Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice

English language

Published Sept. 23, 2022 by Springer International Publishing AG.

ISBN:: 978-3-031-18260-0

(1 review)

NB! This is not Ancilliary Justice, but a crititical companion.

This book argues that Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice’s exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.

1 edition

Sami Sundell reviewed Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice by David M. Higgins

Review of "Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice" on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Ancillary Justice is a story about a starship which turns into a human being and decides to start a quest to put an end to a dictator. The story unfolds in multiple levels, during different times, and each chapter gives us a bit better picture of the reasoning and evolution of an artificial intelligence running a troop carrier.

I knew just about nothing about this book before I started reading about it - the only thing I knew was that it won multiple prizes last year and manages to piss some people off with its depiction of genders. I'm happy to tell this book is grand scale space opera. From the beginning it reminded me of Iain M. Banks, even though Banks' Culture is a much larger construct and Leckie definitely has her own voice.

The world of Raadch is interesting, the writing is beautiful, the protagonist of the story …

Ancillary Justice is a story about a starship which turns into a human being and decides to start a quest to put an end to a dictator. The story unfolds in multiple levels, during different times, and each chapter gives us a bit better picture of the reasoning and evolution of an artificial intelligence running a troop carrier.

I knew just about nothing about this book before I started reading about it - the only thing I knew was that it won multiple prizes last year and manages to piss some people off with its depiction of genders. I'm happy to tell this book is grand scale space opera. From the beginning it reminded me of Iain M. Banks, even though Banks' Culture is a much larger construct and Leckie definitely has her own voice.

The world of Raadch is interesting, the writing is beautiful, the protagonist of the story has plenty of shades. There are suitable doses of futurism, humane an inhuman features to make it a delightfully wonderful read. As any good book, it's more than just the story, though: it also deals with ethical questions and can be read as having commentary on global politics.

On gender: it's not just a gimmick but it's also not something the story specifically focuses on. It does raise an interesting point about the defaults in culture and assumptions of the reader. It also got me thinking how it gets translated into Finnish or some other language that has no gendered pronouns; the assumptions will still be there, even if the language may seem more neutral.