Ancillary Sword

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Further adventures of the angry former spaceship and assorted imperial doings.

This was . . . unchallenging is the word a friend used, and it is exactly the right one. Like, this book kept presenting the most digestible, high-contrast depictions of inequity, and I kept waiting for the onion layers to peel back on it and . . . no . . . apparently the arc of justice bends towards the completely freaking obvious. Like, okay, slave labor by another name is, indeed, unjust. But positing that is not interesting to me as a reader and, more importantly, did not challenge any of the characters as they revolved neatly through this little social justice playlet. Which is part of what makes the book go, actually – there's something awful about how cartoonishly blatant the evil is here, and yet how many characters still can't see it and can't be taught to see it. But we spent so long talking at length about the obvious injustice of captive labor that we didn't seem to have time to delve into the more complex and insidious ways the power structure reinforces itself. The stuff that really gets people where they're rooted, because it's what they're rooted in.

Anyway. I'm selling this book short, to be honest. It has long, charming stretches of angry former spaceship who is baffled by these monkeys, and there are two contrasting subplots about identity that are extensions of how the first book dealt with the expanded self on multiple levels from the personal to the societal, and other stuff that I liked. But there was just something so primary color crayon about most of the sociological plot, and . . . eh.




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