Ancillary Sword

Starred review from August 11, 2014
Leckie's powerful sequel to Ancillary Justice is a touch less ambitious in structure, but every bit as incisive. As news that open civil war has broken out slowly percolates through the crumbling networks of Radchaai space, Fleet Captain Breq Mianaai arrives at Athoek. Subjugated by the aggressively expansionist empire six centuries before, Athoek should be an exemplary world of peace, wealth, and concord, but what Breq finds is a world where the Radch precepts of "justice, propriety, and benefit" have been twisted to justify negligence, outright exploitation, and willful ignorance by those charged with enforcing the law. As Breq methodically analyzes the intertwined networks of privilege, incompetence, corruption and spiteful cruelty, she learns that not all outrages can be punished and justice is often denied to those who most deserve it. Breq's struggle for meaningful justice in a society designed to favor the strong is as engaging as ever. Readers new to the author will be enthralled, and those familiar with the first book will find that the faith it inspired has not been misplaced. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company.

September 15, 2014
Leckie proves she's no mere flash in the pan with this follow-up to her multiaward-winning debut space opera, Ancillary Justice (2013). Breq used to be One Esk Nineteen, an ancillary, or human-bodied extension, of the Artificial Intelligence that powered the ship Justice of Toren. Two decades after the ship's destruction, she is Fleet Capt. Breq Mianaai, envoy of the many-bodied Lord of the Radch empire, Anaander Mianaai. Or a tool of part of her: The Lord is a mind divided against itself, and the dissension among herselves has brought the empire to the brink of civil war. One faction has sent Breq to Athoek station to secure it. Once there, Breq discovers that the station and the planet below are a microcosm of corruption and conspiracy, another symptom of the empire's decay. After the literally explosive finale of the previous installment, one might have expected the novel to have a broader, more action-focused sweep. But Leckie doesn't seem concerned with space battles-the core of the story she wants to tell is more intimate, personal. As in the previous volume, she offers the groaningly obvious moral that those who are considered of lesser breeding frequently display far nobler behavior than the cardboard villains who believe themselves to be their so-called betters. She manages to retain interest, however, by cutting Breq and her friends and allies from more richly patterned cloth. The AI who proves to have more insight, more compassion and a greater sense of justice-who is, in fact, more human-than the humans around it is a common sci-fi trope. But Breq intriguingly defies that trope in one key sense: AIs of that sort usually aspire to be human, while Breq feels lonely and limited in her single body, desperately, painfully missing what she once was. Perhaps something of a retread but still interesting and worth following to its conclusion.

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Starred review from September 15, 2014

Newly appointed fleet captain Breq has been assigned a ship, the Mercy of Kalr, and sent by the Lord of the Radch to Athoek Station. Setting aside (for the most part) the brewing civil war in the Radch empire among clone factions of their leader, Breq has personal reasons for wanting to visit Athoek, which harken back to her final days as a ship ancillary and the events detailed in 2013's Hugo Award-winning Ancillary Justice. But while the titular noun may have changed in this sequel, our antagonist is still very much obsessed with justice and with helping underdogs where she finds them. Breq is a beautiful creation, a former ancillary who functioned as a part of her (now destroyed) ship, still longing for the experience of being completely integrated with her crew even while she deplores the imperial policies that created ancillaries and stripped them of their humanity. VERDICT Few novels could match the bolt-out-of-the-sky originality of Leckie's debut, but this follow-up builds on the world and characters that the author introduced in the first book and takes the story in new directions. There is much more to explore in Leckie's universe, one of the most original in sf today. [See Q&A with Leckie, p. 54.--Ed.]

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