Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

August 1st, 2022, Tottenham

Ok so I’ve let myself get behind on this by several weeks again & I’ve also let myself get behind on all of the life targets I have for myself other than exercising regularly & not spending any/much money which are both easy to do because I can do them without going very far & going far is what gives me panic attacks and depression, I’m at the point now where I haven’t left Tottenham except to go to Walthamstowe (which is further away from London so less London, I suppose?) for four days in a row and I’m feeling better or at least I’m convincing myself that I’m feeling better which is basically the same thing (right?) even tho I know it’s not Christ Christ Christ what am I dooooing with my life that just keeps on continuing onwards even tho I’ve lost pretty much all interest in it (I mean that’s not really true, I have all of these manuscripts in various stages of)-

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August 11th, 2022, Tottenham

Whoops, meant to finish this but I got distracted.

Not necessarily by anything in particular, just by being depressed and editing and submitting lots of my own writing.

Woo… the rejections are coming in fast!

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Ancillary Sword.

What was it about?

Do i even remember?

Right, it’s a sequel to a book I read about a year ago. Less than a year ago, I think, about an AI of a massive spaceship that had been implanted into a human host of thousands and then all but one of these human hosts (and the ship itself) were completely destroyed, leaving the AI effectively as one human. However, one human that has been alive for thousands of years and is still able to integrate digitally with far larger systems than the average people of their universe. Yes?

It’s about cloning, it’s about human rights, it’s about colonialism and it also has quite a lot about tea. I mean, I read this two fkn weeks ago. I don’t remember. I barely remember the book I was reading yesterday, I mean that isn’t true, but y’know it’s easier to type this nothingness than it is to think about the experience I had when I read the book before. Right?

Yeah, it’s fun.

I haven’t really read much “space opera“, in fact, I think this is probably the only space opera I’ve read other than Canopus in Argos: Archives, and I don’t think that those two are necessarily standard representatives of the genre (because they’re written by women?), but I have enjoyed them both. And I will probably read the rest of Ann Leckie’s trilogy at some point.

Ancillary Sword… It is what it is. It’s fun. Yeah. It isn’t mind blowing or life changing or important in any way at all, it’s a solid genre text that doesn’t really eclipse the constraints of its genre. This one is also much less structurally inventive than Ann Leckie’s earlier novel.

Bye.