Ann Leckie’s "Ancillary Justice" A Critical Companion

This book argues that Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice’s exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.   

1.Introduction.- 2.“She Was Probably Male” Gender and Embodiment.- 3. “Luxury Always Comes at Someone Else’s Expense” The Economics of Empire.- 4.“You Have to be Human to be Radchaai” Race, Citizenship, and Imperial Personhood.- 5.“Save it for When it will Make a Difference” Cynical Reason, Agency, and the Politics of Revolution.- 6.Conclusion: Mercy, or the Sword?

David M. Higgins is a Senior Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he is the Chair of the English Department at Inver Hills College in Minnesota, where he teaches classes on science fiction, graphic novels, American literature, and composition. He is the author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, which won the 2021 Science Fiction Research Association Book Award.