Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy (called Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, also known as the Ancillary Series) won a wheelbarrow full of awards. Since then she has come back to her Imperial Radch universe a couple of times with stand alone novels that build out from the events of the original series. Provenance and Translation State were both great novels in their own right, deepened by their connection to a broader universe. In the same vein is her latest novel Radiant Star, set solely on a small, isolated planet that has been colonised by the Radch and starts to be impacted by the ripple effect of the Radch civil war.
The city of Ooioiaa is the location of the Temporal Location of the Radiant Star. Ooioiaa is an underground city, the only one on a freezing planet that tumbles through the universe. The culture of the Ooioiaan population is based around a religion associated with the Radiant Star (although there are competing sects that vie for supremacy). After a brief opening that sets up some of the religious and gender politics of the planet, Leckie notes that the Radch arrive and then jumps the action forward thirty years into Imperial Radch rule. Leckie then delivers a complex, interweaving tale around a range of characters as the city starts to collapse due to the tyranny of small, uninformed Radch decisions and the fact that the planet is cut off from interstellar commerce by events taking place in other parts of the Empire.
Leckie takes time to build her scenario in Radiant Star, including the stakes and position of each of the characters. The narration is by a wry, all knowing narrator (which is probably the sentient ship Justice of Albis, although this is never confirmed) who fills in some of the knowledge gaps for those new to this series or points to other texts for the full story. There is a large cast of characters to be established – including the Radch governor, her damaged niece who is being looked after by Jonr, a young man who had been kept in suspension for the past thirty years, his high ranking mother Zaved, the wealthy man who wants to buy his way to sainthood and his disenfranchised son and plenty of others. As always in this universe, Leckie plays around with gender, with plenty of different pronouns (although it is sometimes unclear what they signify), and fact that the Rasch only use female pronouns for everyone.
While Radiant Star is on its face a fun story peopled and driven by a range of interesting characters it is a difficult book to really engage with. The question that readers are likely to ask being: if you are going to set another novel in the Radch universe what does it add to my understanding of that universe? In this case, not much. The best that can be said is that this is an exploration of what happens to small backwater locations that are part of an Empire when that Empire starts to die. But in the end, the action in this novel does not signify much more than that.
Ann Leckie is a master of detailed, believable science fiction world (or in this case: universe) building. And Radiant Star in no exception. But while there are some interesting themes explored around colonisation and religion, where this book suffers is in comparison to the other books set in this universe. These earlier novels transcended their surface story in much deeper and more interesting ways. Still, a novel set in the Imperial Radch universe, even one with a slightly smaller scope than some of the others. is a better bet than much of the space opera out there.
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie
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