Reading: Ancillary Mercy
Apr. 10th, 2016 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartThis is the third book in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy. I read the first two last year; I thought the first, Ancillary Justice, was brilliant and innovative, and loved the second too, so I had high expectations for the third which, for me, it didn't quite live up to. Which isn't to say that it wasn't still very, very good, but the pacing felt slightly off; where the first two books developed more slowly, with a lot of character study and only occasional action sequences, this had a lot more action and the character development felt a bit squeezed. Which was a shame, especially as there were a number of fairly major new characters I would have liked to see a lot more of. It felt rather as though Leckie got to the final book and realised that she really had more than a book's worth of material to put in it. And, possibly because so much was squeezed in, the plot was actually pretty thin and not terribly coherent, and the resolution was a bit of a deus-ex-machina (although the nature of the deus had been fairly clearly signalled from early on). There was also rather a lot of infodumping, particularly of references back to the earlier books (which feels not only frustrating, but pointless given that it's the third in a trilogy and really doesn't stand on its own, so I wish Leckie had left that out and assumed that her readers would remember) but also on occasion of things that had only been mentioned a few chapters ago.
Cavilling aside, though, and taking the trilogy as a whole, it was an enjoyable read and the depiction of a society where biological gender is completely irrelevant, coupled with Leckie's very deliberate choice of the pronoun "she" for everyone, is well done and really interesting to think about. It deals with some of the same issues as Feet of Clay, especially around the nature of personhood and artifical intelligence, and if Leckie doesn't quite tackle this a deftly as Pterry, well, who could? And, while Ancillary Mercy is the weakest book by quite a long way, it's not bad. It just felt like it could have been better.
Cavilling aside, though, and taking the trilogy as a whole, it was an enjoyable read and the depiction of a society where biological gender is completely irrelevant, coupled with Leckie's very deliberate choice of the pronoun "she" for everyone, is well done and really interesting to think about. It deals with some of the same issues as Feet of Clay, especially around the nature of personhood and artifical intelligence, and if Leckie doesn't quite tackle this a deftly as Pterry, well, who could? And, while Ancillary Mercy is the weakest book by quite a long way, it's not bad. It just felt like it could have been better.
