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Ann Leckie is one of the most important voices in contemporary science fiction. Her debut novel, Ancillary Justice (2013), is the only work in history to win all three of science fiction’s top honors: the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards.
Across her work—the Imperial Radch novels Ancillary Sword (2014), Ancillary Mercy (2015), Provenance (2017), and Translation State (2023); her fantasy novel The Raven Tower (2019); and her award-winning collection Lake of Souls (2024)—Leckie challenges readers to reconsider conceptual categories (such as gender and citizenship) that structure social experience under conditions of imperial power.
Her new novel Radiant Star (2026) returns to the universe of the Imperial Radch in a standalone story centered on the “Temporal Location of the Radiant Star”: a religious site—inspired in part by Leckie’s visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—shared by multiple communities of faith in the city of Ooioiaa on the rogue planet Aaa.
As the Radch absorbs this complex local institution into its own administrative paradigm, Leckie explores the entangled lives of the city’s residents during a moment of crisis, when the consequences of the empire’s distant civil war become personal and intimate.
David M. Higgins spoke with Leckie about Radiant Star via email and in person at the 46th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), where she appeared as Guest of Honor.
David M. Higgins (DMH): One of the most striking things in Radiant Star is your use of omniscient narration. This reminds me of 19th-century fiction; there’s a direct narrative address to the reader, an ongoing stream of social commentary, and a panoramic rotation across a whole social milieu rather than a narrow focus on key protagonists. What inspired this stylistic shift in perspective for Radiant Star?
Ann Leckie (AL): It was absolutely 19th-century omniscient fiction that I was going for! Not for any real reason except that it’s cool, and it’s delightful when writers do it well. I wanted to play with those toys, and it felt it suited the project.
To start with, I was thinking about a place—one inspired by a real-world location (see more on this below). And this implied that the place would be as central as the characters, in a way that a single perspective, or even multiple limited-third-person perspectives, would struggle to capture.
One starting inspiration was Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. But then I went back and reread a bunch of things—a lot of Dickens, George Eliot’s Middlemarch—and then I also read new (to me) things, such as all of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels. The whole time, I was thinking about how these authors conveyed information through perspective.
Right now, omniscient (or omni) is not a fashionable POV. Trends come and go, but if people aren’t reading books in a particular style, they don’t acquire the skill of being able to read in that style, and newer writers never get familiar with it. I’ve seen conversations in writer spaces about how omni is hard to do: How do you avoid the dreaded head hopping? Will editors even buy anything in omni? To me, the difference between omni and close third with lots of character changes is extremely obvious, but it isn’t to a lot of folks.
So, that’s one reason to explore using omni. But also: I just like a lot of the 19th-century novels that I’ve read. I can’t really say anything insightful about them except that the POV is cool, and I enjoy the sentences as well.
DMH: For me, the omniscient perspective works well here, especially given Radiant Star’s central emphasis on place and setting. Can you say more about what this perspective helped you accomplish?
AL: One of the things about using omni was that I could make this story less about a main character and more about a place and time. A large part of the inspiration for this story was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, one of Christianity’s most holy sites, where multiple Christian denominations simultaneously hold claim over the space (sometimes in uneasy tension).
I was fortunate enough to visit this site few years ago, and it was wild. I absolutely recognized the religiosity I saw there; it looked very much like the Catholicism I’d grown up with, turned up to 11. I’ve read that some number of Protestants favor a different location for the death and interment of Jesus, because the Church of the Holy Sepulchre just doesn’t strike them as a holy place. But to me it was obviously and clearly a holy place; all the right signs were there.
And what a place it is. I was fascinated, for example, with the idea of the real, very consequential disputes over who had rights to what parts: Someone moving a chair an inch or two can trigger a fistfight that sends a dozen people to the ER. And over what? I know what, but also—wow. And of course, there’s that famous, emblematic ladder. (Under the Status Quo, the ladder can’t be moved unless all six Christian denominations who share the church agree to move it; it has never been moved, and it has become a symbol of irresolvable disputes within Christianity.) I did not get the ladder into the book, but I thought about it a lot.
I had to think carefully about how I wanted to use that location, though. I wanted to talk about religion, but I don’t have anything useful or interesting to say about Judaism. I’m not Jewish, I don’t have particularly detailed knowledge about Judaism, and my knowledge of the history of Israel is limited to familiarity with the Bible and an interest in the Roman Empire. So I was very specifically not writing about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself, let alone about Jerusalem. The Temporal Location, and Ooiooiaa, were certainly inspired by those places, but they are not meant to be direct references to them in any real way.
DMH: What struck you, in specific terms, about your visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the tensions you saw there?
AL: So, I’m an atheist, but I grew up Catholic. Like, absolutely surrounded with Catholicism—I attended a Catholic grade school and high school in a majority-Catholic city, and I’m from a family of devout Catholics. I’m not Catholic anymore, but I know just how high stakes those disputes are when you’re immersed in that world. I know how exceptional the people are who can step back and say, “Here’s a way to resolve this that doesn’t violate any of our deeply held priorities.” It’s even rarer to find someone who can then persuade others to listen and agree.
From outside, though, the whole idea of ending up in the hospital because of a dispute over moving a chair one inch in an old, crumbling church—if this is the hill you’re going to die on, it looks crazy from the outside. Some might say it’s really all about the tourist and pilgrim money, because it is! And to some people, that somehow makes it all seem less crazy, so it seems like the real explanation for the whole thing. And, sure, that’s part of it—but that’s not all of it. There are, after all, a lot of other ways to make money. Why that one?
There are so many angles on it, it looks so different when you turn it around even by just a tiny bit, it’s amazing.
DMH: Your work, in a larger sense, often challenges the taken-for-grantedness of categorical associations (such as the ways we think and feel about gender categories). My quick description of Radiant Star might be that this is a book where you approach religion with the same speculative insight you’ve previously used to approach gender. At a key moment, for example, the narrator observes that religion is “a language we learn to understand and speak without knowing we learn it.”
To what extent does your exploration of religion here feel like an organic continuation of your exploration of gender in your previous works?
AL: That does sound right. I hadn’t thought of there being any connection, but that’s interesting. I was thinking about all the people who I know and love who are very definitely religious. And they’re not stupid or deluded! They’re just—Catholic or Methodist or Jewish or Wiccan or what have you. And in some ways, it’s easy to account for, say, my Catholic relatives. I know what it is they believe and how they believe it.
And I have to assume (well, I don’t have to, but I feel it’s the best choice) that Methodists and Muslims and Jews and Wiccans and every other religion you could name, have the same experience. Not in the details, the religions (and all their sects and subtypes) are very different in a lot of details. But in the aggregate. I can only assume that a member of any other religious group is likely to have the same depth of—not faith, not all religions require anything like faith—the same deep immersion in their own traditions, the same connection to it. The same life- and identity-shaping importance.
But the details are all different! The ways they shape people’s lives are different! (—talking about whether things are the same or different really depends on where you’re standing when you say it).
And when I go into a Protestant church, it doesn’t seem like a church to me. It seems like someone’s living room, or maybe a schoolroom. The people who attend those churches very likely go into, say, the Saint Louis Cathedral (the “new Cathedral” because there’s an older, plainer one by the river, but the one crammed with gold and glass mosaics) and think it looks weirdly pagan and not like a church at all. The reaction is the same, the details are different. And I got to thinking about that.
DMH: To what extent do you see gender in similar terms? Would you say that gender is a different language we learn to understand and speak without knowing we’ve learned it?
AL: I do think gender is the same—your gender places you in a particular set of social roles and expectations that are as identity shaping as religion is.
On first consideration, I’d say they were different because your gender is maybe in some way inherent—whatever way that is, but I assume someone assigned male at birth who says “no, actually, I’m a girl” is responding to something innate, otherwise why would anyone make that claim, at least in this culture?—but religion is subject to choice.
Then again, I don’t think one ought to be required to have some compelling inner conviction that one is a particular gender in order to declare any given gender identity. As far as I’m concerned, if you tell me you’re a girl or a boy or nonbinary or some other gender category, I don’t really care why you say that, I’m just going to say “cool” and do my best to adjust my pronouns appropriately. Same with religions, really. If you tell me “I’m Wiccan,” I’m not going to delve into why in order to judge whether you’re really Wiccan or not.
And quite a lot of people are “assigned Catholic at birth” or whatever, and maybe later find that doesn’t suit them so well, they move on to some other variety of Christianity, or Neopaganism, or atheism, or what have you. I suspect that most people stay with the religion (or lack thereof) they were raised in. It’s just easier, and probably more comfortable that way.
Looked at from that angle, the two aren’t so different, are they? There are a bunch of other angles that make the two very, very different, but …
I try to treat all of my characters with sympathy and even love, even when they’re horrible. Not to excuse them, but to see them (and portray them) more clearly.
DMH: Your fiction often explores how the way we make sense of the world is based on deeply held associations (sometimes regarding gender, sometimes regarding religion, sometimes regarding other deeply felt conceptual categories). It seems like you have something to say about how these associations can be, paradoxically, both something to value and respect, and also something that we impose with violence on ourselves and/or others.
How do you thread the needle of that complexity? When, in your estimation, is it right to honor the diversity of deeply held foundations of categorical associations? When does fixation on categories lead to violence?
AL: My personal take is that when your foundations harm others, then it crosses a line. Of course, even that is complicated: people raise their children within their systems of identity, and that can harm those children. There is of course a long, long list of such harms, from Christian Scientists refusing medical treatment for their children, to FGM, or worse.
At the same time, I can likely walk outside my house and point to someone who sincerely believes that I have harmed my own children by not raising them as some specific variety of Christian, thus condemning them to hell. To me, of course, the threat of hell is just not real, where condemning your child to death because you won’t use antibiotics is flat out murder. Of course, my judgment in these matters is perfectly reasonable and correct. But then, so is that of the person walking down the street who I’ve just pointed to. I don’t know; I just have to pick my judgments and stand by them as well as I can.
I suspect violence results when people feel their interests, and/or their ability to continue their identities without undue disruption, are under threat.
DMH: It struck me while reading Radiant Star that the omniscient perspective allowed you to make some interesting commentary on character failings. In several cases, the narrator points out how certain characters can delude themselves or justify awful things to themselves—how they’re able to feel good about actions that are centrally selfish or self-serving.
Can you say a bit about your paradigm of moral failure here? You tend to treat all your characters rather lovingly, even the bad ones, but there are clearly some bad ones, and the heckling narrator punctures their hypocrisy at times quite beautifully.
AL: On one level it was just fun to be snarky about those characters. I do like to snark. One of the fun things about Jane Austen, to give just one example, is the way she gently snarks at her characters.
But also, it’s exceedingly rare that anyone actually thinks of themself as a bad person. Or, no, it’s more complicated than that. Let me say it this way: Nearly everyone tries very, very hard to think of themself as a good person. It causes great distress when they can’t. And I want to portray characters accurately, which means the ones that do bad things are also thinking those things are just unavoidable or actually good, because thinking otherwise would completely upend their vision of themselves, if not their whole lives.
Back in the day, when I first read Gardner’s Art of Fiction, I read the bit about what he calls “frigidity” and didn’t understand it. He’s talking about when a writer holds one or more characters in contempt, and it comes through in the writing. Even his example didn’t make clear to me what he was talking about. Years later I was surprised to see it (in an unpublished story that I’d been given for critique) and finally understood. I had to be older and had to have read and written more to see it. (Now the example he gives is just screamingly obvious in a way that amazes me that I could have missed it.)
Other writers will make different choices around this issue. I decided that for myself, I wanted to avoid doing that. Which isn’t the same as sympathizing or approving of “bad” characters!
There’s also the way that, often in my experience, if you try to describe or explain why someone has done something terrible, and that explanation isn’t just “they’re a bad person!,” some folks will get really angry. After all, the bad person was bad, what other explanation could there be? Anything else is condoning the terrible thing!
But I don’t think it is. It’s important to remember that the worst of bad people are human beings, who made choices or who were put in situations that forced or encouraged particular choices. And that any of us might, in those same situations, have also done terrible things. We might not have! But the potential is there for any of us to be really horrible. And if we don’t recognize that, it’s so easy for us to just stroll into horrible behavior while telling ourselves we’re good people and therefore nothing we do is really that bad.
I’m not saying “those people are guiltless cinnamon rolls because really they want to be good and they love kittens.” I’m saying that if you really want to avoid being horrible (as much as it’s even possible—there’s no ethical consumption under late capitalism, et cetera), you really have to look at yourself and acknowledge that you can, in fact, do horrible things and maybe already have. And after all, you can’t avoid something you won’t admit is there to begin with.
So, I try to treat all of my characters with sympathy and even love, even when they’re horrible. Not to excuse them, but to see them (and portray them) more clearly. That said, it’s nice to be able to also snark at the “bad” characters. Which I don’t really get to do in close third!
DMH: But you arrive at this organically, through an exploration of characters and situations, rather than from an approach that starts from a specific theme or message?
AL: I do a lot of my work by feel, honestly. I know writers who work with particular themes and messages very consciously; before they begin, they’re like “I want this story to be about the evils of eggplant!” and they write a lovely story. I don’t really work like that; I don’t think I can. I’m never really happy with things that I produce when I start from there, and also the few times I have, it’s been super short work.
I use the story to do the thinking, honestly, but that means I don’t always know exactly what I was thinking or what conclusions (if any) I’ve come to.
DMH: One of the most interesting aspects of Radiant Star, for me, is the way you examine foundations of belief and expectation (and sometimes the foundations of privilege and entitlement) and then explore what happens when those foundations are shaken or fall away.
How do you feel like this relates to our current moment? To what extent do you feel like the events of the past several years (say from COVID forward, and with the Trump administrations, obviously) have shaped your musings on this topic as it appears in Radiant Star?
What might you say to a reader who is newly confronting the terror that comes from realizing that the United States, for example, isn’t a stable object that just makes sense and can be relied upon in the way they might have previously assumed?
AL: Oof, that’s a big question. So, to start, I didn’t say to myself, “Self, I am going to address this current moment in my novel that I am writing right now.” But obviously (to me, anyway), when I pick up pieces to use and consider how to put those pieces together, my view on how things are goes into my sense of whether those pieces fit together and how, and so they are going to make a now-shaped picture.
That said, when I was thinking about the famine in the novel (for example), I absolutely did consider how people reacted when they thought that there would be a shortage of anything during COVID. Toilet paper. I still remember Costco restricting customers to one package of toilet paper at a time—and of course, this being Costco, one package was not an insignificant amount of the stuff! But that whole thing also showed me just how rarely some people think about where things come from and how they get to store shelves.
That was also a moment when a lot of people were confronted with the possibility that maybe everything wouldn’t just go on as it had always and forever, and I suspect that some of the “this is just a bad cold, it’s not real, don’t wear masks, keep restaurants open, what about THE ECONOMY” bullshit was about not wanting to acknowledge that a hole had just opened up under our feet.
That experience consciously went into the novel. And the current moment, when, as you say, the US is no longer the thing we’ve been relying on it to be—well, to some extent it’s never been what most us have been relying on it to be. (I feel compelled to point out what I know you already know, which is that the US has never been that white, straight, cis place many assumed it was, and challenging this foundation is a very good thing.) But across the board, it seemed close enough to what many different people imagined it was or wanted it to be, and that was sufficient for living day to day without worrying too much about it. And now “close enough” has been shattered in a horrific, traumatic way. (That realization is always traumatic, but now almost everyone is facing it in one way or another.) And what do I say to a reader about that? The same thing I say to myself: Panicking never helps. Building a new model of how things work (in your mind, and in the world) is going to take time and will be the result of many small, inglorious acts. Chop wood, carry water, take care of your neighbors. Do what there is for you to do, put one foot in front of the other. It’s the only way through. 
This article was commissioned by Mona Sloane.
