Posts Tagged: Ann Leckie

Becoming Gandalf

“Petite, her silver hair shining, Le Guin shrugged and grinned when Neil Gaiman placed the medal around her neck,” described The New Yorker of Ursula K. Le Guin when she accepted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters presented by the National Book Awards on November 19, 2014. Le Guin might be petite in stature, perhaps, but her words in acceptance of the achievement were anything but small.

“Hard times are coming,” she said, her voice ringing out over an awed crowd. . “We’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”

Le Guin is a legendary figure in science fiction and fantasy, author of many classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Wizard of Earthsea, and a champion for literature’s place in the every changing landscape of modern society — a “realist of a larger reality” is there ever was one. Her acceptance speech rang through the SFF community and beyond, a tolling bell of optimism. Through her ongoing insistence to use fiction as a lens through which we examine ourselves, Le Guin, and writers like her — poets, visionaries, realists of a larger reality — has continued to challenge speculative fiction to be a catalyst for positive change, a limitless medium that can offer hope to a world that obsesses over hopelessness. Read More »

From Tiptree to Leckie to L’Engle and Cherryh, science fiction has a rich history of women writing progressive and popular fiction. One could argue that modern science fiction was vitalized by Shelley, and Ursula K. Le Guin has been an ambassador for fantastic and thoughtful fiction for decades. And, of course, now they’re the destroying it one novel at a time.

Recently, the /r/printSF sub-Reddit began a conversation about the best science fiction by women. I realized that I’ve read a woefully small number of the listed books, and this spurred some thought in my head about continuing this conversation, and using it as an opportunity to highlight some of the best science fiction books by women.

My own experiences within science fiction are fairly shallow (at least in terms of the scope of this project), so I asked some of my favourite authors and writers to tell me a bit about their favourites. So, join me, Julie Czerneda, Ann Leckie, Francis Knight, Andrew Liptak, Teresa Frohock, and Maureen Kincaid Speller as we gush about some of the best novels that science fiction has on offer. Read More »

2015 Hugo Nominations v 0.1
Best Novel

The flush of the 2014 Hugo Awards is fading, and, with the holidays just peeking around the corner, I wanted to take the time to discuss some of my favourite novels from 2014, the ones that, at this very moment, would comprise my nomination slate for the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Will it change by next spring when nominations are due? Undoubtedly.

These are all terrific novels, and, if you haven’t read them already, well, I envy you.

Best Novel

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Say hello to the best fantasy novel of 2014.

Even as I was startled by its twisted depth, I adored every moment I spent with City of Stairs. Colonialism lies at City of Stairs‘ centre, and RJB handles it with equal parts boldness and delicacy. The ruined beauty of Bulikov and its fallen gods haunted me long after I turned the final page.

Robert Jackson Bennett is best known for his contemporary fantasy and horror crossovers, such as American Elsewhere and The Troupe, so his move into more traditional epic fantasy put him on the radar of a lot of new readers, and the result is something special. On first reading City of Stairs, I described it to a friend as “China Mieville without the ego.” I’m not sure I still agree with that statement, because it’s unfair to saddle one writer with another’s baggage, but while reading City of Stairs I couldn’t fight the feeling that RJB was mixing and refining elements from some of my recent favourite fantasies. Other touchstones exists, such as Kameron Hurley’s The Mirror Empire and Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, that place RJB among the most exciting and vibrant young fantasy writers working today.

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Buy City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Buy Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie: Book/eBook

Ann Leckie, author of the much lauded, and many award winning, novel, Ancillary Justice, announced on her blog that her Imperial Radch series has been optioned for television by Fabrik and Fox Television Studios. “They have previously worked together on The Killing for four seasons on AMC and Netflix,” Leckie said, “and they started their relationship with Burn Notice.”

Leckie warns her fans not to get too far ahead of themselves, though, citing Hollywood’s glacial pacing and labyrinthine nature. “Ancillary Justice has been optioned for TV,” she said. “Now, ‘optioned’ doesn’t necessarily mean that anything is going to actually happen–things get optioned and then never made, quite frequently.’

With the production of a television adaptation of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series in full production, this is a great time to be a fan of televised science fiction. Though the question begs to be asked, where Corey’s work is straight forward science fiction with all the fixins for television, Leckie’s series is a whole different beast, and many of its strongest facets — such as its handling of gender, and its protagonist’s preternatural cognitive abilities granted to her as an ancillary — may prove difficult to adapt to a television script.

“Bringing [Ancillary Justice] to any sort of screen (not counting your eReader screen, of course!) would be… an interestingly difficult project,” Leckie admitted. “I made sure to have a conversation with the folks at Fabrik about my specific concerns–namely, the approach to gender, and the issue of whitewashing (as in, I do not want to see the book whitewashed, I would like to namedrop LeGuin and mention her Earthsea experience here, thank you). I was very pleased with their response.”

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Publisher: Orbit Books - Pages: 400 - Buy: Book/eBook
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie can dance.

When her debut novel, Ancillary Justice, released in 2014, nobody expected it to hit the science fiction community like a nuclear bomb. But it did. And Leckie was dancing the whole way through.

It was a firecracker of a novel — small and intense — but the unusual narrative structure and Leckie’s bold take on gender might have limited the audience to the most passionate and feminist-minded readers. Instead, the exact opposite happened: Ancillary Justice wasn’t a small snap, crackle, pop in a corner of fandom, it was a conflagration of love and adoration heard ’round the community.

Ancillary Justice won almost every major literary award for science fiction and fantasy in 2014, including the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel, and has sold over 30,000 copies to date, proving that not only is there a market for progressive, thoughtful space opera, there’s a thirst for it among readers. Ancillary Justice was a huge critical and commercial success, but with that success comes a lot of pressure for a sequel that lives up to its predecessor and satisfies its many fans. Writing under that sort of pressure can be the first stumbling point for many first time novelists, but Leckie never misses a beat. Read More »