Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction
Ann Leckie
I picked up Ann Leckie's Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction because the title story, "Lake of Souls," is a finalist for the 2025 Best Novelette Hugo award. I read only this one story.
I am not a big fan of Leckie's. Every time I read one of her highly praised works, I find myself wondering what all the fuss is about. It's not that I disbelieve that there is something extraordinary about Leckie's fiction. It is just that I don't get it. (If you want to argue that my lack or appreciation is all my fault, I won't say you're wrong.) Her work strikes me as all ideas and no heart. I can get excited about ideas, but not Leckie's. They seem quite ordinary to me.
In "Lake of Souls" she tries something that Science Fiction occasionally tries, and never, in my opinion, with good results. It is to present an alien who feels really alien. This typically fails as soon the the point of view shifts to the alien. If they think in words, as humans do, well, I'm sorry, but that just makes them feel like humans. Now, of course I get that we are meant to suppose that the alien is not verbalizing internally in a human way -- that the point-of-view narration is to be understood as a sort of translation. But knowing that intellectually doesn't make it work.
The fundamental problem, of course, is that an author needs her characters to feel human in order to engage human readers.
Leckie does not, in my opinion, succeed in imagining truly alien aliens.