Review of Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

Ancillary Mercy is the third and final novel in Ann Leckie’s award-winning Imperial Radch series. The books are about the adventures of Breq an Ancillary who was connected to a ship that was destroyed. An Ancillary is a human who has been turned into an AI and has their consciousness connected to a ship. They can access its data and see and hear what all other ancillaries are experiencing. They will do whatever the ship’s captain commands them to do.

The third novel starts where the second novel finished. Breq is still the nominated fleet commander of the Athoek system and is located on its space station. She is trying to fix the station’s under-garden area, which was damaged in the previous novel, as well as fix the station’s complex politics. She has to deal with the agendas of an uncooperative system governor and power-hungry religious leader.

Her attempts at fixing the station are interrupted when an envoy from the all-conquering Presger arrives to survey humans and to see whether they have broken the “treaty” between the two races. The envoy’s arrival is then complicated by unknown warships appearing in the system.

This novel is about Breq’s attempt to create a more merciful local system where even AIs, like the Ancillaries that run the ships and the station, get to decide their own fates. She wants them to have the choices that she now has as an ancillary severed from her destroyed ship. She also wants the indigenous population of Athoek to control their future.

One of the most intriguing features of the novels is that Breq cannot differentiate between female and male, so she refers to every character as “she”, which creates a viewpoint character who does not bring gender into the power dynamics between the characters she deals with. Leckie leaves it to the reader to add genders to characters if they want to.

I very much enjoyed this novel as it attempted to bring the series to a conclusion, but there were still plenty of loose ends for a fourth novel to explore. It’s probably not as good as the first two novels, as the first was huge on world-building, and the second was more about Breq attempting to redefine herself, but still it is an excellent read.