Leckie’s Imperial Radch books easily rank among the best SF I’ve ever read but they suffer from two flaws: a bizarre fascination with royalty/caste in human society, and an almost embarrassing preoccupation with gods and religious oracles. When these themes kept recurring in the second and third book I assumed Leckie had just painted herself into a corner and that her next works would be free of those incongruities.

How wrong I was: Raven Tower is entirely about them. Hereditary titles, improbable “gods” (minerals, or talismans, even a roving cloud of mosquitoes) with nothing conceivably resembling a central nervous system yet with completely humanlike motivations.

It doesn’t work. Not as SF: there’s not even a wildly remote scientific possibility for a thinking rock that ”lives” for eons yet develops sentience and then the ability to interact with humans on our timescale. Not as fantasy: even if we accept the impossibilities, the story has no other elements of such. And not as literature: the characters are shallow, impossible to relate to (even the human ones); the second-person narration is clumsy and distracting. The language-as-reality parts fizzle completely. I actually abandoned the book shortly after starting it, then picked it up two months later for airline reading. I regret that.

Leckie is a genius. I will not dismiss her because of this, and actually applaud her for pushing into new and uncomfortable territory. I will continue to seek out more works from her. But, yeah, I‘m disappointed.