Ancillary Sword

by Ann Leckie

Info

Date Finished: 10/15/2026

First Sentence: 'Considering the circumstances, you could use another lieutenant.'

Last Sentence: Enough.

Companion Album:

New Cover

An off-white background is crossed by a faint dashed grid. Centered on it is a large orange ring split into four segments, with a downward-pointing orange triangle inside, every edge traced in brown dashes. The title cuts across the middle -- ANCILLARY in heavy, translucent gray-brown sans serif that overlaps the ring, with “SWORD” in dark brown serif beneath it. The author’s name and a line about her Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards sit in the bottom right, and the series note sits in the bottom left.

A Few Thoughts

Ann Leckie's premise for her Ancillary trilogy is a double-edged sword: "I need to find a gun to kill god." It's incredibly compelling, but if you read these books for a crazy over-the-top adventure, you'll be disappointed.

I think Leckie writes in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin, in particular some of the ideas Le Guin explores in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. The story is not about adventure, conquest, and violence. Rather, it's about communication and empathy (and violence).

Ancillary Sword takes the civil war, looming alien threat, and revenge story kicked off by the first book, Ancillary Justice, and sets them gently aside. Instead, we focus on one planet and its (at times mundane) local politics as an exploration of how imperial authoritarianism enacts daily violence on everyday people.

Ancillary Sword can be slow. At times I found myself wondering, "Why are we here? Why are we focusing on this? Why is this person important?" but it's worth sticking with it.

One aspect I want to think about more is how Leckie takes ideas established in Ancillary Justice and reverses them in Ancillary Sword. I won't go into detail here to avoid spoilers, but a new character goes through a process that's similar to, but different from, the one main character Breq went through in the first book. There are other parallels, and it gets more intricate the more I think about it.

By the end, you see how something as simple as a sip of tea requires a boot somewhere grinding people to dust. Ancillary Sword gives you a good hard look at this boot and, by the climax, rather elegantly ties it to the larger conflict set in motion by Ancillary Justice.

Ancillary Mercy

Cover Notes

Another series where the covers are so cool I almost feel bad trying to redesign them. For this one, I tried copying this design I found on are.na. I wanted to do more but Ancillary Mercy -- the next book -- might be where I expand on the idea.