Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I don’t think Ann Leckie has it in her to write a book that isn’t weird as hell.

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

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I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this book. I’d read the summary when it was first announced, but that did nothing for me except make me go, ‘huh?’ But, when an author writes four good books in a row (and some of those I would actually consider “great”), you lend them a little trust and just go with whatever they publish, until it bites you. Leckie’s books have yet to bite me, no matter how weird or outside the box she gets […]

I felt like I could see the wizard behind the curtain, pulling the strings

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

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 On a visit to London last year, I stopped by Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road a few times, and on one of those visits, I picked up three space opera books: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley, and Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. The cashier’s face lit up when he saw my choices, saying that he’d read and loved all of them, especially Ancillary Justice. I’m not sure why it’s the last of […]

Bad head-space, not a bad space-book

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I am way late to this party, and now that I’ve arrived, I’m not sure it was worth the trip. I know Cannonballers love this book, and it was given to me by my dad, former Cannonballer sabian30, after he read it and liked it. But I didn’t love it like I wanted to. The concept is interesting: ancillaries are sprawling, brilliant, multi-bodied beings that serve the Lord of the Radch. Our main character is a ship as well as an army of genetically enhanced, […]

Young blood

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For a book that features deep space travel and multiple distinct alien races, Ann Leckie’s Provenance is a surprisingly human and even cozy story. A companion work to her stunning Imperial Radch trilogy (more informally referred to as the Ancillary trilogy sometimes), Provenance focuses on smaller stakes — though of course there are intergalactic ramifications. It follows Ingray Aughskold, the adopted daughter of a planetary noble, as she takes a risk to impress her mother and stumbles into a tangle of converging political plots and […]

Muscle and Blood and Skin and Bones

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Assyria soon discovered a painful truth: empires are like Ponzi schemes: financial frauds in which previous investors are paid returns out of new investors’ deposits. The costs of holding imperial territory can only be underwritten by loot and tribute extracted by constant new conquests; empires must continue to expand if they are not to collapse.” – Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth Of Civilization  At the end of Ancillary Justice, Anaander Mianaai was openly at war with herself. One faction of the Lord of […]

Chose my aim. Take one step and then the next. There had never been anything else.

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I will often hear about an award winning science fiction book and think “I should read that, but I won’t because it sounds serious and boring.” That is what I thought when I heard about Ancillary Justice. Yes, I want to slap me too. Two things happened that moved the Imperial Radch series off my “ought to, but won’t” list. One, Leckie loves Murderbot and two, all three audio books were available on Scribd during my free trial period. I was correct that Ancillary Justice does […]



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