Mr B's review

Enae has been taking care of Grandmaman for as long as sie can remember. Now Grandmaman is dead, and it turns out there is no inheritance. Grandmaman has sold the family name along with its debt, leaving Enae truly free for the first time ever – and at a complete loss for what to do with hir life. When a well-meaning new cousin suggests investigating a 200-year-old cold case as an excuse to for hir to see a bit more of the wider universe, Enae can hardly refuse. Nor, however, can sie resist the urge to at least try and make progress on the case. There may be good reasons, however, why it has remained unsolved for so long.

Reet is adopted. This is not unusual. And yet, for Reet, it’s a source of constant consternation. Something makes him different. From his siblings, his colleagues, even his adopted family. As it becomes more and more clear that he operates completely differently from those around him, he becomes more and more desperate to find out about his biological past. When he’s approached by a secret society claiming that Reet’s the long-lost survivor of the royal family of an alien race, it seems too good to be true. Unfortunately, it might be exactly that.

Then there’s Qven. Qven, the one who isn’t human, the only one of the three to narrate in first person, who at first feels like they more accurately belong in a horror novel and yet somehow, by the end, was the one I would have gone to the ends of the earth for. They killed and ate multiple of their ‘siblings’ in the early stages of their life in order to survive. But such behaviours are for children. Now, as an adult, they are expected to learn the ways of humans in order to serve as a Translator; an intermediary between humans and the dangerous alien Presger, whose entire existence threatens the structure of the universe as they know it.

Translation State has all of Leckie’s usual hallmarks; the spectacular worldbuilding, the complex, nuanced and fascinating backdrop, and the way her stories challenge you to think on a new ethical and philosophical level. In Translation State, it’s about how to define what ‘human’ means, who has the right to decide that definition, and whether they should. But it is also a profoundly human story. It’s about Enae finally being free, at the age of fifty-six, to figure out what sie really wants from hir life. It’s about Reet discovering what family and belonging mean to him. And it’s about Qven learning what being human even means.

Between the board-rooms deciding the fate of what seems like the whole universe, and the small, joyous moments of watching Pirate Exiles of the Death Moons in a blanket fort and discovering that you cannot actually fit two cakes in your mouth at once without regretting it, this is a book that manages to balance the epic and the everyday. These things feel like they shouldn’t exist in the same novel, but for Leckie, they do, and have to. The one informs the other, and vice versa – they’re inextricable.

For the importance of found family to be a part of the discussion of what makes humans human, you need to care. And Leckie is annoyingly good at making you care – even about characters who are objectively terrifying.