Ancillary Mercy
By Ann Leckie (Orbit, ISBN: 978-0-316-24668-2)
Marvelous end to exceptional trilogy
Review by Lawrence I. Charters, October 25, 2015
Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy are three nicely independent novels that cover a single story as broad as a couple thousand years and as short as a couple of weeks. The story is an epic combination of revenge, reconciliation, and recovery, told from the point of view of Breq Mianaai, a human who is not sure of their humanity after serving two millennia as a puppet soldier.
The first novel was initially disorienting. Though Leckie avoids the beginner mistake of making aliens so alien that they are impossible to understand, or making names so complex that the reader gives up even trying to understand them, she throws in some plain-language tricks that add extra tension to the story through the simple expedient of making the reader uncertain and uncomfortable about: pronouns.
By the time the second novel unfolds, you also begin to suspect that even the titles, themselves, are another clever trick, though you’ll have to explore that yourselves as it is both subtle and worth discovering through reading. Like the first novel, I finished it in an evening, not because it is simple or short, but because I was desperate to know what would happen next.
By the last novel, the overall story arc becomes clearer, both to Breq Mianaii and to the reader. Breq is exploring what it means to be a person, both in their own skin and in those met through the novel. But instead of a film noir format with minimal dialogue and pregnant silences, individual identity is explored through the lens of a festering revolution, clashes of starships, oppressed minorities (and majorities), and multiple minefields of literally explosive power imbalances. It is an exhilarating ride.
Oh, yes, and Leckie won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for the first book in the series. She richly deserved the honors.