Ancillary Mercy is the third and final novel in Ann Leckie’s award winning Imperial Radch series. The novels are about the adventures of Breq an Ancillary who was connected to a ship that was destroyed. An Ancillary is a human who has been turned into an AI and has their consciousness connected to a ship. They can access its data and see and hear what all other Ancillaries are experiencing. They will do whatever the ship’s captain commands them to do.
The third novel starts where the second novel finished. Breq is still the
nominated fleet commander of the Athoek system and is located on its space
station. She is trying to fix the station’s undergarden area which was damaged
in the previous novel, as well as fix the station’s complex politics. She has
to deal with the agendas of an uncooperative system governor and power hungry
religious leader.
Her attempts at fixing the station are interrupted
when an envoy from the all-conquering Presger arrives to survey humans and to
see whether they have broken the “treaty” between the two races. The envoy’s arrival
is then complicated by unknown warships appearing in the system.
This novel is about Breq’s attempt
to create a more merciful local system where even the AIs, like the Ancillaries, that run the ships and the station, get to decide their own fates. She wants them to have the choices that
she now has as an Ancillary who has been cut off from her destroyed ship. She
also wants the indigenous population of Athoek to control their future.
One of the most intriguing features of
the novels is the fact that Breq cannot differentiate between female and male,
so she refers to every character as “she”, which creates a viewpoint character
who does not bring gender into the power dynamics between the characters she
deals with. Leckie leaves it to the reader to add genders to characters if they
want to.
I very much enjoyed this novel as it
attempted to bring the series to a conclusion, but there were still plenty of
loose ends at its conclusion for a fourth novel to explore. It’s probably not as
good as the first two novels, as the first was huge on world building, and the
second was more about Breq attempting to redefine herself, but still an
excellent read.
3 comments:
Sounds like a good read.
Impressed by your dedication to reading. Would you read everyday? How many hours?
Read 3-4 nights a week for about 2 hours. Read about 50 pages in those 2 hours.
That's impressive.
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