Review of Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

This was a perfect book to round out my summer vacation, an equal combination of easy to read yet demanding careful consideration. Ancestral Night is one of those books you don’t read in a single sitting, yet it also isn’t made for sipping here and there over weeks or months. I read it in big gulps. Elizabeth Bear is an author whose name is more familiar to me than her work (of which I’ve really only read one trilogy, long ago, and Karen Memory, and this was a perfect reintroduction to her writing.

Haimey is a member of a three-person crew comprising herself; her pilot, Connla; and their shipmind, Singer. Together, they salvage wrecked or in-distress vessels for the Synarche, the kind of overarching galactic civilization to which humanity now belongs. They’re on their way to salvage well off the usual shipping lanes, but they are not prepared for what they discover. Suddenly pursued by pirates and bearing something she has no way of understanding, Haimey and her crewmates have to work fast to survive. They need to warn the Synarche of a new threat, yet they have no idea whom they can trust. And when their flight inadvertently leads them towards an even bigger salvage prize, Haimey finds herself trapped, cut off from her crewmates, alone on an alien vessel with a lone pirate who will either kill or her or attempt to convert her.

Ancestral Night is really three stories in a trenchcoat. There’s a mystery involving a forerunner civilization, a fugitive/reverse heist plot, and Haimey’s own personal journey of unlocking parts of her past she didn’t even know existed. The benefit, of course, is that hopefully at least one of these stories will grab you. What I really like is how carefully Bear weaves the stories together so that they support and inform each other.

The first plot, involving Koregoi tech, is easily the least interesting to me. Bear is drawing on any number of science-fiction tropes involving ineffable precursor civilizations, nanotechnology, Big Dumb Objects, etc. We have seen this plot a thousand times before. What I will say, however, is that I really like some of the specific details Bear includes, mostly around how Haimey interfaces with the Koregoi tech (I am deliberately being elliptical to avoid spoilers).

The second plot is a lot of fun. Bear’s approach to this universe reminds me of Iain M. Banks’s Culture. The Synarche is an interstellar civilization that has essentially assimilated most starfaring cultures and includes sentient AIs like Singer and the “Core” AIs who appear to set policy. Much of the background chatter among characters concerns whether this kind of benevolent collective authoritarianism is the best form of government, something that dovetails nicely into the third plot. The Synarche isn’t as magically advanced as the Culture—it’s not quite post-scarcity so much as “there is enough to go around if you are good to each other about it.” Haimey’s marginal existence is, we are given to believe, marginal by choice; most synizens (as they are called) live happily down a gravity well or on stations or ships close to the Core. Once you leave that safety, however, you are at the mercy of the vastness of space.

Which brings me to the third plot: Haimey herself. Haimey is comfortably both trans- and posthuman: her feet have been altered into “afthands” to help her function better in microgravity or zero-gravity, and like most synizens, she has a neural implant that lets her share her sensorium with others and also stores “objective” versions of her meat memories. Finally, Haimey has the ability to alter her neurochemical balance (“tuning”) to change her emotional state. I really like how Bear juxtaposes these intense differences from present-day humans with the raw and gritty survival aspects of this story. Despite such technological innovations as warp drive, the Synarche lacks magic like teleportation. Resource consumption is a huge issue on the minds of Haimey and her crew. So for as much as she might be less recognizably “human” in our sense of the word, her struggles and the world she inhabits feel very human all the same.

Bear provides an interesting twist on the idea of an unreliable narrator. Much like any story revolving around memory loss, Bear considers whether we are the same person as the version of ourselves who has certain memories. Farweather plays a fantastic foil to Haimey, who despite being a loner by choice is still ardently defensive of the Synarche and its politics. Farweather is a compelling antagonist because she’s got a point: in one sense of the word, she is far freer than Haimey, Connla, Singer, et al. And I had this interesting experience as a reader where, as much as I see Haimey as a sympathetic protagonist and Farweather as an obviously Bad Person, I had to stop and think. Would I be OK living in the Synarche? What do I think of rightminding? And I have to admit that it weirds me out, and I suspect that I would sympathize far more with Farweather than I care to believe.

This is what I mean about Ancestral Night taking some time to read. The actual story is a simple one and paced slowly enough to be frustrating at times—some chapters are literally nothing but Haimey’s own internal narration to us. Yet there is something very rewarding about wrestling with the philosophies Bear unpacks herein. She manages to boil them down into situations that, while very alien for us, feel very realistic. Although we are nowhere near the level of, say, tuning that these characters can do, Bear’s questions about who qualifies as human and where our own thoughts stop and augmentations begin feel very relevant to today.

There are times when I get annoyed with Haimey or, more often, with how Bear tells the story through her. Yet I also really enjoyed the break from third person. So much space opera relies on multiple points of view simply because the story tends to have such a scope that anything else is too limited. Bear embraces that limitation, deliberately forces us to experience the entire story through Haimey’s eyes. It’s a bold move, and one that some people might find too boring or small-scale to enjoy. I loved it.

I really enjoyed Ancestral Night, much more than I thought I would based on my previous (and admittedly long, long ago) experiences with Bear. Anyone looking for a clever start to a new space opera story would do well to pick up this one.