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Ann Leckie’s "Ancillary Justice"

A Critical Companion

  • Book
  • © 2022

Overview

Authors:
  1. David M. Higgins

    1. Inver Hills Community College, Inver Grove Heights, USA

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  • Advances scholarship of one of the most significant works of literary science fiction from the early 21st century
  • Includes an interview with Ann Leckie
  • Addresses the novel’s engagement with gender studies, critical race studies, and American studies

Part of the book series: Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon (PSFFNC)

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • David M. Higgins
    Pages 1-12

  3. “She Was Probably Male”: Gender and Coloniality

    • David M. Higgins
    Pages 13-29

  4. “Luxury Always Comes at Someone Else’s Expense”: Empire, Economics, and Addiction

    • David M. Higgins
    Pages 31-47

  5. “You Are If I Say You Are”: Race, Citizenship, and Imperial Personhood

    • David M. Higgins
    Pages 49-64

  6. “Save It for When It’ll Make a Difference”: Cynical Reason and Revolutionary Agency

    • David M. Higgins
    Pages 65-80

  7. “Doing Something Is Always Better than Doing Nothing”: A Short Interview with Ann Leckie

    • David M. Higgins
    Pages 81-87

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 89-92
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Keywords

About this book

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.   

Reviews

“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)

"David Higgins' critical companion to Ancillary Justice deftly elucidates the political urgency and theoretical richness of Leckie's novel in prose that welcomes everyone to explore and learn with him. From racial capitalism and neo-imperialism to gender expression and revolutionary agency, Higgins writes with nuance and generosity to all potential readers about the real-world conditions that lie just under the surface of Leckie's far-future space opera. A big-hearted masterwork of accessible criticism, this is a book that you will want to share with students and colleagues alike." (Rebekah Sheldon, Associate Professor of English, Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (2016))


 



"Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy is a major work of recent science fiction, combining the old (space adventure) with the new (reflections on gender, race, and power). David Higgins gives us a masterful analysis of Ancillary Justice, the first novel in Leckie's trilogy, deftly tracing the book's major themes, together with its unusual use of language, and showing how the novel helps us think about the most urgent concerns of our present moment." (Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English. Wayne State University)


Authors and Affiliations

  • Inver Hills Community College, Inver Grove Heights, USA

    David M. Higgins

About the author

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.  

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