces their own cultural preferences at the point of a gun. A reader
familiar with this series is predisposed to take whatever side is not the
Radch.
Radiant Star adds a complication, however. Charak Svo, the Radchaai
governor, is impatient with native inhabitants and strongly dislikes their
religion, but she is reasonably competent. The religious factions that ran
Ooioiaa before the arrival of the Radchaai, on the other hand, are
dogmatic authoritarians with the collective wisdom of a sack of turnips.
Charak does not get everything right and is arguably responsible for at
least one catastrophe. By the end of the book, though, I was firmly
convinced that had the original religious government still been in charge,
everyone would have died.
I found the structure of this book a little odd. The omniscient narrator
tells the story in the form of a history. The target audience appears to
be future inhabitants of Ooioiaa and adherents to the Radiant Star
religion, and the narrator is often maddeningly uninterested in topics
that a reader of the rest of the Imperial Radch books is intensely curious
about. This same property carries through to the plot: I was interested in
how all of the tensions in this obviously absurd society could be resolved
or, preferably, overturned entirely. The narrator, on the other hand, is
far more interested in Serque Tais's intent to become the last saint in
the Temporal Location, and in the details of the subsequent political,
economic, and religious fallout.
Leckie has written three novels set in the Imperial Radch after the
original trilogy: Provenance,
Translation State, and now Radiant
Star. I am sure that I'm not the only person who wants a direct
continuation of the original trilogy, but I'm drawing the conclusion that
Leckie doesn't want to write that. Instead, she's writing around the edges
of the subsequent events, in effect showing readers the shape of them and
their broader implications without showing the details.
Now that I can see what she's doing, I kind of like it. Given what we now
know from the books written around the edges, the ensuing events in the
center of galactic politics are chaotic in a way that could easily devolve
into tedious accounts of messy conflicts. Seeing the effects from afar
lets the reader fill in some of the blanks and speculate, and it makes the
moments where we get a concrete update (such as at the end of this book)
all the more rewarding. I still find it odd, though, to read a book where
the narrator's interests so sharply diverge from mine.
I wish I could say that Radiant Star sucked me in as the story
developed, but it never did. Part of the problem is that I think this book
is intended as a very dry farce, and farce often doesn't work with my
reading style. I prefer to attach myself to a protagonist and hope they do
competent things, and this book is full of characters who are being
themselves far too aggressively and loudly to have time to be competent at
anything. My favorite moments were therefore the small pockets of people
with sense: The governor, Jonr, his charge, and the delightfully strange
Justice of Albis. I enjoyed all of them, but I had trouble caring
about the overall plot and kept putting this book down for days between
chapters.
I think this is mostly personal taste, though. Like all of Leckie's novels
since the original Imperial Radch trilogy, Radiant Star is
competently executed and a little strange. When that strangeness aligns
with your tastes, it's a great deal of fun and rather unlike other science
fiction novels. In this case, it didn't quite work for me, but I suspect
it will for others.
I still want another Leckie novel with a ship as a protagonist, though.
Content notes: Rather disturbing (although bloodless) religious practices,
mass death.
Rating: 6 out of 10
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