★★★★☆ Ancestral Night, by Elizabeth Bear
** spoiler alert ** How to govern oneself and a galaxy
Ancestral Night
Elizabeth Bear
** spoiler alert **
How to govern oneself and a galaxy
Elizabeth Bear's White Space trilogy is a finalist for the 2026 Best Series Hugo Award. It will not get my vote for Best Series (the competition is stiff), but I will go on to read the other books in the series.
It was a surprising book. What I mean by that is that, every time I thought I had a handle on what kind of story it was that I was reading, it morphed into something different. This is, by my lights, a good thing. A novel should not be predictable.
The hero of Ancestral Night is Haimey Dz. She's the engineer of a small salvage vessel. The rest of the crew is pilot Connla and shipmind Singer. They got a tip-off about a derelict ship and have shown up to salvage it. Haimey goes aboard and sees enough to realize this is a big find -- big enough to free all three of them from their obligations to the Synarche -- the galactic government. When they try to take it as a prize, though, they are attacked by pirates.
So far so good: bog-standard space opera, I thought. But then they run home and try to report the pirates, and it begins to look a bit more like a police procedural, albeit with different kinds of police than you usually see on TV. Then Haimey is trapped in a different prize vessel with a sexy pirate, and we get a long section whose thrust is psychological manipulation combined witb high-concept arguments about political philosophy. Finally Haimey and her pirate reach a vast alien intelligence called the Baomind. And then, of course, we have a giant battle to close the story.
In her Author's Note, Bear describes Ancestral Night as "a big-idea space opera." That's accurate. In fact, as big-idea space operas go, this is the biggest-ideaish one I can immediately think of. Definitely worth a read. As I already said, I will continue reading.
I think my final rankings for Best Series will be:
1. October Daye by Seanan McGuire (Tor US; DAW)
2. Emily Wilde by Heather Fawcett (Del Rey US; Orbit UK)
3. The Chronicles of Osreth by Katherine Addison (Tor US; Solaris UK; Subterranean)
4. White Space by Elizabeth Bear (Saga Press; Gollancz)
5. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi (Tor US; Tor UK)
6. The Craft Wars by Max Gladstone (Tor; Tordotcom)
These rankings are provisional until I have read the remaining two White Space novels.