Ancillary Mercy

Synnerligen trevlig trilogi. En stark fyra. En del recensenter tycks klaga på att de dricker te ofta... Nja, bara behagligt: "Indeed" som huvudkaraktären emellanåt säger.

Utmanar och stimulerar fantasin om person eller personlighet visavi samhälle, individ visavi kollektiv.

Olika kulturer, bland annat kring genus, där det i berättelsens eller berättarjagets civilisation Radch blir svårt att överhuvudtaget konceptuellt begripa att någon kan heta något annat än "hon". Kräver ansträngning när möte med andra folk som tänker annorlunda.

Sci-fi i subgenren "rymdopera", som jag själv skulle placera denna trilogi i, finns i en del annat samtida: Om man önskar sig såväl högkvalitativ som njutbar läsning så finns förutom som här Ann Leckie också exempelvis Christopher Ruocchio. Uppföljaren till närmast absurt spännande Empire of Silence utkommer i juli i år:
Howling Dark.

Not quite perfect, but the kind of finale that retroactively pulls up the first two novels up a notch as well. The Ancillary novels, for all that they mirror the standard trilogy pattern of outsider->complicated->triumph, still fell like one long novel chopped into three volumes for marketing purposes, but I love how much it gets right in the end. Not just that it's fun - and the last volume really ups the "fun" factor - but underneath it there's a lot of interesting ideas. How seriously it takes the question of just what happens when you introduce things like AI and cloned personalities into a story, for instance; the driving force behind the whole thing is Breq killing the evil emperor, but how exactly do you physically kill an emperor who has thousands of backup bodies spread out over hundreds of star systems who all depend on her being, basically, God?

Let's be sure that includes ALL of our citizens, shall we, Governor?

Ann Leckie has come under fire from a lot of, shall we say, somewhat less than progressive parts of SF fandom for outrageous things like only using female pronouns for all characters, etc. This, as many have pointed out, is of course profoundly silly; what, we're fine with hive minds and AIs and transhumans and aliens and FTL spaceflight, but gender ambiguity is outrageous? Yes, there are times when the dialogue between her characters almost sounds like the comments section at The Mary Sue, but she uses that. Ideas matter in SF, always have, and what Leckie does is to introduce the classic space opera to the question: Just what do all these various words, "person", "citizen", "people", "human", "individual", etc actually mean when you look beneath them, at the unspoken (or spoken so long we've accepted them) assumptions? She's not nearly the first to do so, but literature is an ongoing discussion and she makes an argument well worth listening to, even if - or especially as - it leans toward the optimistic. Hell, the whole thing is basically kicked off by the fact that even the evil emperor has a conscience. And just look at the titles of the books, and how they're ordered.

Also, fun. How does an all-powerful alien ambassador eat oysters? However she damn pleases.

Of course, underneath all that discussion is another discussion lurking, just how much our current view of rights and justice plays against a very Western idea of self-realisation and individualism. But that's for another day. In the end, this is what clever SF does, it opens gates between systems and lets them clash for a bit, and does so in a way that you can't stop reading.