Dear all,

I remember reading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice when I was about 21. My friend sent it to me after his father sent it to him. I’ve always been a reader, sure, but Ancillary Justice does a few things immediately that utterly, totally changed my life.

Ancillary Justice is a revenge novel about Breq, the last vestige of an artificial intelligence, seeking to kill Anaander Mianaai, the tyrant of the Imperial Radch. It is about the kinds of things that someone with capabilities beyond human would do, if they had no choice but to be human. It is, ultimately, about what love means under imperialism.

I had not really read much sci-fi like Ancillary Justice before I read it. I’d read le Guin’s fantasy novels, which are haunting, Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide books, which are hilarious, and Dick’s works which to me defy description. I didn’t know the history from which Leckie drew. All I knew was that she made it seem easy.

Ancillary Justice is told in the first person. Everything we know comes from Breq, who was once part of a massive carrier ship called the Justice of Toren. She is no longer the Justice of Toren, though the Justice of Toren is still her, because she is all that remains of it. The book alternates between her present and her past, telling us why she’s on this quest while telling us how the end of the quest is going. Breq is a kind of narrator I hadn’t really encountered before - one who describes actions completely at odds with her internal monologue, because what she thinks she feels isn’t always what she actually feels.

In the years since I’ve read quite a lot of sci-fi and fantasy about empire. Much of it is very good. Some of it is quite bad. But often these stories are about the empire itself. They are about the systems that empire concocts in order to justify itself, and the ways that those systems affect every part of a person’s world.

Ancillary Justice and its sequels do not feel like that. Instead they are hyperfocussed on Breq, who has been a carrier for the empire for more than a thousand years. She has a direct and intimate understanding of the Radchaai proclivity for violence, expansion, and subjugation. She doesn’t dwell on the systems and their implications. She just states them. For Breq, things are just true.

I’m deliberately talking in generalities about the book. Partially this is because I don’t want to simply retell the story to you in this newsletter when you can (and should) go and read Ancillary Justice yourself. But it is also because I think that one of the things that sets Leckie’s work apart is how it takes itself for granted. Leckie doesn’t overcomplicate. She knows that there are some things that don’t need explication, and she glides by them.

Early on in Ancillary Justice, we learn that in the Radchaai language, the word for civilised is Radchaai. Which is to say - the language of empire makes clear that only citizens of empire are civilised. To be not-Radchaai is to be uncivilised. Breq dwells on this throughout the book, because she has been an instrument of civilising for nearly her entire existence. To turn the uncivilised into the civilised is to turn them from not-Radchaai to Radchaai. And the only way to do that is through conquest.

One hesitates to assert that the nature of a work’s fans reveals something regarding the work itself. It’s not like people who like Star Wars necessarily get what an empire or a rebellion look like in our world. But I do think Ancillary Justice attracts readers interested in themes that reflect politics in a specific way (I also think it repels readers disinterested in those themes and that kind of politics).

In many ways the writing I do now is directly influenced by Leckie. In the way I think about culture, gender, or the internal monologue of imperial subjects. In the way that I think about how music is spread and appropriated. In the way that I think about solidarity. This is what it changed for me the most - it told me that things I had taken for granted did not need to be, that I could question the very basic building blocks of society, and that both oppression and freedom come in far more forms than I imagined.

Next week, customers.

Cheers,

mvs