Ann Leckie’s "Ancillary Justice‪"‬

"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)

"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.

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.   

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.