Ancillary Mercy (Leckie)

[charlie_ego]

4/5. So I read Ancillary Mercy! And I really liked it, because it was awesome! I still think Ancillary Justice is the best, for a number of reasons, not least that AJ's set up in the best vintage SF-style to slowly reveal the worldbuilding, and by the time of AM we already know pretty much the important bits of worldbuilding

Comments

[ricardienne]

-I should disclose that I recently made a tumblr for the express purpose of being being a dorky fan of the Ancillary books (mostly for the purposes of making as many Radchaai = Romans jokes as possible, but also for writing Homer and Aeneid pastiches...) So I am not in any way objective about this series any more

[ricardienne]

(...and I went over the character limit

[charlie_ego]

Yeah, I too wonder about the fundamental inequality between the AIs and the Radchaai -- I mean, it's not even just the privacy; the AIs have basically almost complete physical power over the Radchaai in their domain. (Okay, I guess Station didn't actually manage to kill Anaander, but not every citizen is going to have a Presger gun.) It's glossed over in the book when Tisarwat complains about it, in that they're like, oh, of course ships/stations love their inhabitants, but it's really a fair question. What if those safeguards weren't there? Somehow got weakened or removed? Can't the existence of that tendency to love also be considered as being coerced in some way? I just... I think they'll need to think this through pretty carefully, and it's certainly not going to look like any government we have on Earth. But I don't know what form it should/would take, and I want to! :)

Ahahaha, yes, Breq does keep thinking that it's the end, and then it's not.

[ricardienne]

Yes! I mean, on the one hand, I suppose that since Radchaai society seems pretty hierarchical and oriented around dependence-relationships, most people already live in some sense under the absolute power of someone -- a Captain, a system governor (? unclear how much power a station governor has for summary executions/brain-reconfiguring/other terrible things), or, ultimately, Anaander Mianaai -- and, for practical purposes are pretty well subjected to someone else -- a superior, the person to whom they're bound as a client, the representative of the government -- whom, in practice, they don't have a lot of appeal against