It's also just as well we do, since Ancillary Mercy spends the bare minimum on reminders of the past and hits the ground meandering (momentum builds slowly in the Ancillary universe – it's less a race than the weaving of a slow and absorbing knot). But it barely scrapes the surface of the richly detailed world that Leckie's created - by now, we know the significance behind using the second-best porcelain, Breq's humming, the intimacy of an ungloved hand, and the directness of an apology as a gauge of how close someone is to mutiny. And it's a nice touch, both in un-gendering its own narrative and reminding us of the power of language to erase things in the languages it colonizes. Much has been made of the series' use of single-gender pronouns as a world-building detail.

If you don't know the Ancillary series by now, you probably should. And luckily for readers, that's quite a bit.

It's complicated work (for one thing, the imperial civil war is between cloned iterations of the Empress herself), so it's just as well for the series that Breq accidentally keeps falling into broken things that need fixing on a more local level: Her devoted lieutenant Seivarden, captaincy of a ship whose human crew has no idea of their leader's past, a planetary assignment with the expected imperial prejudice, and a space station awash in all the cultural minutiae the Radchaai empire can offer. It helped that the spaceships in question were millenia-old artificial intelligences who used hundreds of reanimated corpses as ancillary bodies - which was an amazing visual, a handy metaphor for the totalitarian regime in power, and some very particular backstory for our hero, Breq, an ex-ancillary now separated from her ship.īreq has spent two books trying to bring down the head of the Radch, a galaxy-spanning empire. Ann Leckie's sociopolitical space opera almost singlehandedly breathed new cool into the stereotype of spaceships trundling through far-off systems amid laser battles. With nothing more than the perfume of jasmine flowers.' Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Ancillary Mercy Author Ann Leckie

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