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The third Ancillary book is a direct follow on to Ancillary Sword, picking up very shortly after the that one. The start re-introduces everything going on, which I needed.

However, while much more of a piece with the second book than it was with the first, plot-wise, we do have another change in direction. Ancillary Sword was much about a collision of cultures, and Ancillary Mercy is more about “When in the course of human events….”

This is also effectively circling back to the central points of Ancillary Justice. Much of human space is controlled by the Radch, which is headed by Anaander Mianaai. Multiple Anaanders, as they’re all clones of the original, and also act as provincial governors. And, for an unknown amount of time they’ve been in a violent argument with themself.

One of the results of this argument was a dead military ship, with one part of its AI surviving. A less homicidal part of Anaander put Breq (the surviving part) in charge of the system where the action of these last two books happen, but that background pops back to being important. Breq isn’t cheering for one part of Anaander to win over another, she’s wanting them all gone. Large powerful systems that survive a long time have an intellectual momentum that makes it hard to conceive of life without them. Leckie has done well enough here to give the reader some of the same surprise as the other characters when Breq reveals that her goal is to splinter off this system from control of any version of Anaander Mianaai.

Like the first book, events just go on for about half the book before this comes up. This isn’t to be any great crusade to ‘liberate’ Radch space; Breq’s concerns continue to center on the here-and-now. This also isn’t nearly the revelation that the discussion of personal identity in Ancillary Justice was, so this book holds a lot less weight. That said, it’s closer in spirit than Sword was to the first book, and also refuses to give pat answers to the questions it raises.