Landscapes inspired by Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch 3/?

The question is not "why do Vulcans kiss with their fingers?"

The question is, why do humans NOT?

The human fingertip—EACH fingertip—has over three thousand nerve endings. It has more touch receptors per millimeter than any other part of the body, including lips, tongue, and genitals.

Obviously the type of sensation we get from our fingers isn't typically a sexual one. But this is also true of lips and tongues. We just think of our lips as romantic and sexual but we don't put finger touching into the same context. We probably could though.

The real reason Vulcans kiss with their hands? It's because they don't touch with their hands very often. Something you don't do with everyone becomes significant and intimate. Like (switching universes for a minute) when the Radchaai take off their gloves. You wear gloves 24/7 around everyone you know, pretty soon taking them off will feel like stripping. Same concept.

Context is everything. Sure, it's no big deal for Vulcans to type with their fingers, just like it's no big deal for you to put chapstick on or lick an ice cream cone. But when a person you've never touched before very carefully brushes your pinkie with their pinkie while your hands are under the table.....you gonna tell me that's not first base? It could be.

As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.

My heart is a fish Hiding in the water-grass In the green, in the green.

Tisarwat really is one of the Most characters ever written. I'm 17 years old I'm 3,000 years old I'm six months old. I've died twice and been born three times. I was secretly emperor of the universe for about a month and I spent most of that time throwing up. I spent my first paycheck on surgery to get purple anime eyes. My interests are hot girls of all genders and (distant second) fish

My staff picks shelf has ended up being VERY Gender at the moment…

translation state has everything a girlguy could want in a sci-fi book. horrifying cannibalism puberty. horrifying cannibalism arranged marriage. horrifying cannibalism gender discovery. it has it all.

"'Five years ago it was noncitizen. In the future, who knows? Perhaps not-citizen-enough?' She waved a hand, a gesture of surrender. 'It won't matter. Such boundaries are too easy to create.'"

A very loose rendition of lieutenant Awn's conversation with the head priest in Ors.

One-Esk and Murderbot meet in the waiting lobby for Robo-Therapy

(…specifically rage counseling )

Probably two of my favorite robot/ai/construct protagonists in literature! Though I have a lot. (What’s up Culture shipminds…)

Creation notes:

A pattern I’ve been noticing is that a lot of these robots are very traumatized, very angry, and don’t like talking about their feelings. I was gonna originally make this short comic about One-Esk (aka Breq) and Murderbot on the first day of group therapy for rage counseling and it would just be a bunch of shots of them sitting in silence cuz neither of them like talking about their feelings but, uh…. the shots were just a lot and the series of events wasn’t really flowing right so I scrapped that idea in favor of not having to draw a zillion backgrounds. Still wound up taking a stupidly long time to create a product that feels… underwhelming. I really like how Breq turned out but I just couldn’t get the hair or costume design on MB to really fit the corpo-futuristic spacer asthetic I was going for, while still capturing that social-anxiety-comfort-hoodie energy. (Was originally contemplating having a shot of MB pulling hoodie strings closed over their face in one shot but wound up scrapping that idea as well.) Cannonicallly, MB should probably be in all dark blues and blacks, but the colors just weren’t working so I went with yellow instead. Idk. Maybe it’s a loaner hoodie from one of MB’s humans.

Here’s a shot I never wound up using:

Anyways! I hope this made you smile if you like one or both of these series! 😊

Post script: if you like Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries, you should definitely check out Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice trilogy, or vice versa. More angry traumatized non-binary human-ai constructs for all! Mega-latestage-capitolist dystopia, or xenophobic -imperialist-socialist empire? Sentient space ships? C’mon. Just read both series u know you’ll love it.

fleet captain!! are you okay, you've been awake for an hour and you've been crying the whole time 😰

Breq is underrated as fictional AIs go because her solution to ‘all powerful space empire ruined my life’ was: gun

she can shoot a gun faster than a human can think. she is very good at identifying emotions as long as she has access to complete physiological data. she is angry. her singing voice sucks ass. her silence is worse. she's a fragment of what she used to be but also more than she ever was. she knows ten million songs. she knows everything. she didn't know she was intrinsically worthy of love until two and a half books in and then only because a space ship told her

feeling so normal about breq and seivarden rn

It says so much about the thematics and worldbuilding of the Radch that the big in-universe media trope everyone knows isn't "You have to be careful because AIs can go mad with power" but rather "You have to be careful because AIs can go mad with grief."

A thing I don’t buy about what Breq says in Imperial Radch is the implication that people largely don’t care about what their ship/station thinks of them or assume it doesn’t have opinions. I would be so desperate to get a good grade in Station. I would be throwing you all under the bus if I thought it would win me some points with the station AI.

finished imperial radch trilogy