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It's always hard for me to separate what happens in Ancillary Sword and what happens in its sequel. Both books are set on the same station, deal with the same themes, and this book would feel incomplete without its sequel.

“I know that Ship appreciates it when you act for it, and your ancillary façade lets you feel safe and invisible. But being an ancillary isn’t something to play at.”

“No, sir. I can see that, sir. But like you said, Ship appreciates it. And Ship takes care of us, sir. Sometimes it feels like it’s us and Ship against everyone else.” Self-conscious. Embarrassed.

It's funny to me to turn to military scifi for feelings of found family, but what endears me to this book is the relationships between Ship and Breq and its crew. The human crew acts like ancillaries, which previously was a way of dealing with a jerk captain but also is a way for the Ship to cope with no longer having ancillaries itself. Ship helps Breq deal with her own losses by sending her images and data from the ship and crew as if she were still one of many ancillaries herself.

Really, I love the way that the omniscient nature of Ship here allows the reader to see into the hidden emotional state of characters and to show moments that are "off camera" from the main narrative.

It's comfort reread season over here. This book has enough reviews and awards it doesn't need another general review from me on the pile, so mostly I'm wondering about what makes this book a comfort reread for me (and many others)?

Partially it's that thematically it hits really strong notes. It's a story about justice, and revenge against an empire. It's about not trusting empires, no matter who is running them at the time. But it's also about second chances, leaning on friends, finding new ways of being, and the value of small actions even when you can't solve everything.

And even if the tyrant’s protestations were insincere, which they ultimately had to be, no matter her intentions at this moment, still she was right. My actions would make some sort of difference, even if small.

The first time I read this book about revenge on an empire at war with itself, my expectations were that the next book would be some sort of escalation, but instead it went much smaller. In retrospect, I'm not sure the worldbuilding and the stakes could have been escalated without it becoming a heroic arc for Breq (or somebody else) defeating an empire and saving the universe. It just isn't that kind of story.

Instead, this book feels much more about the value of small and local actions. The mutiny at Ime is a news story in the background, but it carries so much thematic (and worldbuilding) weight and feels like part of a through line for the trilogy. In a world where I continually despair of my lack of leverage to make the world better, this message about doing what I can where I can is one I continually need to hear.

Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choosing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn’t need to do that here. I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was home.

I am always a sucker for a story with some gender in it, so I know this is part of why I come back to this book. I love the humor about Breq not understanding other culture's gender and getting it wrong. The quote above resonates for me in the trans sense of being in a space where you can drop the mental worry about people misgendering you; it's a reversed feeling of observer vs observee from the quote, but the mental relief at removing the mental gender work feels tangibly similar.

The first time I read this book, I could tell that my brain had to defend itself against bringing in extra gendered baggage for the she pronoun. I don't know if it's because this is a reread or if I've been tested by the much more gender adversarial Too Like the Lightning, but this time around my internal observation was that I didn't feel like I parsed "she" any differently than "they".

When times are tough, sometimes you need a comfort reread of fantasy books from 1990. This book still resonates well for me, but it's hard for me to know how much of that is nostalgia having read it so many times. I suspect I am biased for this one and for GGK in general.

Tonally, this book can sometimes feel overwrought and full of told-not-shown sentimentality. That said, it's also a book about grief and memory and tyrants, and I think its style is not out of place for what it's trying to achieve. There's a few lines that jar me as a reader thirty years later, but on the whole I think it stands up better than I would have expected.

I quite enjoy its fantasy politics and scheming, but I also really appreciate the fact that the clash between Alessan and Brandin is specifically about two very similar proud leaders who are too stubborn and unwilling to forgive sins from the past. They each have plenty reason to hate the other and not give up their fight, and it makes them both believable and imperfect characters in their own way. I like that this is not a book about military battles but rather an angry, grief-filled sorcerer who erases memories of the country that killed his son so it can't be spoken of again.

I still never know what to think about Dianora. I do think she makes for a very interesting character in terms of her inner conflict and the way her perspective humanizes one of the potential villains of the tale; on the other hand, she's the only significant woman point of view character, and she has incredibly limited agency. The end result is that her character arc is not particularly satisfying to me and I wish she had a better goal that her actions were aiming towards. I also think Caterina might have been a better point of view character than Devin.

This plot-driven scifi book about the power of memory felt better suited to be a beach thriller or a movie (which apparently it might be). Largely, the character arcs feel flat and other a neat core idea, I'm not sure that the plot machinations hold up that well for me.

Some minor negatives: the time loop-esque conceit of future selves saving past selves, which always falls flat. It's also hard for me to suspend my disbelief about the idea of perfect memory, when it is always intermediated and misremembered. I also give a huge side-eye to this British author using Australian Aboriginals and their mythos as context for some plot elements.

On the positive front, for a story about memory, I appreciate that it is structured as a frame story where one person forces somebody else to recount their own memory of events, in which the story can nest further into other memories. I also appreciate the foreshadowing of the pick up artist who asks enough people out through persistence until somebody says yes. There's also a few good SCP-esque lines in the Lazarus Institute that made me laugh. But all of this was not enough to carry it for me.

This sf novella centers on Damira, a conservationist who fought back (sometimes violently) against poachers, and whose mind was put into a mammoth's to help them relearn old behaviors and live again in the wild. It's a story about human greed, vengeance, memories, and identity.

I really enjoyed the writing here, but the more I reflected on this story after reading it, the more hollow it felt. It's hard not to cheer along with the book against different types of human greed, and the storytelling was enjoyable; at the end, I don't know that I came away with much more than that.

It's also unfair to critique a book by juxtaposing it with another, but I'm going to do it anyway. Having already read Lee Mandelo's Feed Them Silence it's impossible not to feel like that book tremendously overshadows this one, especially thematically. I think I would have enjoyed Tusks of Extinction more had I read them in the opposite order.