{"id":2210,"date":"2016-12-16T22:15:34","date_gmt":"2016-12-17T03:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/?p=2210"},"modified":"2024-01-21T11:30:18","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T16:30:18","slug":"leckie-ann-01-03-ancillary-justice-sword-mercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2016\/12\/leckie-ann-01-03-ancillary-justice-sword-mercy\/","title":{"rendered":"Leckie, Ann: (01-03) Ancillary Justice, Sword, Mercy<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have finally gotten around to reading Ann Leckie’s complete Imperial Radch trilogy<\/strong> and I am dusting off this booklog to talk about it quickly. (Also pulling out a bunch of notes or mostly-written entries on other books while I’m at it.)<\/p>\n

As you may recall, I really liked\u00a0Ancillary Justice<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>and was unsure what to think about\u00a0Ancillary Sword<\/em><\/a> because it was\u00a0very much a middle book.\u00a0Sword<\/em> kept looking worse in retrospect to me, so when I tried reading Ancillary\u00a0Mercy<\/em>, the\u00a0concluding volume, and\u00a0realized\u00a0I needed to reread\u00a0Sword<\/em> to make sense of it, I lost a lot of\u00a0enthusiasm for the prospect. (The opening absolutely tries to orient the reader, but I’d forgotten so much that it wasn’t enough.) But, very recently, I needed to reread\u00a0Justice<\/em> for reasons not relevant here,\u00a0which reminded me of how much I loved it. So I\u00a0resolved to push quickly through\u00a0Sword<\/em>\u00a0so I could finally get to\u00a0Mercy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This worked very well indeed. Not only did my love of\u00a0Justice<\/em> give me the momentum to get through\u00a0Sword<\/em>, but it had\u00a0the benefit of\u00a0getting me in the proper frame of mind to approach the scope of the ending. I know some people would have preferred that\u00a0Mercy<\/em> go wider, and that’s entirely understandable; but\u00a0Justice<\/em> is explicitly about doing the small, hopeless-seeming things because they’re the right thing to do and might make a difference, who knows. And\u00a0I found satisfying the way\u00a0Mercy<\/em>\u00a0developed this theme\u00a0about the meaningfulness of smaller actions, while also hinting at ways that the\u00a0immediate resolution could have much wider effects.<\/p>\n

Sword<\/em> looks somewhat better now, too. The plantation section is probably always going to feel like low-hanging fruit for me, but it’s less of the book than I remembered (like\u00a0Frodo & Sam in Mordor). And now\u00a0I know Sword<\/em> wasn’t a\u00a0standalone episode, but necessary setup for the last book, which addresses my other major concern about it.<\/p>\n

I found Mercy<\/em>\u00a0compulsively readable, funny (fish sauce!), and tense. It put something on the table that I somehow failed to realize should’ve been all along,\u00a0and it’s always great when a book can pull that kind of inevitable surprise. It introduced two awesome new characters and continued to develop several existing ones. And it was generally very satisfying and heartening. I’m glad I finally read it.<\/p>\n

Finally, if you haven’t read “She Commands Me and I Obey”<\/a> yet, you should definitely do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have finally gotten around to reading Ann Leckie’s complete Imperial Radch trilogy and I am dusting off this booklog to talk about it quickly. (Also pulling out a bunch of notes or mostly-written entries on other books while I’m at it.) As you may recall, I really liked\u00a0Ancillary Justice\u00a0and was unsure what to think … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Leckie, Ann: (01-03) Ancillary Justice, Sword, Mercy<\/cite>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,88,15],"tags":[284],"class_list":["post-2210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-imperial-radch-series","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-leckie-ann"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2431,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2210\/revisions\/2431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}