If Ancillary Justice were a horse, it would have won the Triple Crown. If it were a golfer, it would have snagged a Grand Slam. But Ann Leckie’s thoroughbred is a sci-fi book, and it achieved its particular distinction by winning the coveted Hugo Award for best novel… and the Nebula Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. No previous book ever achieved that triple distinction. Ancillary Justice has now been translated into a dozen or so languages, and also got optioned for a TV series. And did I mention it took home the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award? By the way, it also picked up a Locus Award for best first novel.
Yes, Leckie earned all of these honors with her debut effort. Her path to success, however, was highly unconventional, and she is anything but an overnight success. The author of Ancillary Justice was in her mid-forties at the time of its publication, and her resume include d stints as a waitress, receptionist, recording engineer, and rodman on a land surveying team. Although she had made some efforts to publish fiction in her youth, her vocation as a writer didn’t take off in earnest until after the birth of her children, and she sought distraction from the responsibilities of a stay-at-home mom. Her decision to participate in National Novel Writing Month back in 2002 led to the first draft of Ancillary Justice , but a full decade would elapse before she completed the work and sold it to publisher Orbit Books.
How would I describe Leckie’s novel to a sci-fi fan who was trying to decide whether to read it? I would start with a comparison to Ursula K. Le Guin, who came to fame a half-century ago with a thoughtful insertion of sociological, religious, political and gender themes into deftly-paced space operas. Leckie works from the same playbook, and adds some new twists of her own. But her book also shows the influence of Star Wars and Star Trek (Yes, Leckie was a Trekkie—there’s the making of a limerick there, I’m sure) and other intergalactic thrillers where devastating weapon systems and high tech battles in outer space juice up the action, but don’t entirely replace one-on-one fights and over-the-top personal rivalries in pushing the plot forward. Mix these two elements, the cerebral and the pugilistic, and spice lightly with Orwell, Atwood and Vance, and—voila!—you have Ancillary Justice .
But the bold, new ingredients are the most interesting elements in this novel. For one, the narrator is a corpse. Or, an ancillary, in the lingo of the Radch empire, the totalitarian political system that controls most of the universe in which this novel takes place. Ancillaries are dead bodies that have been revivified to serve as slave soldiers for the Emperor of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai. Teams of ancillaries work together on battle and occupation missions, and even though they possess a degree of individuality, they also share a common mind—allowing for a seamless flow of thoughts and actions between the corpse soldiers. These are zombies on steroids , my friend. The Emperor also shares this ability to operate simultaneously in multiple bodies—so even if an assassin killed one manifestation of the leader, many others remain active, thus allowing the Anaander Mianaai to survive any number of calamities and, in principle, to maintain rule forever.
This multi-body perspective allows Leckie to employ some interesting prose techniques, as she integrates the simultaneous impressions of the different individuals constituting her ancillary narrator, Breq. But on a more practical plot-driven level, the fact that a single character can possess more than one body creates a huge obstacle for Breq, who has decided that she wants to murder the Emperor—but how can you assassinate a leader who has spread herself over so many planets and solar systems?
I said ‘she’ in describing Breq and Anaander Mianaai, but that requires me to explain the other intriguing twist in this novel. Our narrator struggles to identify gender cues in many settings, and can’t distinguish a ‘he’ from a ‘she’. As a result Breq relies on a universal ‘she’ in describing and addressing people—a practice that occasionally causes problems when she is speaking about a male in a language that relies on gender-driven terms and rules. Leckie uses this deliberate ambiguity to good advantage, and the reader who mentally envisions the passing scenes in the book must deal with the mind-expanding complexity of characters who are male from the perspective of their society, but female in the language of the narrator of Ancillary Justice .
Leckie is also skilled in her handling of a complex chronology, with different subplots taking place at various points in a thousand year timespan. Breq’s travelling companion Seivarden is a survivor of an Imperial disaster a millennium in the past, and another key building block in the story involves the mass killing of innocent citizens by Radch occupation forces more than a decade before the main events of Ancillary Justice . The resonance between past and present is amplified by a mythological-religious subtext about destiny, synchronicity and prognostication that permeates the belief systems of the key characters.
It’s to Leckie’s credit that her daring moves in narrative structure soon begin to feel like the most natural and unobtrusive way of telling her tale. Many readers will get caught up in her action story and not even notice how many chances the author is taking along the way. The same is true of the ‘big picture’ themes embedded in Ancillary Justice . If I were teaching this book in a classroom setting, I could use it to spur discussions on civil disobedience, stereotypes, religious tolerance and a host of other issues that rarely take center stage in genre fiction. But here too the ‘ideas’ are mixed in so subtly with the energy and pacing of a thriller, that the reader is hardly aware of the many different levels at which this book is simultaneously operating. The result is the best kind of experimental novel—namely one in which the experiment is so successful that the audience is unaware of the many ways it could have failed.
But I do have a gripe with Ancillary Justice , and it is the same complaint I have made against many other genre novels. Instead of seeking for closure at the end of her book, Leckie decides to set the stage for a sequel. This is a characteristic move in the current day—after all, why aim to create a great novel when you could build a commercial franchise instead. But it is precisely this kind of decision that shows the large gap between a literary writer and a genre writer. John Updike wrote sequels to Rabbit Run , but he didn’t use the ending of book one to build up demand for book two. Instead he sought for closure and a holistic aesthetic vision. The same is true of Philip Roth, who would never have distorted the conclusion of American Pastoral or The Human Stain to amplify the Zuckerman franchise. Marilynne Robinson’s Home is more than a sequel to her novel Gilead —they each tell the same story from a different perspective—but she makes sure that each book is self-contained and complete. If science fiction writers want to be taken as seriously as the shining stars of mainstream literary prizes, they ought to learn from these examples. Write the best book you can, and don’t shortchange the reader in the final chapter in order to hook them into buying a sequel or prequel or (worst of all) an infinite series of brand extensions.
But I can’t lay all the blame for this at Leckie’s feet. Plenty of other genre writers have made the same move—and probably with the encouragement of agents, publishers and readers. And there’s enough skill and bravura in the first 350 pages of Ancillary Justice to convince me to overlook the manipulations of the final pages of the book. And certainly when dealing with a debut novel, any reservations about a work of this caliber are more than offset by high hopes for works to come. Leckie is a big talent, and now that she has won the Triple Crown of sci-fi, she just might pull off a crossover victory in that sprawling alien universe outside the boundaries of genre writing.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).