Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ann Leckie is very knowledgeable about the ancient world. The Radch is Rome. There are slaves and citizens and legions and barbarians and an emperor and polytheism, convincing ancient polytheism, which is rare. There’s even a tiny upstart monotheist cult with incomprehensible ethical objections to the whole thing.
In fact, it’s so convincingly like a historical fiction novel that I almost feel the objection to it that I feel to many of those books: that the main character is an implant from our time, effectively a modern thinker in period dress, with contemporary ethics and biases, unrealistically. Brej’s political stances, in particular, need no explanation to an American reader. But her life experiences have been so different from those of the rest of the people around her that I should cut her some slack in that regard; it’s totally realistic that she would have ideas different from everybody else’s.
This thing where you have a sci-fi or fantasy novel with a civilization that’s basically Rome is pretty great. I think I might write a novel like that. Except, when I do it, I’m just going to call it ‘Rome’. I think that would be a lot of fun.
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