Thanks also to my awesome editors, Tom Bouman and Jenni Hill, whose thoughtful comments helped make this book what it is. (Missteps, again, all mine.) And thanks to my fabulous agent, Seth Fishman.
Last—but not least, not at all—I could not have even begun to write this book without the love and support of my husband Dave and my children Aidan and Gawain.
extras
meet the author
MissionPhoto.org
ANN LECKIE has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, a lunch lady, and a recording engineer. The author of many published short stories, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband, children, and cats.
interview
Honored Breq, or One Esk, or Justice of Toren, is a unique character in that she has a human body, but artificial intelligence. What led you to this choice, and what were some of the challenges and opportunities it presented?
Breq on her own wasn’t nearly as challenging as Justice of Toren, or even just One Esk. Depicting what that must be like—to have not only a huge ship for a body, but also hundreds, sometimes thousands, of human bodies all seeing and hearing and doing things at once—the thought of that kept me from even starting for a long time. How do you show a reader that experience? I could try to depict the flood of sensation and action, but then the focus would be so diffuse that it would be difficult to see where the main thread was. On the other hand, I could narrow things down to only one segment of One Esk, shortchanging one of the things that really intrigued me about the character, and also making it seem as though it was more separate from the ship than it was.
But a character like Justice of Toren also sees a great deal, and so it can act as an essentially omniscient narrator—it knows its own officers intimately and can see their emotions. It can witness things happening in several places at once. So I could write in straight first person, while also taking advantage of that ability to see so much at one time whenever I needed that. It was a nifty short-circuit around one of the more obvious limits of a first-person narrator.
You have shown us elements of Radch culture in great detail, and reading Ancillary Justice, one gets the sense that you know far more about this civilization than appears in the novel. Can you tell us a little about what inspired the Radch?
I’m not sure I could say truthfully that any particular real-world example inspired the Radch. It was built piece by piece as time went by. That said, some of those pieces did come from the real world. I took a number of things from the Romans—though their theology isn’t particularly Roman, the Radchaai attitude toward religion is fairly similar, particularly the way the gods of conquered peoples can be integrated into an already-familiar pantheon. And the careful attention to omens and divination—though the Radchaai logic behind that is quite different.
The Romans have provided a lot of writers with a model for various interstellar empires, of course, and no wonder. The Roman Empire is a really good example of a large empire that, in one form or another, functioned for quite a long time over a very large area. And over that time, there was all sorts of exciting drama—civil wars and assassinations and revolts and bits breaking off and being forced back in, even a pretty big change in the form of government, from Republic to Principate. There’s tons of material there. And they loom large in European history. It wasn’t so long ago that any educated Westerner learned Greek and Latin as a matter of course, and read Virgil and Ovid and Cicero and Caesar and a host of other writers as part of that education.
But I didn’t want my future—however fanciful it was—to be entirely European. The Radchaai aren’t meant to be Romans in Space.
Though Ancillary Justice is your first novel, you have published a number of short stories. Do you have very different approaches to writing, according to length? What can you share about your writing process?
When I first started writing seriously, I found that I was naturally producing very long work, and writing shorter was very difficult. Some of that was just being a beginner, but some of it was a product of the way I write. I might start out with the bones of an idea—the next step will be figuring out the setting. Setting, for me, is very much a part of my characters, and to set those characters in motion without also giving those details that make those characters’ actions meaningful makes for thin work, at least when I do it.