Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Manners, Emotions, and Identity in a Colonial Context Ancillary Sword (2014), Anne Leckie’s second Imperial Radch Trilogy book, begins a week after the end of the first novel, Ancillary Justice (2013). A civil war has broken out between two factions of the myriad clones of Anaander Mianaai, the three-thousand or so year old Emperor of the far-flung Radch empire. One is bent on constant expansion and annexation of ever more inhabited worlds, while the other wants to shrink the military, stop expanding, and stop making ancillaries for their sentient AI ships. (Ancillaries are human prisoners taken from annexed worlds and used as replaceable soldier/crew puppets by AI ships.) The protagonist Breq has aligned herself with the more pacifist Lord of the Radch, who has given her a new connection as a supposed relative, a new role as Fleet Captain, a new ship (the Mercy of Kalr), and a new mission: go to Athoek Station and secure it, its gate, and its planet for the “good” Emperor faction. Accompanying Breq are the experienced Lieutenants Seivarden and Ekalu and the “baby” Lieutenant Tisarwat, a teenager added by Anaander Mianaai at the last second. Breq senses something inconsistent in Tisarwat’s personality: the “good” Emperor couldn’t have given Breq Trojan Horse, could she? Breq is an interesting character, being a two-thousand-year-old former AI space warship (the Justice of Toren) who once had (at least) hundreds of ancillaries to enter and control at will but is now limited to a single “human” body, albeit with implants and enhancements permitting nearly instant access to ship and station AIs. Twenty years ago, the “bad” Anaander Mianaai faction destroyed Justice of Toren and all her ancillaries but one, Breq, who says things like, “I could almost forget that I wasn’t a ship anymore,” hums or sings songs from different cultures, and feels very human. Because she can access the sensors and data of the AI ship Mercy of Kalr and of the AI of Athoek Station, has two-thousand-years of experience with various human beings and aliens and their cultures, and is sensitive, observant, thoughtful, careful, and wise, Breq is a semi-omniscient first-person narrator who hears and sees and feels what everyone on the ship or in the station is saying, doing, and feeling at any time, limited mainly by her respect for other people’s privacy. It leads to moments like, “As she spoke I knew Seivarden was in stage two of NREM sleep. I saw pulse, temperature, respiration, blood, oxygen, hormone levels. Then that data was gone, replaced by Lieutenant Ekalu, standing watch. Stressed—jaw slightly clenched, elevated cortisol.” Leckie also plays a compelling narrative trick with gender, as the Radch no longer distinguish between genders, using female pronouns for everyone. And because Breq never describes anyone with our gender markers, we read most of the novel never knowing what gender the characters are! The only clues come when Breq interacts with people from Radch annexed worlds whose locals still notice gender. At one point, she refers to such a person as “she” in her narration but as “grandfather” when talking to “her,” and at another, she is corrected to understand that such a person has a “brother.” Similar clues in the first novel reveal that in our culture Breq may physically be female and Seivarden male, while some clues in this one reveal that Tisarwat may be male. But nothing they do confirms or refutes our idea of their gender. When Breq learns that one member of a couple is an abusive bully while the other is a compliant victim, we categorize the former as male and the latter as female based on our culture’s gender lens, but both characters are referred to as “she.” The net effect is similar to reading Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness: you forget about gender for long stretches and see people as people rather than as men or women. Once Mercy of Kalr arrives at Athoek Station, Breq immediately sets about improving the lives of the scorned and exploited locals and workers. As Athoek (the planet) is famous for producing the tea so vital to Radch culture and as the Radch authorities and tea plantation owners look down on the annexed people and treat them unequally and brutally, we realize that Leckie is using the Radch to comment on the British Raj and human empires (and on the American slave system). As one character says, “You murder and rape and steal and call it civilization.” A side element of Breq’s mission to Athoek Station concerns Basnaaid Elming, the younger sister of Lieutenant Awn, who was a Justice of Toren officer loved by Breq, who was forced to kill her by direct order from the “bad” Emperor, which was the trigger for Breq to align herself with the “good” one. Basnaaid lives and works on the station, and Breq wants to protect and aid her. Another wrinkle is that Breq has a secret super weapon, a gun that will shoot through anything in the universe, given her by the alien Presger, an advanced civilization of obscure aims and fearsome technology. For most of the story, in addition to trying to improve the life and work of the annexed denizens of the station and that world, Breq is trying to find out who’s smuggling bodies and artifacts, but she and Mercy of Kalr never really engage enemy Emperor faction warships. Although the climax involves violent action, it’s over pretty quickly and doesn’t feel so convincing, so I suspect that Leckie prefers depicting fraught conversations than graphic fighting. The novel is intensely emotional and psychological, Breq detailing people’s emotions: “I could see, almost feel myself, the thrill thrumming through Lieutenant Tisarwat at Basmaaid’s presence.” Leckie writes some devastating lines on empire and human nature, like “I can’t fix every injustice” and “We are all of us only human. We can only forgive so much.” She also asks interesting questions about identity. Who is the real Lord of the Radch? Are you committing treason no matter which faction you support? And “How much can a person change and still be the same?” The audiobook reader Adjoa Andoh has a great voice and British accent and perfect manner—but she overdoes the voices of the contemptuous and contemptible types (cocky sword ship AI, entitled plantation owners, corrupt governors, etc.). What they say is bad enough without needing it said in exaggeratedly obnoxious voices. I am looking forward to the third book in the trilogy! View all my reviews
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