Ancillary Mercy

Ancillary Mercy is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ann Leckie, published in October 2015. It is the conclusion of her Imperial Radch trilogy, which began with Ancillary Justice in 2013 and continued with Ancillary Sword, and it takes up the story after the events of the second book.

Breq was once the artificial intelligence of a warship and now exists in a single human body, carrying the memories of the soldiers who served aboard it. The novel opens with a search of a station's slums that turns up someone who should not exist, with a messenger arriving from the mysterious Presger empire, and with a political situation in which the Radch's own order is being challenged from several directions at once.

Leckie writes space opera that spends its time on language, identity and administration rather than on battles, and the trilogy's question about who counts as a person is settled here rather than postponed. The series is told largely in the first person, and its narrator's difficulty with gender is one of the books' most discussed features.