Reviews and Comments

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.

This is the final book in the Lady Astronaut series, with Elma York landing on Mars to help establish a base. This book has the mix of space stuff, politics, relationships, and technical trouble that you would expect from the rest of series, but fundamentally, this book is about Elma learning to be a leader and it's a good capstone on her emotional and professional journey.

Unfortunately, most of the action in this book takes place off page. Early on Elma realizes people are covering something up, but that event has already happened. There's some feint that maybe more problems from Earth First terrorists could happen, but this does not materialize. And sure, there are some real consequences from the coverup, but the majority of them also happen off page. It is not as if I am reading the Lady Astronaut series for action and adventure, but it's hard not to feel like there's a more engaging story being told next door. (To that end, I wonder if this book would have been better told from Leonard's perspective.)

One thing I do really appreciate about this book is seeing Elma and Nathaniel's relationship continuing to grow. For me, Mary Robinette Kowal's writing excels at telling a story with believably married characters who each have their own foibles and needs, and I feel like that's the case both here and in her Glamourist Histories series. It's nice to see the two of them care about each other, but also argue and disagree and be understandably frustrated with each other in a way that I don't see many books engage with.

This cozy starship mystery novella was billed to me as "Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple" and, sorry book, but I'm going to go with no on both counts. It has vibes of all of these things, but no depth to the mystery, characters, or worldbuilding.

The worldbuilding is a bit wild. I appreciate (but also laugh at) the way that the starship quite explicitly has no cops, only detectives with investigative power as a way to get around cop-centric detective fiction. The book also has UBI, which is a weird concept to extend forward in time to an intergenerational starship that has mind upload. It's all just a little too light that it doesn't hang together.

Ultimately, the mystery is too easily unraveled by the protagonist, but the details are not something the reader could have known about ahead of time. Largely, this feels like it comes from the complication of telling a light science fiction story in the space of a novella, and needing to explain the parameters of the world to the audience (as well as that of the mystery) in that small space.

Tangential musings: * is it a requirement of a cozy mystery to include knitting, even if it's on a spaceship? * furthermore, where does fiber for a knitting shop come from on an interstellar generational starship? * surely other people see the horror in "oh well my previous body died I'll just download into another body with a copy of my memories"? * how do you simultaneously have a world with (faulty) memory-based replicators (hope you remember all the zipper, pleat, and hem details for your clothing!) but also (somehow trustworthy) mind backup of your memories?

The Tomb of Dragons is the third book in the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy. The first book in this series felt like a straight mystery in a fantasy setting, but by the time we get to this third book, the mystery portion gets balanced out by more politics and interpersonal growth and the story is stronger for it. I appreciate the way a number of plot points and characters from the previous books (including Goblin Emperor) all get woven into this story. The plot is just messy enough in a way that's believable, but tight in a way that makes events (especially of the first book) feel even more relevant. I loved it enough that I finished it and immediately reread Goblin Emperor because I wanted to be in the world a little bit more and revisit Thara back at the beginning.

In the previous book, Thara has lost his ability to speak with the dead, and this book is partially about him dealing with understanding who he might be when he is unable to do the work that he has been called to for years. But, it's also about witnessing for a dragon genocide against an overwhelmingly powerful mining corporation, and about Thara learning to accept being cared for. It's got a lot going on.

One thing I always forget about these books are how name dense they are. Everybody has fantasy titles and surnames and personal names and get referred to in multiple different ways. It makes the world feel much more real, but foof does it create some friction to get back into it after a while away. Sometimes it also breaks out fantasy words like "revethvezvaishor’avar" which I can only assume is meant to be half joking, but it can feel like a lot.

If I have any real quibble with the book, it's that the legal climax of this book is a little underwhelming; however, the personal and emotional elements land perfectly for me. (The multiple hand holding scenes!!!)

On this note, the conversation with Iäna midway through the book is absolutely incredible. This moment has been building the entire trilogy, between Iäna's escalating kindness to Thara and Thara's inability to accept care for himself. It gets to be too much for Thara, where he just can't understand why Iäna is being so nice, and it turns into an incredible conversation hashing out what they mean to each other, the nature of friendships, and love. Honestly, Iäna is such an incredible role model.

This book reminds me a lot of the second book in Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy. Both are set out in the hinterlands, with a different focus and locale than the first book, but crucially both are there to establish the thematic question for the series. Here, that question is around the human nature of kings and emperors, and the complicated human desire for them.

Unsurprisingly, this series continues to be solidly in the mystery genre despite being blended with kaiju fantasy worldbuilding. It opens with a locked room murder mystery (and a missing body), has a brilliant Moriarity-adjacent mastermind, and ends with a dramatic reveal. This was true in the first book as well, but I quite appreciate how the details and clues are meticulously laid out for the reader to spot; even when there is a "our investigator must go into a fugue state to find answers" moment, her revelations are all something the reader could have intuited themselves.

One friend who has been reading this series (and crucially has not read any mystery books) has been disappointed at the "small-ness" of the plot threads, where the climax is a mystery rather than a fantasy escalation, and the terror of the leviathans only looms in the distance. These books certainly do not have the escalation of ideas from his previous series The Founders Trilogy. However, following the Divine Cities example above, my prediction is that the final book is going to satisfyingly tie together the themes from the first two books while answering our questions about the nature of the leviathans and the silent Khanum emperor.

Overall, I love this novel's ideas but the genres it mixes together work against each other rather than being stronger for the combination.

(also please name your protagonist, it's so awkward, thank you)

I found the writing here to be surprisingly funny and engaging. The dialogue between the protagonist and Graham continually made me laugh, and the book is peppered with delightful drive-by analogies like "he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font" or "I lay in my own body like a wretched sandbank".

The strongest part of the book to me (and the part that I found the most engaging) was the relationship and dialogue between the protagonist and Graham. A 19th century sailor is a great foil for modern London life; however, it also does a good job of making both the protagonist and Graham real, fallible characters who each make incorrect assumptions about the other. One other way this relationship also works for me is that it lets the book delve into the parallels of being an expat forced into a new time versus a new place work really well, or of not being be able to go "back".

However, the construction seams of this novel show, and that's where it gets weak. The more "serious" time travel and time war shenanigans feel tacked on, and thematically don't really integrate with the rest of the story (tonally or thematically). As a time travel story, it's not doing anything particularly novel here, and these bits weaken the rest of the novel.

(This was the #SFFBookClub book for May 2025.)