ike on Nostr: My favorite recent sci fi trilogy is Anne Leckie’s ancillary series. The setup is ...

My favorite recent sci fi trilogy is Anne Leckie’s ancillary series. The setup is wild (powerful ship AI ends up in human body and seeks to overthrow the emperor) and the story does not abate while casting light on some important contemporary themes: how we deal with injustice, what makes a life and what makes a life worth protecting, how should we understand freedom and technology, etc. I think about it all the time. This is something that good science fiction does well: takes a salient question (how should we treat people that aren’t like us?) and casts it in a new, otherworldly light. At its best it asks us to rethink our own relationship to the world. While I’m on it, another series that does this really well is Adrian Tchaikovksy’s Children of Time series. Totally transformed how I see and interact with spiders!