>> Monique Scheira: Thank you for coming my name is Monique Scheira and I am pleased to
welcome Ann Leckie to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. She's here to discuss
Ancillary Mercy, the third in her series about Breq, a high of mind consisting of a sentient
starship and its crew of network soldiers. Ann has one almost every major award in science
fiction including the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards. She has published short stories
in several magazines including Strange Horizons and Realms of Fantasy. One of her stories was
reprinted in Science Fiction, Best of the Year 2007. Please join me in giving her a very warm
welcome. [applause].
>> Ann Leckie: Hello. Thank you for having me I have no idea what you all are interested in
hearing from me, to be completely honest. I'm not sure how many folks are familiar with the
books or what sorts of things you might be interested in hearing. Our most people here
familiar with the books or not familiar with the books? Most people are familiar with the
books? Okay. Maybe the best thing to do is just to say do you all have anything you want to
say about the books or ideas in the books, since basically you kind of know what they are?
>>: I'd like to ask the obvious question, which is one of the challenges that you present in the
book is for the reader to conceptualize gender identity in the face of lack of specificity. I was
wondering if you could comment about when you are writing the stories how you
conceptualize gender and gender identity in your books. For me, it was a big challenge. It was
an interesting challenge and I really appreciated it when I finally got to that moment when I
understood that there wasn't specificity being presented to the reader and I'm just curious if
you could talk about how you thought about that and how you think about it as you are writing.
Do you think of your characters as being gender in specific or do you just kind of use the
pronouns in a consistent way to make it so you are not going to disclose the identities?
>> Ann Leckie: That's probably the most famous thing hands down about the books. When I
started writing I just knew that I wanted to, just for fun, which was very naïve on my part,
create a culture that really did not care at all about gender. So I wrote and I was assigning
characters, he and she but I was still putting characters in very stereotypical slots and very
stereotypical roles. So I went back and I looked at it and I said to myself this is not doing the
thing I wanted to do. So how my going to do that? I had already started writing Ancillary
Justice and the characters in those first few chapters were assigned binary genders. After
thinking for a while I thought about various approaches I could have used today, which is a
perfectly cromulent neutral pronoun. Don't let anybody tell you it's not grammatical. It is 100
percent proper grammar. But when you've got characters with thousands of bodies using they
introduce is a kind of ambiguity that is far more confusing than anything I wanted to deal with,
so that wasn't going to work. There are some more recent, I want to say invented, but that
sounds dismissive and I don't mean to sound dismissive of them, more recently invented
pronouns that are meant to shortcut using he or she. And many of those seemed too distant.
There not something that we use habitually and so it really made the narrative kind of cold and
made the characters seeing like cardboardy and not real to me when I was writing them. And I
said well that's not working. I do wish that people would use those more often so we get more
familiar with them. I said well what about if I use she. I tried using he. I wrote a short story
using all he and did not like the effect because it did not come across as nobody cares about
gender. It came across as this is a universe consisting entirely of men. She does kind of give
that effect to some readers. I had some people finished the book and then go to see people's
reactions and say wait. I thought it was just all women and I thought it was very refreshing.
Well, no; that's not what was going on. I said I will go back and I will try she and see what
happens and it was very weird at first. And one of the really weird things about it was the way
that characters that I had assigned male in those first chapters all of a sudden felt very different
to me as characters just because I was using that different pronoun. And I thought well that is
really interesting, so I'll keep that up. And as I kept writing and new characters were coming on
stage, I didn't have to assign them a gender and so I never did. Sometimes they just all seemed
very feminine and sometimes they feel more ambiguous to me, but doing that made the
gender of characters in my mind just kind of slipped around and be kind of indefinite.
Sometimes it would be very definite in one way or the other, but it was a very interesting
experience. And so then I finished and I was like yeah. I think I'm going to keep that. It's going
to be weird and maybe some readers aren't going to be able to deal with it and that's perfectly
valid. But I'm going to try it and see. And so that was why I decided to do it. And the
experiences a little bit strange even from my end. But to most of the later characters I have not
assigned them genders and so their genders are just kind of nebulous to me. Uh-huh?
>>: I have two different questions. The first one is did you know that you were going to right
three books or more when he started writing Ancillary Justice? And the second question I had
was did The Left Hand of Darkness influence you at all and were you familiar with that look
when you had written this one? I knew up front that it wanted to be a trilogy, probably
because that's what we're used to in science fiction. It's like a basic form. But I didn't tell my
agent that one I was shopping it around. I wrote it to standalone as much as it could and then
my agent came back to me and he said now what if we sell Orbit three books? Can you do
that? And I said oh, maybe I can do it. I think I can maybe do that. And I had already started
writing book two just because you should be doing something. I actually did not read Left Hand
of Darkness until I was about halfway through the first draft of Ancillary Justice. I was aware of
it and I was aware of the conversations surrounding it. It's hard not to be in science fiction,
right? I was also aware of the fact that kind of famously she writes about a species of human
that is genderless except when they are, saying in heat sounds kind of cameros, and then they
can be one or the other, so you could conceivably, for instance, be a father and a mother, right?
And she had pronoun problems with that predictably, and she was writing in the sixties and she
chose to use the masculine pronoun for everyone in that book. Years later, she said that she
was not 100 percent happy with that because he gave the impression that this was a planet full
of men that occasionally had babies. And she went back and wrote more that was set on that
planet using a feminine pronoun and it gave a really radically different effect. So I knew that
outline, but I hadn't read any of the work. I was halfway through the draft of Ancillary Justice
and I said I better read this. I sat down and I read it and I was like I should have read this a long
time ago. It kind of had an effect in kind of wasn't a major thing. It just was complicated. Uhhuh?
>>: Gender gets all of the PR, but actually, I secretly love the fact that Breq's really unclear on
the plural versus single and keeps running into is there one of them or many of them questions.
I have truly never ever seen.
>> Ann Leckie: Yeah. Well, with herself, right, this is difficult to do because Breq is one piece of
a huge ship, a ship with thousands of pieces. And so when she says I, what does that mean? It
doesn't mean the same thing that we mean when we say I. And that was, to me that was one
of the more fascinating parts of writing the book and thinking about what do we mean when
we say I. Where does that idea of who we are come from? I have actually done a fair amount
of reading about the neurological basis of our sense of identity which is really very creepy and
can be potentially upsetting to read too much about because you discover very quickly that
your sense of yourself can be altered or destroyed if you have a stroke or the right kind of head
injury or the right kind of surgery. And it's really not difficult to alter somebody so that they will
tell you that no. This is not my arm. And you can't convince them that that's their arm or really
I don't exist. There was actually a woman; she wrote a book. She probably had some strokes at
a very young age who became convinced that she did not exist. She was not a person, but it
was just a body walking around saying and doing things. And that's really weird and upsetting
to think about, but it was also interesting to think about a few had this, this sort of magic tech,
this sufficiently advanced technology, what you could do with that in terms of making
someone's identity be completely different from what it is, make it be what you wanted to be.
And what does that mean when your identity stretches over all of these bodies or you believe
that it does? I personally think that's a bigger part of the book than the pronouns, but the
pronouns get all the press.
>>: Your ideas about distributive intelligence are unique in science fiction, I think. Having the
individuals affect the overall intelligence as much as the other way around, because the Borg,
obviously the traditional example at this point of the distributive intelligence, but they are all of
one mind set, but in this way it's much more, I don't know, true to life. Did that come from
your nonfiction reading?
>> Ann Leckie: Absolutely. In some ways it was a side effect. When you're writing a character
who's not human you have to make them relatable somehow, one way or another. And I
wanted the character to have emotions that we would recognize as human emotions, but if
you're not human, and so I said what are our emotions anyway? And the more that I read the
more that I became convinced that emotions are very physical. We think of them as being
some kind of nebulous sort of spiritual thing that is sort of separate from the rest of us that
controls us or whatever. But there are very specific physical reactions that produce very
particular feelings and then you interpret those in particular ways and make behavior choices
depending on them. And the first implication of that was that if human bodies were going to
be part of this being's body, they were going to have to have human emotions because they
were going to have physical reactions that would produce them. But at the same time, even if
you think about yourself, when your hand hurts that affects everything. When your foot is in
pain or your tooth is in pain, that affects your whole functioning. It may not completely derail
everything that you're doing, but it really does have an effect on what you're doing and how
you're doing it. But we don't think of ourselves as being our foot or being are hand. We think
of ourselves as being a brain that is going around doing things. And so the implication of that
was, of course, that whatever these ancillaries were feeling was going to have to be relayed
back composite being and was going to have to affect what they were thinking and doing in the
same way that minor systems in our bodies aren't really minor at all. They really affect what we
are thinking and feeling.
>>: Why did you choose to have them be effectively recycled people instead of clones or
something like that, because it seems that the recycling was part of their long-term downfall of
the system as the reason why they were abandoned?
>> Ann Leckie: Yeah. Partly I chose it because it was super creepy. [laughter]. Actually, clones
would be super creepy, but superficially cleaner and less upsetting.
>>: Maybe you wanted the diversity of outlook so it multiplies how they are multiple beings?
>> Ann Leckie: Yeah. It does at a different thing. Also, it kind of ounces out because Anaander
Mianaai, who is ruling this empire, she is basically thousands of clones, but even so she's not
completely identical. Even so there's a conflict there. Also, when you're conquering lots of
planets, we're going to pretend that that's a realistic premise to begin from, and then try to be
reasoning from there saying what's one of the resources that is just almost literally laying on
the ground all around you? You don't have to raise them. You don't have to build or make
them. They're just lying there. You can just take them, so you are using your enemy's
resources against your enemies instead of having to invest your own resources in producing
this great big army. But in the end, I chose it because it was kind of creepy in a cool way that I
really liked. You had a question I think.
>>: You do so many interesting things with language and that was a great segue. One of the
things I was fascinated by it was when Breq is ruminating about that Radch means civilized and
so she makes a statement that there is a civilization outside of the Raj [phonetic] and that it's
logically inconsistent as a statement in Radch.
>> Ann Leckie: Yeah, you can't say it in Radch.
>>: Yeah, to be civilized is to be Radch. So I wondered if you could just talk about that idea and
about the idea of the Empire in the Empire believing in themselves as the only ones who are
civilized, kind of where you kind of drew your inspiration from.
>> Ann Leckie: I actually think that's fairly common in a lot of big very powerful cultures and
civilizations, to think of -- I think it's a basic human, there's us and then there's these other
people. And so it's really easy to say we are the people who know what the right way to live is
and y'all people who don't live like us, you don't know the right way to live. What is wrong with
you? But I was also interested in the way that language, I'm not an advocate of the strong
Sapir-Whorf theory, if y'all are familiar with that. You can only think things that your language,
I'm not a big advocate of that. I think that's a little simplistic, but at the same time I think that
the kinds of words that are available to you and the kinds of things that they mean in your
language do filter and frame the way that you make narratives about the world and I think
narratives are really powerful in how you view the world. So the way a language says things
can restrict the ways that you frame narratives about the world. That was one way of playing
with not only do these people think that they are really civilized, but just their everyday speech
makes it even more difficult for them to stop and say maybe people outside the Empire are
civilized because there really, literally is no way to frame that in that language. In that scene,
that character has to switch to another language to say that to the person that she's talking to
because she can't say it in Radch because in Radch it sounds like people can be Radch who
aren't Radch and that doesn't make any sense. But that's something that really interests me
just generally. So I was like I will play with that. A lot of times people say you had this thematic
plan and you were doing this thing and I am like, no. Actually, I was shoving as much cool stuff
that I thought would be fun into the book as I possibly could. Uh-huh?
>>: A question regarding setting and plot, as I was going through Ancillary Justice it felt like it
was really cinematic, like awesome like that and then going to Ancillary Sword it was more
planet sized. There was a lot of political intrigue, but it was much less action oriented than the
first one. And I was kind of wondering what the change of pace meant and where you see it
going next, I guess.
>> Ann Leckie: I knew when I was writing Sword, first of all I didn't want to write Ancillary
Justice again. That would almost be impossible. Justice turned out to be a really hard act to
follow which I didn't realize was going to be the case when I started Sword. But I knew I
wanted to write a very different book just because I didn't want to bore myself. If I'm going to
spend all this time writing, why am I going to write stuff that doesn't amuse me? So some
readers have really enjoyed that change of pace and some have found it really baffling and
disappointing. I was talking to someone the other day who said especially in science fiction, we
want that big cinematic action and it's very common for the plot to be about the big cinematic
action. And my friend said actually, your plot, all that stuff is going on but the plot is actually
about Breq. It's Breq's arc. And so I followed Breq's arc into Sword and some number of
readers were expecting me to follow more explosions into the Civil War directly, which is a
perfectly understandable and valid thing to expect and want. But it wasn't where I was going.
The third book is once again really not very much like either of the previous two, because why
would I bore myself? It is, however, much more actiony then Sword was. In some ways it's a
little more comedic than both of them. And I see that book as closing out Breq's arc. That's her
plot there. That's done. The universe, of course, is huge and I can do almost anything in it. But
yeah, there have been a lot of varied reactions to that change of pace, but I saw myself as
following that character arc through where some readers really wanted to go through to the
actiony thing.
>>: Spoiler alert, because I've already read the first part. The thing that I would look for and
have found disappointing in many trilogies is you've got this first one that like in your case has
these bombshell ideas, and that's interesting. And then it's not so much the action. Who cares
about the action, it's like how are you going to follow-up on that stream of ideas?
>> Ann Leckie: Believe me. I had that idea many times while I was writing. What I wrote
Justice I was like this book will never sell, but I'm going to write the next one anyway because
when you are a writer that's what you do. If you don't do it you never succeed because you just
get rejected all the time as a writer. And so I said I'm going to get rejected anyway. I'm going
to keep writing. And then the book was bought and I was finishing up the second book when
the first book came out and I was completely floored by the reaction. I was thinking that if I
was lucky it would sell a couple of thousand copies. Event was my most extravagant fantasy
and the publisher would not cancel the rest of my contract and I would get to finish the trilogy
and that would be super awesome and I would have it made like as a writer. That would be the
most extravagantly realistic thing that I could expect. That is not what happened. And that
made finishing up a book two and writing book three completely terrifying because instead of
following up a book that maybe a couple of thousand people had kind of like and would be
interested in reading the next one, I was following up a book that nobody could possibly followup. There's no way that the second book was going to win like every major award the way the
first one did. There was no way that people were going to be taken by it the same way that
they were taken by the first. It was actually very difficult for me to continue writing and at
some point I had to just say I just have to pretend that none of this is happening and put my
head down and write and write what I was planning to do to begin with.
>>: Were those ideas for you in the first book just, were they the point of the book or were
they just ways for you set a stage further universe you wanted to operate it?
>> Ann Leckie: They were ways for me to tell the story I wanted to tell. I was really just kind of,
I had a bunch of toys that I playing with, but part of my process, even when I was mostly doing
short fiction, is I have a weird idea. Okay like being with thousands of bodies, and then I say I
have to get a story out of that somehow. So logically, why am I interested in that idea? What
would make it work? And that tends to kick up a bunch of really cool ideas, but I didn't really
start with the really cool ideas. I started with the crazy images, or whatever. So very often, the
ideas are a vehicle for me to get a story down on the paper. If it doesn't kick up interesting
ideas, there's no point in writing the story to begin with. I wouldn't have fun.
>>: Breq is a really complex character who goes through a lot of different phases of
development. I'm curious, especially with regards to loss, her reaction to losing part of her
body to losing the love that she has this lieutenant even though she kind of encapsulates it and
doesn't really admit that it's happening. It's really intriguing. It makes for a great read. I'm
curious where you grew that from. Did you know that that was going to happen with her from
the beginning or did it just organically come about as you started playing with some of these
ideas?
>> Ann Leckie: I knew that it was going to happen from the beginning. I didn't know precisely
how, but from the start I knew that the rest of her had been destroyed and I knew that that
particular event, I don't know who hasn't read the first book and I don't want to spoil that
particular scene. When I came to that particular scene and I realized what the specifics had to
be and I was like oh wow. Oh wow, yeah, this is going to be a hard scene to write. I knew
writing it that if I didn't mail that scene the whole book would collapse because if you don't
believe that scene you don't believe anything that Breq does for the whole book. As to
whether, I think most people do experience some kind of loss. And so to some extent maybe
you draw from personal experience like that. But I can't really think of a specific, I wasn't
necessarily writing to a personal loss or anything. I was just, once again, following that
character to that logical place and then saying what is that going to be.
>>: Hollywood, film?
>> Ann Leckie: That would be super awesome. There is a TV option, but as often happens with
options, you never know if anything is actually going to happen. So they cut me a little check
and I cashed a little check and whether anything will actually happen -- it would be super
awesome, also it would be really difficult. I have no idea how they would handle some of the
gender ambiguity stuff. They would have to almost do something completely different from
what I was trying to do, but would be cool on its own terms to succeed.
>>: It seems like it would only be interesting to a creative director or someone to really try to
figure out this is a great little nut to crack.
>> Ann Leckie: Yeah. It would have to be somebody sympathetic to the project, not like the
Italian translator who just decided to just gender everybody male in this second book.
[laughter]. Not that I'm angry about that or anything. [laughter]. I think you had a question.
>>: So you have these ancillaries and they are similar, but you also say in some parts that
there's a little bit of the previous something there sort of fighting back, at least early on in the
stages of the implants. So I wonder if you have any more thoughts on what's left over of the
previous being in the generic sense and also trying to relate that to Breq. Breq is now sort of a
singleton where there was many and if there was not a loss of like loss of limb, but is there a
loss of personality, intelligence as well.
>> Ann Leckie: That's an interesting question. There's a character in the second book that I
don't want to spoil for folks who haven't gotten this far, the question of how much is left has
become particularly pertinent for readers. My take on it is that when you destroy that sense of
identity, that person is gone. So you could set up a new sense of identity. They would have the
same memories, in fact, often the ancillaries are described as mind wiped in reviews and when
people are talking about the book. I don't say that anywhere. They have all of their own
memories, so Breq's body has all the memories of whoever Breq was before, but she does not
experience herself as still being that person. That person is in the past, someone else. This
character in the second book is a new person with all of the previous memories of what that
body has been through before and that makes the question of who both of them are really kind
of difficult and kind of weird. This is something I enjoy and haven't really resolved, but
sometimes people will say who is Breq really. And I will be like maybe you just have to take her
word for she is. The question of how much may be personality and sense of herself she might
have lost, that's a really interesting question and she probably lost a fair amount, because she
had all this input from all of these other parts of herself that were composing her sense of the
world and her sense of identity and her sense of herself must be completely different. And in a
lot of ways you could very validly say she is a completely different person now than she was
before that ship was destroyed. And she might or might not say that. Sometimes she might say
that and sometimes she won't and she probably would feel very ambivalent about that. But, of
course she would never say she felt ambivalent about that because she will never tell you how
she feels. Uh-huh?
>>: Are you kind of playing a little bit with the reliable versus unreliable narrator?
>> Ann Leckie: In some ways. The first time someone said this I was very surprised when
someone said oh Breq is a really unreliable narrator. And I went no, she isn't. And then I
thought about it and I realized what they meant was that Breq is a really unreliable narrator
when she comes to talking about herself. She will never tell you what she is feeling. She will
tell you what she does and she will tell you what she says and she will tell you what other
people do and say, but she won't tell you that she was crying in that one scene until somebody
else will happen to mention it. And then you backup and you go wait. So some readers pick up
on that really well and some readers have to take about it in advance and go wait. I'm actually,
there are all these other clues as to what she is feeling. So in a lot of ways she is an unreliable
narrator, but I wasn't really thinking of her that way when I was writing her.
>>: I like all of the little cultural things in the book, the key and the gloves and the pens and the
funeral rituals and stuff. Is that, like you say, just trying to cram the book full of cool stuff or
was there a specific…
>> Ann Leckie: That is just trying to cram the book full of cool stuff. The tea, in particular is
partly because I love tea. And why not put in something I know about? Then I had to do a lot
of research, terrible thing. But also, I don't know if you all have read C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner
books. They are really fabulous. At this point it's a long-running series and it's basically, the
main character is a translator. A small group of humans are stranded on a planet with
humanoid aliens and for various complex reasons it makes sense in the book, the only point of
contact between humans and the aliens is this one translator to prevent a further war. There
was a terrible war and humans were almost wiped out. These humanoid aliens have a different
set of emotions. And they don't like people. They don't love people, but they have their own
set of emotions. If you approach them expecting them to respond like human beings you can
get yourself into big trouble. Our main character is trying to navigate this alien society. He
knows the language really well, but he's in a really dangerous situation and has to figure out
what's going on because the consequences are that all of the humans on the planet could die.
That first book is fabulous and I strongly recommended. The aliens drink a huge amount of tea.
Tea is just a big thing and very often it is a book full of political intrigue and very often things
need to be explained to us and so the main character will sit down and have tea and think
about history or have a conversation with somebody. But there is just like tea flowing through
those books and I love them very much. And I said well, what the heck? I'm going to put lots of
tea in my books and that's what I did. Most of those things I just grabbed them and I didn't
think about the implications until I went to jam them into the story and then I said I could do
some cool stuff with this.
>>: What was that book again Cathy
>> Ann Leckie: Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh. It's Cherryh with an h on the end. I don't know if this
is really true. When she published her first book in the seventies, her editor told her nobody
would buy science fiction books from a girl named Cherry. Her name didn't actually have the h
on the end and so she went with her initials and put the h on the end leaving people unsure
how to pronounce her name for decades to come. Uh-huh?
>>: Could you talk a little bit about your experience as a writer? There was an actor recently on
some talk show that talked about getting an Oscar very early and he said thank God that I got
this so early so I can not have to worry about this anymore and how sad it would be to have to
work your whole life just for this one thing and realized that that's not what it's all about. So
the question when you have your first book, your first full book be a big hit, and then also, why
you didn't go a common route for authors writing new books and just to self publish and not
worry about it at all?
>> Ann Leckie: Awards, by the time I was selling work, of course, any science fiction fan we all
know that the Hugo is like you see it on the covers of books from when you're little and so
when you become a little baby writer, winning the Hugo award is like going to heaven. That's
the thing. When I was really writing seriously and had friends at that point who were being
nominated for Nebulas and Hugos and of course I was a little envious. But I sat down and I said
to myself how my going to think about this. I concluded that awards are really wonderful and I
certainly should feel free to do the thing where I stand in the bathroom with the door closed
and pretend to give my acceptance speech and stuff. And then when that was done I was done
with that. That was a crazy fantasy like being an astronaut or having a dinosaur for pet or any
of these other things that are not going to happen. They are great fantasies and now it's time
to get to work. I and so that was pretty much my attitude. So I said to myself, I don't write the
kind of thing that wins awards, plus it would be a little bit presumptuous of me to assume that
my writing is on that level. And really, the important thing is to sit down and write the kind of
stuff that I want to write and whatever happens is going to be what happens. And actually, I
was lucky enough that I didn't have to write for income. My husband has a nice stable job. I
have family was not relying on me for rent money or for food or anything like that, so I really
had the luxury of doing whatever the heck I wanted to do. And then I won all the awards and I
was sure I was hallucinating for like months. I was like, this isn't actually happening. I'm going
to wake up in a hospital and they are going to say you had a terrible head injury. You have
been in a coma for months and yeah. On the one hand, I mean I'm not going to lie. Winning
the awards is really super awesome. On the other hand, there's lots of really fabulous stuff
written that never wins awards. And there are kinds of books that never win awards. But many
of those sell piles of copies and that in and of itself is its own kind of thing. And I think focusing
too hard on the award thing can be very toxic and it can really do a kind of damage that really I
think is best to avoid. Of course, I'm standing up here saying you know it's best not to think too
hard about awards, and it sounds kind of hypocritical coming from me. But at the same time,
every science fiction writer has that in the back of their head. That rocket shape is like
imprinted on the back of your brain when you are a science fiction fan, so I can't blame
anybody for really, really wanting it. So in some ways at this point, this year, the second book
was up for a Hugo again and people were like I'm rooting for you, and I'm like I don't really care.
I mean, I would have been thrilled to win but at the same time if I didn't win, and I didn't, and I
didn't think that I would, and I am like yay, Three Body Problem one. Good for Three Body
Problem. And that kind of baffled some people because there is that sense of urgency. But it's
not a big deal to me. I've been really fortunate that way and so it is helpful to be able to not
worry too much about that. That is really nice. I would hope that writers starting out are able
to put themselves in a place where they aren't going to embitter themselves thinking that I
deserve this and I didn't get it and there is something wrong with the world. I think that really
leads to a place that is just bad for everybody.
>>: Part of that is why so many authors go the self-publishing route nowadays, because getting
a publisher is part of that like, it's an award, right? They don't want to have to think about that.
Can you talk a bit about how you got locked in with the publisher or did you think like I will self
publish and the publisher just showed up on your doorstep or how did that work?
>> Ann Leckie: Early on when I first started writing I said to myself these are the things I want
to write. In fact, I was sure that Ancillary Justice wouldn't sell and I said to myself I can always
self publish. That did not used to be a viable route. It is a viable route now. But I wanted to try
traditional publishing first partly because I'm old enough to remember when that was the
reputable way to be published and self-publishing was, you know, what are you doing that for?
It's not that way anymore. But also if you want the recognition, self published books by and
large, they don't get that kind of name recognition. Andy Weir is an exception. Hugh Howey is
an exception. They exist, but they are big exceptions. But I would have self published if I could
not have sold the book. What I did was very traditionally I finished the manuscript. I polished it
up as best I could and I went to my friends who had agents and asked them who is your agent.
And you know these other people and who are their agents and what can you tell me about
back channel gossip about who is good and who's bad and who does what. It was very
important to me, for instance, to find somebody who would respond to me. I had heard several
stories of folks who I knew were fabulous writers who had agents who had more famous clients
and they could not get their agents to respond to them for anything. That was an important
thing for me. Then I made a list and then I wrote up a query letter. I would rather claw my eyes
out than write another query letter. They are really terrible. You have to boil down your whole
book to like 200 words. Nothing sounds good boil down to 200 words. It all just sounds
completely stupid. So I wrote the query letter and sent it off to five agents. I got requests for
chapters. I meant to send off to five a week, just so it wasn't a huge load, but since I got
positive responses pretty much from all five, I said let's wait and see how they came out
because I put my top folks at the top of the list. And I actually ended up going with one of
those folks who put me on. After that it was all in his court. Stuff would happen and I would be
like yeah, I pay Seth to worry about that. I don't have to worry about that. I don't have to
worry about rejections. I don't have to fret about where it is. My agent, bless his heart, he is
never going to see a cent from me, but he worries about that. So he shopped it around and he
told me himself he didn't think it would sell to one of the big houses, that I would end up going
to one of the small presses that are publishing really interesting stuff. But because of their
small-scale they can take a risk on some of the more interesting and unusual stuff and he
figured we would end up in a place like that, which was not the case. But it's really almost a
stereotypically route to publishing where I queried, got an agent and the agents considered the
novel and the publisher bought it. Nothing really unusual there. I totally would have been
ready to self publish if we couldn't have sold that book.
>>: Did you get an editor as well?
>> Ann Leckie: Oh yes. In fact, I have two editors. Because Orbit is in the USA and the UK and
so it is released in the US and the UK simultaneously and so I get both editors' comments at
once on my manuscript.
>>: Do you see that as a value of the traditional system? Obviously, in self-publishing it's
missing.
>> Ann Leckie: Yes, I do. I think some folks are really good at editing themselves and seeing
their work clearly themselves, but that's a really difficult thing to do. A lot of people who self
publish to either have friends who look over stuff for them or they will hire freelance editors to
go over things for them, which I think is smart. One of the dangers of self-publishing, it can
work really well but when you are a new writer you feel like all of your stuff is good. But you
think it's a lot better than it is because your skill level isn't where you think it is because it's
difficult to see your own work very clearly. And I think some number of folks go they are not
buying my stuff so I am just going to self publish it. But their stuff wasn't being bought because
it wasn't really where it needed to be and they would have benefited, even if they still self
published, they would have benefited from taking a year or two more and working a little
harder on the stuff. But it's hard to see that yourself and I think the traditional publishing does
have those extra layers of people giving input, people screening, people making suggestions
that really does help a lot.
>>: I like discussing the mechanics of publishing. You said you would have been happy if it had
sold just a couple of thousand copies. And I guess those hardcover?
>> Ann Leckie: Trade paperback, yeah. They did not, you only get hardcover if you're kind of a
big deal and people would actually pay the hardcover price. Actually, my next book that is
under contract will come out in hardcover first. But I was nobody when I sold the first book and
so it was trade paperback.
>>: I wanted to ask because personally I never buy hardcover and rarely by almost like this,
pocket. So do you think it would be better if more books were published in this format as well?
Might they get published after a few years, right? Or maybe they would get better
[indiscernible]
>> Ann Leckie: On the one hand, I agree with you. My impulse would be to make books as
inexpensive and as freely available as possible. The mass-market paperback, which is usually
the size that I buy, I would wait for something to come out as mass-market. They are not going
to put that out in mass-market until it stops selling in trade. Then they will put it out in massmarket. I am like put it out in mass-market now. Make it cheaper for everybody and sell tons
of copies. But they are very, they are the ones that have all of the sales data and have some
experience knowing how all of that goes. And so they must, when they put out a hardbound,
they have to know that a certain number of people are going to buy it even for that price. And I
have to admit, like C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner books, which I am a huge fan of, there are like
number 16 will be out next year. I will buy it in hardcover the day that it comes out. Or I will
pay $15 for the e-book because I wanted the data it comes out, and I think they are gambling
on that people want it enough that they will pay that money for it. It seems counterintuitive to
me. I would want to sell 400 million of them at two bucks a pop if I could, but they are still in
business so there must be something that I'm not getting.
>>: [indiscernible] conversations were [indiscernible] pays for it all because I think the
electronic forms outsell the paper. You can see the disappearance of shops.
>> Ann Leckie: Actually, from what I see of my numbers, I sell a bit more e-books than I do
paper books, which is fine with me.
>>: How do you think discovery is going to work in that? It's always seemed to me a great loss
not being able to go into a shop and spend an hour walking around.
>> Ann Leckie: And browse? Yeah, because when I was younger that's the way I would find
books. Walk up and down the shelves and look at the covers. The covers sold me many a book.
Like Michael Wheeling's painting on the front of a book would almost sell it to me. I think that's
kind of interesting and I think that's where things like book bloggers and social media have
become really important. One of the things that really helped me out a lot was the fact that
several book lovers with fairly large audiences in the science fiction community, read my book
early on and really liked it and started talking about it, so that by the time it came out there
were already people talking about how they wanted to read it.
>>: That's how I discovered your first book. Somebody mentioned it as one of their favorites.
>> Ann Leckie: Uh-huh. And I think that social media has been really helpful to me and I
suspect that sort of to some extent sadly replaced the browsing in the bookstore, because we
were talking before about access to information. What that means is whoever those sort of
taste making bloggers are are the ones who are the ones who are funneling book titles to
instead of you being able to randomly chance on one, you are more likely to just grab the ones
that have grabbed these particular set of bloggers or your friends who are tweeting or
whatever. And I do think that's a shame and I'm not sure what the solution to that is. I think
that is one of the -- e-books are fabulous because you can carry a whole library and not like
break your back, but discoverability is an issue with e-books. It really is.
>>: [indiscernible] Black Swan, I don't know if you have read that. There's a whole section in
there about the Black Swan effect in media. I think the classic example was 100 years ago if you
were an actor you played only in local theaters. You went from town to town playing. The
most brilliant actor had a very limited audience and limited income. Now arguably, they might
have been better than the ones who are superstars today because they had to work at it to stay
alive. Now you get a hit and you are number one and number ten nobody remembers.
>> Ann Leckie: I think that's a good point, absolutely. I'm not sure if there's a solution to that.
Maybe down the line there will be some kind of change in online culture or something. I don't
know. I could hope so.
>>: You would almost have to cut off the communication networks to make that change back
to where it was.
>> Ann Leckie: Which I wouldn't want to do because there are so many advantages to those
networks.
>>: So the ships are fascinating characters in your stories, really unique and interesting. I
haven't read Mercy yet but I would love to see more of ship to ship relationships.
>> Ann Leckie: There is more of that in Mercy. You'll be gratified by that.
>> Ann Leckie: By necessity the ships are often in the background. You don't get them very
prominently. You'll get more of that.
>>: I'm sorry to bring this up, but since you got a lot of bumps from the awards you got
especially, and I…
>> Ann Leckie: I know where you're headed.
>>: You know where I'm going? So I'll just leave it at that as far as like what is your experience
and how does that affect your view on…
>> Ann Leckie: All of the stuff that has been going on this last year? Yeah. Are you all aware of
the stuff that went on surrounding the Hugo awards this year?
>>: No.
>>: I'll let you explain it. [laughter].
>> Ann Leckie: My take on it, which is not the same as everyone's take on it, there was a writer,
Larry Correia, who I have not read his work, but I am quite sure that it's good adventure stuff
that people really like. He had been nominated for the Campbell, which is best new writer and
went to the ceremony and didn't win and felt somehow that this was evidence of malfeasance
because he should have won. And he spent the next several years working up his fans to
nominate him and other people for the Hugo, which, you know, if your readers want to
nominate you for a Hugo it's their game. It's cool. But over the last year or two it became very
politically tinged. There were a lot of things thrown around about how a liberal cabal was
keeping good red-blooded conservative authors from winning the awards they ought to. And
people were voting for things in the Hugos just because it had politically correct stuff in it and
not because they liked the books. And of course, my book became a prime example of a book
that the only reason anybody would have nominated it for an award was because of the
pronoun things, and there really wasn't anything else in there and that was really very
frustrating. I think the writers involved are actually attempting a self-promotion thing. You
know, and this is true, winning a Hugo can make your career. It is absolutely true. From that
angle, it makes a superficial kind of sense to say that if I want to my career than the thing I need
to do is win a Hugo. And I think that's where they were coming from and I think the political
stuff, while many commentators on it really focus on that, and I do believe it to some extent,
they hold the beliefs that they are saying. I don't think that it is the prime motivation. I think
it's the self-promotion and the careerism that is motivating what's going on. What has ended
up happening is in this past year there were a lot of really ugly things said about writers who
they decided were unfairly keeping them away from the awards that they deserved. I feel kind
of bad for them on one level because that's a really horrible place to be. As I was saying earlier
about how really you can embitter yourself really badly by focusing on what you think you
deserve in the way of awards and rewards. It's just a really good way to make yourself very
unhappy and I think they have made themselves very unhappy. And they are doubling down
and continuing it. On the other hand, I really do not appreciate the insults flung at friends of
mine or flung at my books or flung at me. But really, the best thing for me to do generally is to
just not say anything because when people haven't read the book start talking about what the
book is about and what the book is saying, it's like they are putting on a big clown nose. They
just don't know it. And I don't really need to say anything about that because everybody who
has read the book can see that big clown nose on them. So mostly I just don't say anything, but
it can be very frustrating and it has at times been very angering. Primarily, the thing that angers
me the most about it when I do get angry is the slander of my readers, because I hear from
people who love these books. They love them, and these folks are saying well, nobody really
liked those books. They're lying about it. And like you can say what you want about my book.
If you don't like it that's fine. That's fine. Why are you saying that about my readers? I love my
readers. My readers are fabulous. And so that does make me angry sometimes. But by and
large I feel like they are kind of building their own private little hell in a place where everybody
can see them do it. I don't need to help them do it.
>>: On a lighter note, something in common with a lot of science fiction, including yours, you're
guilty, and Disney movies for children, emperors, royalty, why? Why do we go into the future
and we spread across a thousand star systems and presumably learned a lot and there are still
emperors around? Really?
>> Ann Leckie: If you ask me, it's because the roots of space opera, in particular, are actually
not in the sort of technological part of science fiction, but reach back into medieval romances. I
think medieval romances and…
>>: [indiscernible] storytelling thing. You're not really like thinking seriously about whether it
makes sense?
>> Ann Leckie: That's true. A lot of writers, honestly, will stand up and give you all of these
reasons why they do things, but mostly they are doing it because they thought it was cool and
they pulled it out of the back of their brain. But literarily I think science fiction has brought
together a whole bunch of different genres, especially adventure-based genres and this
includes medieval romances and Gothics and includes a whole strain of novels from the turn of
the twentieth century that are explicitly about colonization and empire. So we have taken a
whole bunch of tropes from those and just sort of transported them forward. It is nice to see
them questioned and I would like to see more democracies and other kinds of governments
and not just the empires.
>>: But you are in a place that just kind of demonstrated that emigration and conquest is also
an opportunity to throw up an empire.
>> Ann Leckie: Yes, absolutely and I am not going to say any more about that. There is an
online question.
>> Monique Scheira: We probably have time for one more question and then we will switch
over to the signing. Okay?
>> Ann Leckie: One more question?
>>: So your book's released today. Are you having like a launch party or something here?
>> Ann Leckie: I'm having a signing at the University bookstore tonight at seven o'clock and
that's what I'm doing now for the rest of the week. Tomorrow I will be in Denver doing the
same thing and the next day I will be in Portland doing the same thing and then San Diego and
then San Francisco. And then I get to go home, but it's like a different city every day all week,
which on the one hand is exhausting and on the other hand is like achievement unlocked. I get
a book tour.
>>: Where is home?
>> Ann Leckie: St. Louis. Well thank you very much. [applause]