Ancillary Sword

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This reads more like a footnote to Ancillary Justice than a fully fledged sequel. The best way to think of this book is to compare the Star Trek movies Insurrection and Wrath of Khan. While the former is quietly contemplative and penetratingly speculative in the best tradition of Star Trek, it simply cannot hold a candle up to the visceral intensity of Wrath of Khan.

Here, the same. It is as if Leckie has deliberately, if not perversely, written as low-key a sequel as possible. Of course, it is highly likely she envisaged the broader totality of this sequence long before Ancillary justice became such a hit in the SF community. Still, it is a curiously muted follow-up that tells such a small story so obliquely that I was left feeling very frustrated.

The lack of plot and the overall focus on ‘justice, propriety and benefit’ as the underlying principles of Radchaai civilisation means that Leckie could easily have swopped the titles of these books around. The comparison with Star Trek is quite apt, given the tone and slant of an investigation into cultural dynamics and the lingering effects of colonialism. (There is even a character called ‘Medic’ that grumpily disapproves of the antics of the crew and how they ignore ‘her’ medical advice, much like Bones in Star Trek).

Perhaps my biggest problem with both novels is Leckie’s supposed answer to the gender bias of the English language by using female pronouns exclusively, and without any consideration of gender. Here and there she does drop hints to let the reader know if a particular character is male or female, but I simply found myself thinking of everyone as female regardless. I do not think this is a particularly successful strategy, and also that it raises far more questions than it attempts to answer. But maybe that is the point after all.

Still, Leckie represents an interesting modernisation of the sort of sociological SF pioneered by Samuel R. Delany and Ursula Le Guin. That she is not nearly as radical as either of these seminal writers is a telling reflection of how conservative and politically correct we are in today’s fractured and divisive world.

Does Leckie’s phenomenal success imply a hankering in the SF community for the sort of politically astute SF of yore? I find it curious that while Leckie is lauded left, right and centre, a writer like Kameron Hurley – whose incendiary God’s War is far rougher and in your face than Ancillary Justice, and which tackles both gender issues and fundamentalism – is not nearly as successful. Could this mean that the SF community is as conservative as broader society itself?

This is not to suggest that Leckie’s success is either derivative or undeserved. Her first salvo remains one of the more interesting SF novels of recent times. It is such a pity therefore that it is not done justice by its sequel.

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Romans in space

If Ann Leckie had switched the first two chapters of Ancillary Justice around, she would have had one of the best opening sentences in an SF novel ever: “Nineteen years, three months, and one week before I found Seivarden in the snow, I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis’urna.” The first sentence of Chapter 1 is, however, still quite dramatic: “The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly grey, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.”

Ostensibly we have the entire plot in these two sentences: the mystery of the identity of One Esk (also known as Honoured Breq, or Justice of Toren), and the mystery of the identity of the person whom One Esk finds dumped in the snow. This intrigue culminates in a series of shattering revelations, a nail-biting set-piece on a glass bridge, and a real doozy of a space battle that would not look amiss in a Star Wars movie.

But there is so much more to this book, which is one of the most interesting takes on interstellar colonialism (‘colonisation’ is a bit of a whitewash of a phrase) since the glory days of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness (Ann Leckie also references C.J. Cherryh as an influence). Invoking these past masters is particularly apt, because Leckie’s book clearly engages dialectically with both Asimov and Le Guin.

In a fascinating author interview in the Extras section, Leckie explains how the Radchaai evoke the Roman Empire, particularly in terms of ‘clientage’ or fealty, and their assimilation of foreign religions and cultures. However, she is careful to point out that the Radch empire is not “Romans in Space”.

At one point a character remarks: “Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.” Justice, propriety and benefit are the hallmarks of Radch society, leading to the axiomatic view that “to be Radchaai is to be civilised”. However, what about the alien cultures at the receiving end of Radch annexation?

Such annexations are quite brutal and merciless, even if the subjugated races are permitted to retain the trappings of their cultural and religious identities. “You realise that quite a lot of people outside Radch space consider themselves to be civilised?” someone asks pointedly.

And then there is the Radch concept of ‘ancillaries’, which are a hi-tech version of Rome’s legionnaires. These are humans seconded to sentient spaceships, effectively becoming extensions of AIs and suborning their own identities in the process.

There is an astonishing set piece where we witness the birth or awakening of one of these stored ancillaries aboard a starship. Exposed to her pain and fear, we begin to understand that these are individual, sentient creatures after all, and that what the Radch are doing is nothing more than interstellar slavery. Or is it merely the next step in human/machine interface? Leckie does not opt for easy answers.

Interestingly, the Radch language does not distinguish gender, so all the pronouns used are female, irrespective of actual gender (in Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin used all-male pronouns). I am not convinced that this effectively evokes a gender-free view of language, for as soon as I worked out what genders the main characters were, I instinctively imagined them as ‘male’ or ‘female’, despite the language.

This novel was such a joy to read. It is exciting and engaging from a plot perspective, which combines intrigue with thriller elements. Leckie has an unerring eye for world-building, and knows just what details to include, and what to merely hint at, in order to give an impression of a much vaster narrative canvas (which will no doubt be explored in the remainder of the trilogy).

Of course, this is also very much a ‘novel of ideas’, in the grand tradition of SF, which is something that the genre is particularly adept at. The discussion around assimilation and ‘contamination’ of non-human influences, and how the Radch must maintain their cultural ‘purity’ through merciless annexation, is highly topical today.

If I have one slight gripe, it is that it takes the reader a while to warm to Leckie’s world and characters, as a lot of the book is pretty dour and occasionally grim. There is a sprinkling of humour, but not nearly enough. I sincerely hope that Leckie lets her hair down in the next instalment, and allows herself to have a bit more fun.