Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice: A Critical Companion by David M. Higgins (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice: A Critical Companion by David M. Higgins Veronica Hollinger Excellent Short-form Scholarship. David M. Higgins. Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice: A Critical Companion. Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, 2023. vii+92 pp. $44.99 hc, $34.99 ebk. [End Page 486] Palgrave’s “A New Canon” is one of a growing number of very good scholarly series devoted to short critical studies. Examples include University of Minnesota Press’s “Forerunners” (e.g., Steven Shaviro’s No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism [2015]), the Association for Asian Studies’ “Asia Shorts” (e.g., Jing Jiang’s Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction [2021]), and MIT’s “Essential Knowledge” series (e.g., Sherryl Vint’s Science Fiction [2021]). Think of them as the novellas of critical scholarship. David Higgins’s “critical companion” to the first novel of Anne Leckie’s immensely popular Imperial Radch trilogy is the latest in Palgrave’s “New Canon” series. In the words of series editors Keren Omry and Sean Guynes, it “aims to offer ‘go-to’ books for thinking about, writing on, and teaching major works of SFF” (viii). In spite of its title, however, the diversity of offerings so far would seem to discourage conventional canon-building. It is difficult to cram (among others titles) Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), BioWare’s media franchise Mass Effect (2007–), Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (1984), Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist album project Dirty Computer (2018), and Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993) into a single “type” of sf/f worthy of canonization. On the other hand, it is difficult to ignore the series’ subtitle: if nothing else and in very different ways, each of these can lay claim to being a “major work.” As the only novel ever to win the trifecta of major sf awards—the Arthur C. Clarke, the Hugo, and the Nebula—Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013) is both very well known and well worth the extended focus of Higgins’s Companion. Equally, this Companion more than does justice to Leckie’s novel. The title of one section in Higgins’s introduction, “The Problem of Empire,” is at the core of this astute and entertaining reading; it also extends the post-colonial work of his award-winning Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood (2021). Each of the chapters following the introduction circles back to this “problem”: chapter 2 on “Gender and Coloniality,” chapter 3 on “Empire, Economics, and Addiction,” chapter 4 on “Race, Citizenship, and Imperial Personhood,” and chapter 5 on “Cynical Reason and Revolutionary Agency.” Higgins’s “central argument . . . is that Ancillary Justice offers a multitude of critical interventions that culminate in a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism during the post-9/11 era and beyond” (10). For this reason, his Companion emphasizes the novel’s allegorical features, as both an estranged mirror and a critical reassessment of the historical and contemporary conditions of US imperialism. Higgins opens by examining the novel’s “speculative defamiliarization of gender” (13), focusing on Leckie’s contentious use of “she” and “her” as universal pronouns in the Radch Empire. Higgins notes how this one small change serves to unlink sexed bodies from the performances of gender, recalling Judith Butler’s analysis in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). As he explains, “Radchaai enjoy a profound [End Page 487] freedom from the endless restrictive categorizations that gender creates in countless real-world contexts” (21). At the same time, however, he emphasizes the imperial arrogance behind the Radch empire’s failure to recognize the importance of gender differences in so many of the other cultures that they have so violently absorbed. Higgins shows how even Breq, the novel’s first-person point-of-view protagonist, “can get away with misgendering people” because she is a representative of empire (25). In this discussion of “the coloniality of gender” (26), he concludes that “even though...