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| Trade paperback, 359 pages Published 2015 Acquired December 2016 Read December 2018 |
Ancillary Mercy is better than Ancillary Sword, but I'm wondering if Ann Leckie was a one-hit wonder-- neither the Ancillary books 2-3 nor Provenance were anywhere near as good as Ancillary Justice. I feel as if after Justice, she just had no idea where to go; that's how it reads, anyway. The stakes in Sword/Mercy (which basically forms one big story) are technically higher than those in Justice; in Justice, Breq was just out for her own satisfaction/vengeance, whereas in Mercy, she's fighting to save a solar system. But in Justice, the stakes felt higher because of Breq's personal need to do this; the climax of that book was one of the most intense reading experiences I can remember having in ages. The big problem of Sword/Mercy is that there's no strong personal involvement for Breq. She was sent to this solar system arbitrarily as far as we can; I don't really have a reason to care if it can be protected from Anaannder Mianaai.
Part of the problem in Mercy goes back to Sword. It didn't feel like Breq had to fight for anything in that book, so why should I care if it's taken away from her? In Justice, what she did was hard work. In Sword, she was easily right every time. It would have been nice to see Breq struggle to be a captain, because surely the service-based attitude one needs to be a good ship is different than the leadership-based attitude one needs to be a good captain. But Breq doesn't struggle; she's just a good captain from the word "go." Thankfully, Mercy reverses this somewhat, but it's still annoying. A morally right character who struggles to implement justice is sympathetic. A morally right character who always gets her way is smug and obnoxious.
The shame of it all is that Leckie does great, complex worldbuilding (along with Seth Dickinson, she's very much part of a movement more attentive to the details of colonialism and empire than I remember seeing in older sf) and crafts marvelous sentences. She writes great characters. I really like Seivarden, for example, and the Presger translator Zeiat was delightfully funny and alien; I laughed a lot at her antics.
I can imagine a better book 2-3 than we got-- and the very end of book 3 promises it, when [WATCH OUT, SPOILERS] Breq founds her own polity with citizenship for AI. Imagine if books 2-3 had been condensed down into one book ending where book 3 does right now. Then book 3 could have been about Breq trying to defend her own society from Anaander Mianaai and the Radch, trying to take from her the enclave of justice that she's built. That would have potentially had real emotional stakes in a way that this book does not. After reading Ancillary Justice, Leckie's work became must-buy for me... after reading the rest of it, it has lost that status. She's not a bad writer, but outside of Justice, she's not a great one, either.
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