The Ancillary series, by Ann Leckie is one of the best works of SF I have ever read. It is SF at its best. Leckie has created one of the most interesting cultures, and one of the most interesting characters I have ever read.
Many years ago, Heinlein made the point that a truly good writer does not provide answers, he asks questions, and leads the reader to seek his own answers. Leckie has done that very, very well. The central question I get from the Ancillary series is “What is ‘human’?” If a person has her personality wiped, and overwritten with an artificial intelligence that makes her a part of an artificially intelligent warship then is she still human? If she becomes separated from that machine intelligence, even though she contains an instance of it, then is she again human? If a person exists as a community of clones connected to a hive mind then is she human? If a person is one of those clones containing an instance of the hive mind then is she human?
Another question Leckie asks is “Is gender really important for plot or story?” We don’t positively know the gender of the central character until about a third of the way through the first book. We find out the sidekick’s gender early on, but only because the central character specifically mentions that gender. Past that the gender of any of the characters is merely hinted at. We never find out the gender of the villain at all. And it doesn’t matter. Leckie has told the story so well that the gender of the characters, or their lack thereof, does not matter.
One of the most important questions Leckie asks is “What happens when a widely distributed hive mind, thousands of individuals strong, develops multiple personalities which hate each other? If they kill each other would it then constitute homicide or suicide?
Further, I would like to thank Ann Leckie for the way she handled characters of indeterminate gender. The Radchaai language does not have a gendered pronoun, and in Radchaai society it is considered rude to show outward signs of gender. Leckie handled this by defaulting all personal pronouns to feminine, as long as the character is speaking Radchaai. In fact, we can tell when a character is speaking something other than Radchaai because she uses gendered pronouns. I would doubly like to thank Leckie for NOT resorting to the singular “they” to express indeterminate gender pronouns. I recently read a short story which resorted to the singular “they” for a gender-indeterminate pronoun, and I found it extremely annoying. Especially when the story needed a plural pronoun! If I tried to read an entire book full of the singular “they” then by the end of it I would be throwing things. If I made it to the end.
Leckie would probably have had an easier time writing the books if she worked in Ido, because Ido personal pronouns default to nongendered unless specifically masculinized or feminized. But I don’t read Ido, so I’m glad she worked in English.
As I have now read all three of the existing books, I can only hope Leckie writes more in this universe, because I want to know what happens next, and she has certainly left the story open for more.
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