Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice

Its a commonplace to say that writing is a solitary art, and its true that the actual act of putting words down is something a writer has to do herself. Still, so much happens before those words are put down, and then after, when youre trying to put your work into the best form you can possibly manage.

I would not be the writer I am without the benefit of the Clarion West workshop and my classmates there. And Ive benefited from the generous and perceptive assistance of many friends: Charlie Allery, S. Hutson Blount, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Anna Schwind, Kurt Schwind, Mike Swirsky, Rachel Swirsky, Dave Thompson, and Sarah Vickers all gave me a great deal of help and encouragement, and this book would have been the lesser without them. (Any missteps, however, are entirely my own.)

I would also like to thank Puddnhead Books in St. Louis, the Webster University Library, St. Louis County Library, and the Municipal Library Consortium of St. Louis County. Libraries are a tremendous and valuable resource, and Im not sure its possible to have too many of them.

Thanks also to my awesome editors, Tom Bouman and Jenni Hill, whose thoughtful comments helped make this book what it is. (Missteps, again, all mine.) And thanks to my fabulous agent, Seth Fishman.

Lastbut not least, not at allI could not have even begun to write this book without the love and support of my husband Dave and my children Aidan and Gawain.

A NN L ECKIE has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, a lunch lady, and a recording engineer. The author of many published short stories, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband, children, and cats.

Honored Breq, or One Esk, orJustice of Toren, is a unique character in that she has a human body, but artificial intelligence. What led you to this choice, and what were some of the challenges and opportunities it presented?

Breq on her own wasnt nearly as challenging as Justice of Toren, or even just One Esk. Depicting what that must be liketo have not only a huge ship for a body, but also hundreds, sometimes thousands, of human bodies all seeing and hearing and doing things at oncethe thought of that kept me from even starting for a long time. How do you show a reader that experience? I could try to depict the flood of sensation and action, but then the focus would be so diffuse that it would be difficult to see where the main thread was. On the other hand, I could narrow things down to only one segment of One Esk, shortchanging one of the things that really intrigued me about the character, and also making it seem as though it was more separate from the ship than it was.

But a character like Justice of Toren also sees a great deal, and so it can act as an essentially omniscient narratorit knows its own officers intimately and can see their emotions. It can witness things happening in several places at once. So I could write in straight first person, while also taking advantage of that ability to see so much at one time whenever I needed that. It was a nifty short-circuit around one of the more obvious limits of a first-person narrator.

You have shown us elements of Radch culture in great detail, and readingAncillary Justice, one gets the sense that you know far more about this civilization than appears in the novel. Can you tell us a little about what inspired the Radch?

Im not sure I could say truthfully that any particular real-world example inspired the Radch. It was built piece by piece as time went by. That said, some of those pieces did come from the real world. I took a number of things from the Romansthough their theology isnt particularly Roman, the Radchaai attitude toward religion is fairly similar, particularly the way the gods of conquered peoples can be integrated into an already-familiar pantheon. And the careful attention to omens and divinationthough the Radchaai logic behind that is quite different.

The Romans have provided a lot of writers with a model for various interstellar empires, of course, and no wonder. The Roman Empire is a really good example of a large empire that, in one form or another, functioned for quite a long time over a very large area. And over that time, there was all sorts of exciting dramacivil wars and assassinations and revolts and bits breaking off and being forced back in, even a pretty big change in the form of government, from Republic to Principate. Theres tons of material there. And they loom large in European history. It wasnt so long ago that any educated Westerner learned Greek and Latin as a matter of course, and read Virgil and Ovid and Cicero and Caesar and a host of other writers as part of that education.

But I didnt want my futurehowever fanciful it wasto be entirely European. The Radchaai arent meant to be Romans in Space.

ThoughAncillary Justiceis your first novel, you have published a number of short stories. Do you have very different approaches to writing, according to length? What can you share about your writing process?

When I first started writing seriously, I found that I was naturally producing very long work, and writing shorter was very difficult. Some of that was just being a beginner, but some of it was a product of the way I write. I might start out with the bones of an ideathe next step will be figuring out the setting. Setting, for me, is very much a part of my characters, and to set those characters in motion without also giving those details that make those characters actions meaningful makes for thin work, at least when I do it.

People are who they are because of the world they live in, and the world is the way it is because of the people who live in it. If youre writing something set in the real world fairly close to our present time you can evoke setting and historical context with a few words. But I tend to write secondary-world fantasy, or far-future space opera, and evoking the history and culture of those worlds can be a bit complicated. It takes a bit of elbow room, or else incredibly efficient exposition.

I personally like working with a big frame, I like the feeling that the world extends well past the edges of the story, and odd, neat little details are one of the ways you do that.

But in a short story, theres very little room to work. Often new writers are advised to make sure every scene in a story is doing at least two things, but Ive found that when I write short, two is too few. Every scene has to be doing as much work as it possibly can, and each sentence has to have a justification. If I can cut it, and the story remains comprehensible, then it pretty much has to go. Even if its doing two or three things.

And then, of course, some ideas are suited to large-scale handling, and some wouldnt make more than a thousand words of story even if you jammed as much extra stuff in as you could. So I found that if I wanted to write short fiction, I needed to learn either to pull out a fragment of a big idea, or else compress something sweeping into a smaller space.

Your main character is known for her encyclopedic knowledge of song, and for her enthusiasm for singing. Is this an enthusiasm you share, and if so, were there any pieces of music you found particularly inspiring when writing this novel?

I love singing! I especially love singing with other peoplechoral singing is a blast. I think its a shame that so many people I meet have such an ambivalent, fraught relationship with singing. Its such a personal kind of music, one nearly anyone can make, but theres often a feeling that only certain people are allowed to do it. Ive met way more people who claim they cant sing than actually cant. And Ive met lots of people who actively discourage anyone around them from singing. Why is that? I wish people felt freer to sing, and freer to enjoy people around them singing.