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.

From the Golden Age to the Tarnished Age

Space operas rocketed to popularity during the Golden Age of science fiction in the mid-twentieth century, often serving as thinly-veiled allegories for the Cold War or swashbuckling fantasies about the "fun" side of colonialism. With a few notable exceptions, these stories stuck to the "have ray gun will travel" formulas of Robert A. Heinlein's juveniles, where conflicts have clear solutions and space is an endless frontier that's ours for the taking.

Today, these formulas don't just feel stale—they actually ring false. Partly that's because we've discovered that space travel is going to be a lot harder than we realized, scientifically and psychologically. But it's also because Earth politics have changed. It's almost impossible to buy into the idea of a singular "bad guy" or "good guy" with one, coherent agenda nowadays. Put another way, geopolitics have become so messy and complicated that our fantasies of astropolitics had to get more complicated too.

Even the most escapist of stories don't work unless they have a germ of reality at their cores. Our heroes have been tarnished, and our world-hopping adventures have too. But that doesn't mean they can't be fun.

Welcome to the Radch Empire

That's why the Ancillary series took the science fiction book world by storm. Its hero, Breq, is the last remaining avatar of a sentient AI spaceship named Justice of Toren. The Radch Empire has built the Justice's crew out of thousands of slaves and prisoners of war, using high-tech implants to convert them into a vast hive mind. These mind-wiped ship slaves are called ancillaries, and they are a vital part of the labor force in the Radch Empire, which is itself ruled by a hive mind called Anaander Mianaai that has secretly gone to war with herself.

Breq, who remembers nothing of her pre-ancillary life, wants revenge on Mianaai for destroying her ship. But of course she was also in a very real sense the ship's zombie slave. Yes, this shit is deliciously, weirdly complicated—especially when you get into Mianaai's motivations. The Radch ruler is made up of hundreds of ancillary-like people whose conflicting loyalties lead some of them to attempt alliances with Breq and others to try to murder her. Basically, she's a schizophrenic hive mind.

In Ancillary Justice, there are no special chosen ones with great destinies. There are no grand battles that decide the fate of the whole galaxy. There are only compromised, broken people trying to find a shred of justice in a world of corrupt regimes and local skirmishes.

The backdrop to this revenge quest is the larger drama of the Radch Empire that Mianaai expands through ruthless colonial conquest. New worlds are brought into the fold through military conquest, and if the locals don't like it, they are slaughtered or turned into ancillaries.

Previous generations of space opera writers might have taken this scenario and turned it into a drama of interstellar exploration, full of the joys of discovery. But Leckie gives us a suspense thriller about crimes that occur during the horror of colonial occupation. Planetary civilizations already riven by ethnic conflicts are given weapons that turn feuds into massacres. Despots willing to work with the Radch forces are offered incentives to keep impoverished groups even more impoverished so they can have lots of cheap labor to supply for their new overlords. Meanwhile, the AIs who run every piece of space infrastructure are treated like glorified versions of Siri, even though they have aspirations of their own.

This isn't the kind of situation where you can just kill the bad guy, nor zoom triumphantly to an oppressed planet to liberate the underdogs. Every solution has difficult consequences.

From an alien perspective

As noted before, Ancillary Justice is structured like a suspense thriller. Breq wants revenge, and the pleasure for us as readers is solving the mystery of how her ship was destroyed and what was Mianaai's role in it. With her array of tech implants, Breq is an ultra-strong, ultra-fast action hero who doesn't care who she has to kill to destroy her target. But Breq is also an alien, one from a civilization whose rules are very different from ours.

In classic space opera, the hero is usually someone from a more or less human background who guides us on an exploration of weird alien worlds. But Leckie never allows us to have this kind of comforting, human-centric perspective. We see everything from Breq's Radchaai viewpoint. The Radch Empire has no gendered pronouns, and therefore everyone in all the novels is disorientingly referred to as "she," regardless of how manly they seem. When Breq goes to planets that have more than one gender, Breq is always calling people by the wrong gender because the whole concept is utterly alien to her.

By the time we reach the second novel in the series, Ancillary Sword, Leckie has made the scenario even more alien. You might expect an action hero like Breq to slash and shoot her way to Mianaai's palatial lair. Instead, Ancillary Sword takes us on a long diversion to a space station next to an area that was recently-decolonized. To get revenge, Breq has figured out a way to become...a space bureaucrat. Wait, what? After all the breakneck action of Ancillary Justice, we're now going to sit in meetings all day and talk about space station politics?

Yes, and that's because Breq doesn't think like a human. She's playing a long game, and she doesn't expect a climactic outcome. The series takes a sudden turn from Battlestar Galactica-style action to Deep Space Nine-style strategizing.

Breq discovers that the poorest people on the station are being pushed to return to the planet, where their only option will be to work on giant tea plantations to supply the Radch Empire with their beverage of choice. And yet the planet's ruling class is itself in thrall to the Radch. Loyalties are divided; some of the oppressors are actually kind of nice and some of the oppressed are shitballs. No matter what Breq does, somebody will be screwed who doesn't deserve it.