Ancestral Night is a snappy and grippy space adventure. The big "future idea" here is not faster than light travel or even arguably the alien artifacts from long-disappeared alien races (although these things appear in the book); it's instead that humanity has discovered "rightminding", or the ability to directly manipulate emotions and hormones such that they can get past tendencies towards hierarchy or antisocial behaviors and coexist peacefully with aliens.

Rightminding reminds me of the mood organ from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. However, instead of being a metaphor for the similarities of humans and androids (and also being a tiny side mention), here it's the meat of the story and gets at the line between brainwashing and merely adjusting your brain to get along better with others.

I love how talky this book is. Yeah, sure, there's stolen alien spaceships and sexy space pirates and giant ancient space squid. But also, there's constant rumination and bickering on what makes a just society, what it means to be a person, and what an individual's responsibility to their society is.

The other thing I think is done well is that nobody and nothing is perfect here. Maybe the Synarche is better than alternatives and involves a lot more consent than similar systems, but also it's built on atrocities and there's rightful criticisms you can make about what little you see. Similarly, rightminding is a useful tool, but also any tool can be misused.

Anywho, I quite enjoyed this. Fun ideas and interesting characters wrapped up in an action space story.

(A few more spoiler-y opinions in this post.)