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.

Hugos 2024: Translation State by Ann Leckie

Translation State by Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie immediately won me over with the masterful Ancillary Justice, which kicked off a movement in sf that continues to this day, as evidenced by the 2024 Hugo Award finalist Some Desperate Glory: action-focused space opera that critiques empire and colonialism with careful attention to cultural difference but also explores its allure.

Originally published: 2023
Acquired: May 2024
Read: July 2024

After the conclusion of her original trilogy, Leckie's returns to the world of the Imperial Radch have been in a slightly different mode. Like Provenance (2017), this takes place in that realm but while it has intrigue, it doesn't have space opera–style action. Translation State has three protagonists that it rotates between: Enae, the scion of a powerful family whose grandmother dies, leaving eir on their own but with nothing to call eir own; Reet, a maintenance worker on a space station who finds out he might be the heir to a ruling family thought extinct; and Qven, one of the mysterious, strange Presger Translators, humans put into the service of the most dangerous of the alien species. Over time, their three stories intersect.

All three storylines are about belonging; the characters are all ones who have not had it for various reasons, but are in search of it. Enae was hated by all members of eir family, including the only one sie was close to; Reet was an orphan raised in foster care and thus has always felt a bit estranged, even from his loving foster parents; and Qven has always felt a bit strange even among the Presger Translators. Leckie does a great job bringing us into the minds of all three characters, and the opening chapters for Enae are particularly strong, as we see eir struggle when sie is cast adrift. The Presger chapters are also strong, Leckie displaying (as in her novels Ancillary Justice and Raven Tower, in particular) for off-kilter, thoughtful worldbuilding.

In the end, though, the whole thing ends up feeling a bit sedate. In Ancillary Justice, Leckie starts with a moment of high drama (the flashback to the Justice of Toren's last mission), continues though some desperate actions in the present day (Breq and Seivarden's ice trip), and ends with an explosive but character-driven action sequence. For most of its run, though, there's little like any of that in Translation State. I feel like all the ingredients are all there, but the characters are very rarely making interesting, dramatic choices; in the end, it feels like they kind of all did exactly what you might have expected them to do. There are a few too many sequences where it seems like the characters are waiting around for other characters to decide important things. The climax is pretty creepy, but it doesn't have the tension of any of those sequences from Ancillary Justice.

Enae, in particular, ends up feeling a bit superfluous to requirements, even though sie was the character I was most interested in at the beginning. (The end hints at future adventures for eir, so I hope those come to pass in future novels because I would be on board with seeing Enae do something more.) I think the thing that worked against the novel's success the most is that the three protagonists are all näive people who feel very young even though they are all actually middle-aged. It's a type I wouldn't mind seeing once but three times—why? As a middle-aged reader myself, I think you can depict someone uncertain of their own position in the world but not make them come across as a twenty-something YA protagonist. Obviously Breq in the Ancillary books is näive in some ways, too, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that they are very powerful and knowledgeable in others. That's true of Qven here, and I ended up liking the end of their storyline a lot, but less true of Enae and Reet, who both kind of grated in the end.

All this makes it seem like I really didn't like it. I don't think that's true; I always enjoyed reading it. Leckie writes compelling characters and neat worlds. Unlike Provenance, this one feels like its asks for more, too; in addition to the bit about Enae I mentioned earlier, both Qven and Reet are left in places that seem to imply interesting complications to come, and the political situation left in place at the end of Ancillary Mercy continues to develop. This is solid work, but it's solid work from a writer I know is capable of great work.

Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 422 pages
Published 2013

Acquired December 2016
Previously read May 2017
Reread November 2019

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

I used to say Ancillary Justice was the best sf novel of the last five years... until I realized it was over six years old. Oh well. But as soon as I was assigned an sf creative writing course, I knew this would be the novel I would teach. I really like the way it handles worldbuilding, and the way it makes something new of old sf tropes. For example, in an essay on John Scalzi's Whatever, Leckie points out that the idea of an evil empire reusing corpses of conquered people as soldiers is an sf staple... but the story of Justice of Toren is an interesting twist, because once "liberated," her body doesn't have any desire to go back to who she was, because she doesn't remember being that person. She is Justice of Toren.

I also like the way she handles exposition. We talked about Jo Walton's concept of "incluing" a lot in my class; Leckie argues in an essay of her own that the infodump has its place, and sometime it is better to tell than show. On the one hand, the first few pages of Ancillary Justice throw a lot of stuff at you, to my students' consternation. What's a Radchaai? A segment? How can the narrator be a "piece of equipment"? On the other hand, come chapter 2, we get some clear-cut explanations: "Nineteen years, three months, and one week before [...], I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis'urna" (9). And then the narrator just spells out a lot of stuff for us. What's a troop carrier? What's Shis'urna? How do the ships communicate? All just told, because we need to know.

But she keeps dropping in little details she doesn't entirely explains; at one point, she mention "gates" and I asked my students what this meant. To my surprise none of them knew! Leckie is, of course, banking that you have enough previous knowledge of sf to know that one from context. But it's also not important on p. 9, and when it becomes important (when Justice of Toren enters gate space on p. 217), the narrator just tells us what a gate is and how it works. The notorious gender stuff is largely done through incluing, on the other hand, maybe meant to indicate just how much it's second (or first?) nature to our viewpoint characters. I also really liked the quick switching of viewpoints in ch. 2 to explore how the ancillaries work, though this requires some effort from the reader (as Walton discusses in her examination of incluing); if you don't pay close attention, you'll be more confused, not more elucidated by the time this part is over. Leckie is really good at this kind of thing. (Except when it comes to the structure of the Radchaai military vessels, which confused my students, and confused me when I tried to explain it; I had to pull up a chart from the Internet to get it all straight.)

It's always been interesting to me that the story's play with gender-- which got all of the press when it came out-- is actually sort of irrelevant. Compare The Left Hand of Darkness, which is largely about Genly Ai's discomfort with the unusual form of gender he encounters on Gethen. But you could delete the lack of gender in Radchaai civilization from Ancillary Justice, and in terms of plot and character, I think it would basically be the same novel. The "Big Idea" of the novel is about colonization and the ways other cultures are absorbed and assimilated and disposed of.

We did explore how readers react to the lack of explicit gender information on the characters. Most, like myself, filled in information based on guesswork and, to be honest, stereotypes. I imagined Awn as female (because she seems young and innocent), Skaaiat as male (because she is a bit of a "player" with Awn), Dariet as male (because she's in a position of authority and commanding), Isaaia as female (because she's snobby and reads as "bitchy"). On the other hand, I always perceive Seivarden as female even though we're explicitly told he's male! I think it's because of the snobbishness? I'm not sure. Most of my students did similar categorization; others had different reasons. One said she liked imagining all of Anaander Mianaai's bodies as female just because women evil overlords are so rare in science fiction. Some students didn't categorize at all: one just took all the female pronouns at face value and thought of everyone as a woman. I said I wished I could do the same, but some things were too ingrained and you can't entirely control your imagination.

So why is this aspect of the novel there? This is what I demanded my students tell me, but there are a couple reasons I had in mind. One is that the Radchaai can't be entirely about the Big Idea, because then they become one-note. All the tea stuff, though fun, creates a parallel to the British Empire, reinforcing the imperialist critique running through the novel. The gender system is largely orthogonal to the issues of colonialism and classism in the novel, thus making the Radchaai a more complex, fleshed out society. Utterly evil in some senses, but highly progressive in others.

The second is that it does reinforce the novel's themes. In a large part, this is a novel about judging people not by who they are, but by how they act. Anaander Mianaai misjudges Justice of Toren; Seivarden misjudges Breq; Breq misjudges Seivarden; the Radch misjudges entire civilizations. It's about how you need to take the action that is most good, not the action that is expected. The reader doesn't make these misjudgements because the reader doesn't have Radchaai classism culturally ingrained. But the reader does make a whole different series of misjudgements because they have an entirely different system of gender culturally ingrained. To read Ancillary Justice successfully, you have to learn to overcome your own preconceptions about how the world works-- just as the characters did.

(Oddly, this did expose to me that the character who most learns the central lesson of the novel isn't the protagonist; Breq occasionally misjudges, but usually reserves judgement until she sees people act. Breq already knows all this. It's Seivarden who learns this lesson, and Seivarden who thus changes the most across the course of the novel. Which is probably why Seivarden is my favorite character in the trilogy.)

Review: Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 359 pages
Published 2015
Acquired December 2016
Read December 2018

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

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.

Hugos 2018: Provenance by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 441 pages
Published 2017
Acquired April 2018
Read June 2018

Provenance by Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie won the Hugo, the Nebula, and basically the everything for Ancillary Justice-- her very first novel. Provenance is her first book since the Ancillary trilogy concluded. The first was amazing, an excellent, gripping, clever novel. The second was low-energy and disappointing. I haven't yet got around to the third. Provenance takes place in the same universe as the Ancillary books, but is entirely unrelated.

In terms of quality, Provenance is somewhere between the first and second Ancillary books. It's about a young woman who comes up with a desperate plan to curry favor with her mother, breaking someone out of jail to get him to help her locate artifacts he stole. It feels a little generic YA at times: I liked Ingray, but she is brave and clever and nice and resourceful, and is on the verge of tears a little too often. (The back cover calls her "power-driven" but this is completely untrue.) The beginning is quite good, as you figure out what Ingray is up to, and she keeps being thwarted in her desires; no sooner do you figure out her plan than it is completely upset by a new revelation, one that made me actually say "uh oh" aloud.

But after that I felt the book tapered off. About halfway through, Ingray's original goal just kind of dissolves and the books feels like it's treading water for a while with incidental details before it finally gets going again... but then it's moving in a completely different direction, and a new plotline with only tenuous links to the first. This is exciting, but not as interesting as what the book's beginning promised, I think. It's never bad, but it feels generic in a way that Ancillary Justice did not, which had strong attention to cultural detail and a cool sf hook with the ancillaries. Provenance doesn't have a cool sf hook; the technologies here are all pretty bog-standard stuff you've seen in other sf. A good adventure book, but I had hoped for more from the author of Ancillary Justice.

Review: Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 356 pages
Published 2014
Acquired December 2016
Read September 2017

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Ancillary Justice was a book with a lot of a narrative drive: you kept reading because you both wanted to know how Breq had ended up in her situation, and because you wanted to know how she would carry out her vengeance. Each of the parallel plotlines had a great hook and a lot of energy.

Ancillary Sword is weirdly energy-less. Given her own ship and sent off on a mission, Breq seems to pretty much have nothing to do beyond stick her nose into various local affairs at the planet where she and her ship (Mercy of Kalr) end up. I never really got what her purpose was. Supposedly she's helping to defend the Radch, but there are no clear stakes to Breq's mission in this book-- contrast that with the enormous stakes in Ancillary Justice. Furthermore, what she does do quickly becomes obnoxious, as Breq is smarter and more moral than everyone else in the novel, accomplishing all of her goals with an ease that soon becomes dull. Is there no one she can't outwit? Apparently. Is everyone in the Radch less principled than her? It sure seems so, deflating all tension. How did she get so good? Why make your main character a former spaceship if it has no bearing on the story?

I like Breq, I like the setting (it's very complicated, politically and culturally), I like many of the side characters, such as Seivarden (though she doesn't do much in this volume) and Kalr Five (who is awesome). But Ancillary Sword is not the best story that could have been told with them, unfortunately, and huge let-down compared to the first book.

Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 422 pages
Published 2013
Acquired December 2016
Read May 2017

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

I really enjoyed this. Basically the perfect sort of space opera (if you're me): cool concepts like dispersed intelligence and living spaceships, effective world-building down to the littlest details, nuanced take on the details of how colonialism functions, well-written characters, effective plot structure, strong prose, and gripping action-- I read through the last one hundred or so pages in one go because I had to find out what was happening.

It struck me how this book was in some ways a response to Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, though not an anti-Left Hand. Maybe more a development of it. The setting puts me in mind of it: a lone visitor from an interstellar alien* alliance comes to an iced-over world where the gender rules are different to what they're used to. In both books, there ends up being a long cross-tundra journey on a sledge, with the life of someone the visitor knows hanging in the balance. Only in Left Hand, the representative is an actual emissary; in Ancillary Justice, they're a fugitive from an underclass. In Left Hand, the other person on the sledge is a close friend; in Ancillary Justice, the visitor doesn't even know why they're saving them. In Left Hand, the visitor comes from a world with our concepts of gender; in Ancillary Justice, the visitor goes to a world with our concepts of gender. In Left Hand, the book defaults to male pronouns for characters who are hermaphroditic; in Ancillary Justice, the book defaults to female pronouns for every character no matter their gender/sex. In Left Hand, the interplantary space alliance is largely benevolent; in Ancillary Justice, it's decidedly not. There are enough parallels-with-divergence to make me feel like it was intentional, or at least that Left Hand of Darkness was bubbling somewhere in Leckie's subconscious as she wrote Ancillary Justice. Though if this is all so, I'd have to think more before advancing what Leckie might actually be trying to say in her reworking.

* Alien in the sense of cultural, not biological. In both books, the visitor and the visited are (essentially) biologically human.