This book argues that Ann Leckie's novel
Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency.
Ancillary Justice's exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.
1.Introduction.- 2."She Was Probably Male" Gender and Embodiment.- 3. "Luxury Always Comes at Someone Else's Expense" The Economics of Empire.- 4."You Have to be Human to be Radchaai" Race, Citizenship, and Imperial Personhood.- 5."Save it for When it will Make a Difference" Cynical Reason, Agency, and the Politics of Revolution.- 6.Conclusion: Mercy, or the Sword?
David M. Higgins is a Senior Editor for the
Los Angeles Review of Books, and he is the Chair of the English Department at Inver Hills College in Minnesota, where he teaches classes on science fiction, graphic novels, American literature, and composition. He is the author of
Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, which won the 2021 Science Fiction Research Association Book Award.
"I am a huge fan of Leckie's IMPERIAL RADCH trilogy and I found Higgins's Companion an excellent read ... for its parallel introduction to critical postcolonial questions about the workings of empire in the twenty-first century." (Veronica Hollinger, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 50, 2023)
