Ann Leckie returns to the Imperial Radch universe in Translation State, a complex tale of identity with surprisingly high stakes. Each of the three characters has to wrestle with who they are. Enae wonders what sie is supposed to do with hir life now that hir grandmother has passed away. Orphan Reet thinks he might have figured out who his people are. Finally, Qvin fights for independence in a society that had everything planned for e before e was even born. Will any of them find answers?
We meet Enae first, on a very strange day. Sie has been taking care of hir cantankerous grandmother for most of hir life. When that grandmother dies, the entire family is shocked to discover that the imagined riches had been spent long ago. Everything the family owned was sold off. The only beneficial thing for any of the family members are instructions that Enae should receive an allowance and be taken care of for the rest of hir life; no one else gets a cent (or whatever they use on Enae’s world). The new heir interprets this as securing a sinecure for Enae with the diplomatic service: hir task? To find someone who disappeared two hundred years ago. It’s a cushy job no one expects anyone to complete.
Next, we meet Reet, a crotchety mechanic. Reet knows that he’s different from everyone else but he doesn’t know why. He was found as an infant on a spaceship and no relatives were ever found. His adoptive parents give him a home, though they can’t answer any of his questions about why he finds it so hard to get along with others and why he has the occasional urge to bite people. As an adult, he is approached by a group of people who believe that he might be the long-lost heir to an ancient ruling class. Reet knows that he’s not and that these weirdos are probably just using him. It’s just so tempting to think that he might, at last, have found who he came from.
Lastly, we meet the most unusual narrator, a young nonhuman named Qvin. Qvin’s people have a habit, when young, of eating each other. What puzzles Qvin more than this Darwinian state of affairs is the way that e and eir fellow younglings are drilled in human language, manners, and behavior. E grows up with endless rounds of tea and gardening and talking about the weather and no one will explain why any of this is necessary.
Once the characters are established, the plot brings them together in a series of accidents and chance encounters. Reet gets a new job escorting newcomers to his planet, courtesy of his maybe relatives, and meets Enae when sie arrives to chase a possibility that hir quarry might have stopped there. Once sie learns about Reet’s lack of history, sie starts to ask some troubling questions. Meanwhile, Qvin is attacked by another youngling so severely that eir original lifepath is no longer possible.
Once Enae started asking questions, I started to piece together where Translation State was going. I don’t mean to say that this book is predictable. Rather, I found it very satisfying to see how Leckie would tie together three very different characters on three different planets. The plot starts to get very interesting once all three intersect, especially when once more catastrophe strikes and forces the entire trio to get their acts together before irreparably fatal things can happen. Along the way, we get to ponder with Enae, Reet, and Qvin what it means to be independent people (human or otherwise), the limits of self-sacrifice, and what I can only describe as a good kind of selfishness.
Readers who love speculative fiction blended with hard science fiction will enjoy Translation State, as will readers who love to accompany characters along their journeys to become their own person.