Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, short stories
Pages: 403
Published by Orbit on April 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke award-winner Ann Leckie is a modern master of the SFF genre, forever changing its landscape with her groundbreaking ideas and powerful voice. Now, available for the first time comes the complete collection of Leckie's short fiction, including a brand new novelette, Lake of Souls.
Journey across the stars of the Imperial Radch universe.
Listen to the words of the Old Gods that ruled The Raven Tower.
Learn the secrets of the mysterious Lake of Souls.
And so much more, in this masterfully wide-ranging and immersive short fiction collection from award-winning author Ann Leckie.
My Review:
I read this story almost two years ago, when I reviewed the collection for Library Journal. (LJ runs ahead, so the collection, which was published in April 2024, was reviewed in the February 2024 issue which was finalized in December 2023.)
Which means that I read the story, “Lake of Souls”, more than 18 months ago and I didn’t remember the details before I reread it the other night. It didn’t stick the way that, say, Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine” did in last year’s Hugo reviews.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t interesting, just that it didn’t stick in the mind. Come to think of it, the difference in the way my memory of this story contrasts with the Kritzer story reminds me a bit of “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” in its discussion about stories that are easy vs stories that make you think – and keep thinking.
But this story is also reminiscent of Jessica Levai’s The Glass Garden and This World is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa as well as the Star Trek Original Series episode “The Devil in the Dark” (the one with the Horta) and the Next Generation episode “Home Soil” (“ugly bags of mostly water”).
All of which may explain why it didn’t stick, as it’s a story that’s been done before in SF, and at least sometimes done well.
There’s actually two stories in “Lake of Souls”. The overarching, sorta/kinda framing story, is similar in theme to all the above references, in that it’s a story about humans going out into the galaxy and terraforming any suitable planet that doesn’t already contain sentient life. With the deck stacked very high against finding such sentient life by not looking very hard. And particularly, in the case of this particular story, by bringing along specialists to determine whether or not the life they find is sentient while keeping those specialists on ice in cryosleep so that such life isn’t recognized when it is found.
Which is where human side of this story comes in, or rather wakes up and goes down to the planet and discovers that she is the last human left alive after one of her former crewmates went on a murderous, mutinous rampage and killed everyone else.
Where she discovers that the “animals” they all referred to as “lobster dogs” are, in fact, sentient and sapient. Because one of them tries to protect her and helps to heal her.
What makes the story interesting isn’t that human’s point of view. We’ve seen that before and as a species we aren’t all THAT fascinating. At least not here.
What is fascinating is the perspective of that “lobster dog”, originally called Spawn, and Spawn’s journey away from their home village because they don’t quite fit with the people they were born to. So they are on a quest to find themselves – or to find the probably mythical Lake of Souls – whichever comes first.
Spawn recognizes that the human is “people” because they are tool-using just as their own people are. And even though they can’t save the human, recognizing that “people” come in all shapes, sizes and belief-systems allows them to make a place for themselves among their own people. Not as someone who goes along with the herd, but as a person who can show other restless souls like themselves that there are more ways to be “people” than the more rigid members of their tribe had led them to believe.
Escape Rating A-: I have to admit that this worked better the second time around. Which could be because I read it in isolation, separate from the collection in which it was published. Not that it isn’t isolated there, as the collection Lake of Souls is a mostly retrospective collection of the author’s short works, and all of the other stories except one (“The Creation and Destruction of the World”) had been previously published elsewhere.
The thing about this particular story is that it HAS been done before because it is such an SFnal story, in the sense that it uses SF to tell ITS story but to also tell a lot of other stories. Because from the human side of the story it’s about the propensity of humans to take and take and to pretend that they are not taking FROM someone else by defining whoever they are stealing from or raping or conquering as being less than themselves. So in that sense this is an eternal story in SFnal trappings – possibly in order to get the message across – or at least to make it go down easier.
And from the other side, from Spawn’s perspective, it’s an equally eternal but not necessarily SFnal story about following the beat of your own drummer – and forging a path or at least providing an example – for others who can’t make themselves follow the herd either. Even if the members of that herd are all lobster dogs.
On this reading of the story, I’m left thinking about it a lot harder than I did the first go around. It’s also making my Hugo voting in this category a bit harder for everything below first place. However, I am now finished with the Best Novelette category, and will be turning my reading and/or listening attention to the Short Story category so that I can finish in time to get my ballot in!
