The thing is, though, that Butler’s Oankali have their own selfish motivations-and also don’t exactly have the readers sympathies. There’s an instructive parallel here with the Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, in which creepy tentacled alien things descend from the sky after earth has destroyed itself to heal the humans and show them the path to happiness, great sex, and the acceptance of difference. “How can you be civilized if there is no uncivilized?” She’s reprimanding the Radchaai for their imperial ways…but she could be talking about the structure of the book itself, in which a plentful of foils are presented as less civilized so that Breq can show them the way. “Everything necessitates its opposite,” Breq says. With this kind of panoramic view, Breq and the voice of the novel become almost simultaneous Breq might as well be the author, which means that the book feels like Leckie setting up the other characters as problems to be solved by Breq. ![]() Part of the problem is that, as ship’s captain, Breq has access to instantaneous information from her ship which allows her to function as a semi-omniscient narrator she knows what other characters are doing, and, often even what they are thinking and feeling. She orders repairs to the ghettoes, sparks wage negotiations on the plantations, and forces the recalcitrant citizens to confront their unjust preconceptions every one. With vast political and personal abilities and an infallible sense of morality, Breq swoops in to show the locals the error of their ways. Dispatched as a powerful commander to Atoehk Station in the wake of a chaotic breakdown of the empire, where Breq encounters fairly transparent analogues of earth prejudice, ghettoes, and slave plantations. In the second book, Ancillary Sword, especially, Breq’s unique qualifications and sympathies become a literal social justice deus ex machina. She (most people in the novel default to the pronoun “she”), as a former ship’s ancillary, is incredibly physically adept, ancient and knowledgeable, and, as a former slave-body, uniquely attuned to the trials of the marginalized and oppressed. Breq in fact functions as a kind of superhero. In fact, though, Breq’s personal pain becomes a kind of guarantor of a broader, more thoroughgoing justice. That sorrow never goes away, nor really gets revenged (at least not after the first two volumes) which is why some folks might not immediately see the books as particularly happy. The ship is then dismantled, and one escaped ancillary body, now calling itself Breq, fless across the universe, consumed with sorrow. The central event of the books is when the main character-a spaceship, with connected ancillary human bodies-is forced to kill its captain, the love of its life. Some might be taken aback at the idea that the Ancillary series is cheerful. Leckie has plenty of smarts, and she writes well, but she’s just too…cheerful. I can’t really recommend this as highly as LeGuin/Butler/Russ, though, nor with the enthusiasm I have for more contemporary writers like N.K. tradition of feminist sci-fi, and Leckie does too, so that makes me happy. It’s great fun page turning space opera adventure with twisty plots and thoughtful meditations on justice, identity and gender along the way. I think that's hopeful.I’m currently whipping through Ann Lecki’s Ancillary series. ![]() ![]() But we can tackle this with just a couple of minutes per day. “If it turned out that the changes we want to make required huge allocations of time to activities we're not doing now, then it would be impossible. “We have to switch off fossil-fuel energy and construct more renewables,” says study co-author Eric Galbraith of McGill University. Ultimately the study found that relatively little time-about five minutes per average human day-goes to activities that directly alter the environment and climate change, such as extracting energy and dealing with waste, suggesting an opportunity to put in more time to help the planet. Activities such as agriculture took up much more time in poorer countries than in wealthier ones, whereas others such as human transportation were fairly constant everywhere. Scientists recently compiled the available data about how people around the world allocate their time and used them to define the average “global human day.” More than a third of our hours are spent in bed, they found, with the rest split among three categories the researchers devised based on whether the time directly affected humans, the physical world, or where and what people are doing. Every human on Earth has the same 24 hours to spend in a day-but the way we divide those hours for work and sleep and school and play varies a lot.
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