Hugos 2025: "Lake of Souls" and Other Stories by Ann Leckie

Lake of Souls collects all of the short fiction by sf&f writer Ann Leckie to date; compared to some writers (say, Sarah Pinsker), this isn't very much. Leckie is clearly much more at home in the longer form than the shorter. The book contains eighteen stories: three from the world of the Imperial Radch (though, like most of Leckie's returns to this setting, not set in the actual Radch), seven from the world of her fantasy novel Raven Tower, and eight works not linked to larger settings, including one story original to this volume, "Lake of Souls," which is a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette. I read the volume prior to the Hugo finalists being announced, but did not get around to reviewing it until after.

The useful thing about reading a short fiction collection is that it really allows you to triangulate what interests a writer. Prior to reading Lake of Souls, I'd read every novel by Ann Leckie... but that amounts to, arguably, just five stories (the original Ancillary trilogy, Provenance, Translation State, and Raven Tower). Add on the stories in this book, and I've gone from five stories to twenty-three! With this broader sample size, you obtain a deeper understanding of what Ann Leckie is interested in, what she's using her fiction to figure out.

Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 2006-24
Acquired: July 2024
Read: March 2025

One thing that clearly drives her fiction is the way that our biology shapes our needs and desires. This is most obvious in the title story, "Lake of Souls," which has parallel narratives about the unusual life cycle of an alien species and a human explorer trying to work it out, but we also see this in "The Endangered Camp," "The Justified," and Translation State. Even more specifically, there's definitely an obsession with eating, with sentient beings that can devour other sentient beings. In a more metaphorical sense, this is the premise that drives the Ancillary trilogy: the Radch devours the bodies of other cultures to sustain its own imperialist conquests. The stories here and elsewhere ask what are the ethical imperatives of consumption—if you are driven to do this by biological need, is it wrong to eat other sapient beings?

Biology also comes into her fiction through an interest in parentage. To what extent are our actions determined by those of our parents or other ancestors? Can we escape them or move beyond them? Does parentage shape our actions even if we are adopted or raised by someone else? Both her novels Provenance and Raven Tower were about this to some degree, as are many of the stories here: "Another Word for World," "Bury the Dead," "She Commands Me and I Obey," and "The Snake's Wife." In these stories, children work to escape to the shadows of their parents, to forge their own identities.

Perhaps both of these concepts are examples of a larger interest in what we might call "systems of constraint." We also see this in the stories that come from the world of Raven Tower. (Though one should note the short fiction all preceded the novel; it developed the ideas she originated there.) As I discussed in my review of that novel, Leckie is "very good at the sf thing of taking a what if? and thinking through its implications. Here, the conceit is that praying to or making offering to gods gives them powers, and that anything a god says is true becomes true: if so, how would this work? We get a lot of different permutations of this, many of them quite clever. Yes, technically it's fantasy, but like (say) Jemisin in The Fifth Season, it's approached with an sf worldbuilder's mindset, which is how I like my fantasy." All the Raven Tower stories take this basic premise of how godhood works and explore its ramifications in various ways. 

To me, these were—for much the same reason I enjoyed the novel—the best stories in the book. Leckie is very skilled at setting up a set of constraints and exploring how this would affect the actions of various people. If a god makes a promise, how can they fulfill it? If a person commits themself to a god, how can they fulfill their obligations? I found these stories inventive and clever, taking a basic concept from the real world—making promises—and applying a fantastic veneer to it in order to deepen our understanding of it. But as fantastic as it is, I would argue this is just another version of what Leckie is doing in her biology stories or her parentage stories. We live in a world where rules and commitments imposed by others shape our behaviors: how do we navigate that ethically? what kind of promises do we make under those constraints?

(There are other themes we could identify, too, which won't be very surprising to readers of her novels, particularly an interest in empire and issues of translation.)

There are a number of strong stories here, of course, but the real strength of this book is the deeper understanding I now feel like I have of one of my favorite sf&f writers working today. It took almost twenty years for Leckie to amass enough short fiction to fill a single volume, so I guess I won't look out for a second collection until the 2040s, but until then, I'll continue to enjoy her novels.