Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is one of the best presentations of difference in character and difference in language of any book I know of. It’s not for nothing that it won all those awards. It provides a lot of those delicious moments when you’ve been inside the protagonist’s head and language for a while and you’re used to it, and then another character appears and reacts to them, and you can suddenly see them from the outside, and know them for a minute as they don’t even know themselves.

Also worthy of mention is the extraordinary crisis at the center of the political events of the novel, which I won’t spoil — but it’s fantastic, and it’s exactly the thing I love about sci-fi, the way this technology we don’t have yet and haven’t thought through yet can have problems that are just as totally outlandish and impossible as the technology itself; and yet they’re the same human problems we’ve always had. It’s, at the same time, a meditation on impossible, bizarre things and on those things that are closest to our own humanity.

I almost feel like this is a retelling of some era of Roman history. It feels very, very Roman, right down to the inclusion of a strange, newly-popular monotheistic cult, the sharp divide between slaves and citizens and the mysterious barbarians who somehow can destroy you even though you know you’re better, you just know it.



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Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There’s a scene in which the Presger translator, Zeiat, reveals by means of a metaphor involving fish-shaped tea cakes, that the Presger do not believe in qualia. It’s what finally explains the two translators’ seeming confusion of identity — which one is Dlique and which one is Zeiat — because the Presger do not draw invisible lines between things and say this is one kind of thing and this other is another kind of thing.

This is the most fun part of the book. The Presger translators don’t really care about their own existences because they don’t really believe in them; and are just barely able to understand that other human beings do. It’s actually very reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ ruler of the Universe. I think Douglas Adams had a lot of ideas that more ‘serious’ authors are still working on unpacking. They just struck us all as jokes because they were too new to have been rendered banal by repetition and endless explication.

Anyway, Ancillary Mercy is pretty good. The astropolitical resolution is a bit of a deus ex machina, I guess, but that’s okay. As somebody famous maybe said, no serious problem is solved within the terms of its original statement.



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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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