The book series that brought space opera into the 21st century

Cover detail from the Ancillary novels. (credit: John Harris)

Ancillary Justice was published with little fanfare in 2013. Its author, Ann Leckie, had never published a novel before and was a relative unknown outside the world of science fiction book fandom. But then, word started to get around on the blogs—Ancillary Justice was something special, a galaxy-spanning epic with characters and conflicts that took a tired genre in mind-blowing new directions. The buzz reached a fever pitch when the book won both the Hugo and the Nebula for 2013, the two top US awards for science fiction.

Leckie followed up rapidly with two sequels, Ancillary Sword (October 2014) and the New York Times bestseller Ancillary Mercy (October 2015), which surprised readers by abandoning many conventions of trilogies. There is no giant spherical object in space that must be destroyed; there is no bad guy with a singular purpose; there's not even a good guy whose journey offers us an arc of transformation or redemption.

The series will no doubt be remembered as one of the most exciting and confounding developments in space opera of the past several decades. Without question, it has changed the way the science fiction book world thinks about space opera.

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