Review: Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
Reviews / October 12, 2015

Amazing, if you think about it, how quickly the new and strange can be adjusted to. Ancillary Justice came out and took the genre by storm; I personally called it a glorious mindfuck for the way it played around with language and perception. This was a book that was lauded for many things: a great story, a unique take on immortality, and the ancillaries of a single mind in constant communication. Yet the conversation quickly narrowed in on one aspect of Leckie’s writing; the universal use of feminine pronouns. It was something of a shame too. Because while the game of trying to guess which characters were male and which were female before realizing how little it actually matters was a great experience it wasn’t the entirety of the book. But detractors quickly classified the book as a gimmick, fans often found themselves on their heels defending this specific aspect of the book, and amusingly certain groups with political agendas decided the book was everything wrong with speculative fiction when they fixated on ‘the gender thing.’ Ultimately the series got what it deserved; winning awards all over the place. And now here we sit with the trilogies conclusion. All of…