Introduction

Abstract

Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice (2013) was a sweeping success, winning the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and BSFA Award for Best Novel (among many other awards and high-profile nominations). Leckie, who attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in 2005 (where she studied under Octavia Butler), had grown up as a life-long science fiction fan since her childhood in St. Louis, Missouri.

Following a synopsis of Ancillary Justice, a short biography of Leckie, and a review of existing critical scholarship, this introduction argues 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. This book’s four main chapters each examine key themes central to the novel: gender, economic inequality, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice’s exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century.