Abstract
Leckie started building the Ancillary Justice universe during a cultural moment powerfully shaped by the September 11, 2001 attacks and the United States’ subsequent global militarization for the so-called War on Terror. As a result, the novel (in its final form) offers an extended meditation upon the politics, immigration policies, and economics of early twenty-first-century imperialism: the Imperial Radch (like the United States) occupies and influences foreign territories for profit, and it depends on continuous imperial expansion as well as the creation of inequality through territorial border regulations in order to sustain its economic luxuries.
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Notes
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For more on the United States and energy imperialism, see Alberta Acosta’s “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse,” in Beyond Development: Alternate Visions from Latin America. Ed. M. Lang and D. Mokrani, Transnational Institute and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2013. Pp. 61–86. Additionally, see Justin Parks’ “The Poetics of Extractivism and the Politics of Visibility,” Textual Practice, Vol. 35, Issue 3, 2021. Pp. 353-–362.
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Higgins, D.M. (2022). “Luxury Always Comes at Someone Else’s Expense”: Empire, Economics, and Addiction. In: Ann Leckie’s "Ancillary Justice" . Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18261-7_3
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