skygiants

A month behind everyone else: I read Ancillary Sword!

I didn't love it as much as I loved Ancillary Justice, but this is one of those situations where I loved Ancillary Justice so much that the sequel was never going to quite live up to it.

Generally I'm more interested in One Esk at the bottom of the power structure without resources than in One Esk Large And In Charge ... I mean this is mostly a personal thing to me because my favorite One Esk is super passive-aggressive One Esk, and as a Person In Charge she is required to be less passive-aggressive, which is probably good for the people around her but not as fun for me. >.> It also means ... hmm. I'm not exactly complaining about the fact that Esk is now apparently on a mission to upend unjust power structures, and I also appreciate how ... inherently unfixable some of it was? But I do feel like this time around we didn't get as many of her particular blind spots, both interpersonally and in terms of power structures and ways of setting up civilization that the Radch take for granted. She was right a little too often, by which I mean right in terms of plot decisions and understanding people's motivations, and also in terms of modern social justice concerns. Not enough pushing of One Esk herself, not enough growth. I'm more excited for the third book, when all the problems will be bigger, and push her harder, and also probably be super interesting (depressed exiled three thousand-year-old spaceship? YES PLEASE.)

Also I didn't realize how attached I was to Seivarden until she was mostly offscreen for 3/4 of the book. But the fact that I am deeply attached to Seivarden should not honestly be surprising given that she is a terrible snob, a really self-absorbed person earnestly attempting to learn unselfishness by the numbers, and A HILARIOUS INTERPERSONAL FAILBOAT WITH A HOPELESS CRUSH ON A SPACESHIP WHO'S JUST NOT THAT INTO HER.

I did find everything to do with Tisarwat really fascinating; I continue to be curious about whether One Esk is being an unreliable narrator (or, you know, having a giant blind spot) about how much the pre-ancillary personality affects the ancillary person that results. And the complex awkward interpersonal spaceship dynamics were also pretty great, and I loved every single one of the Mercy of Kalr non-ancillaries. Ann Leckie also did a fantastic job conveying a sense of One Esk's Mercy of Kalr-linked perceptions that was still visibly distinct and different from the actual multiple-bodiedness of Justice of Toren. I don't know, I would probably have been happy with a whole book that was just everyone hanging out on Mercy of Kalr, really.

I remember seeing a bunch of reaction posts last month that I could not read at the time; if you made one, link me? I'm very curious what everyone else thought!