Ancillary Sword

The second book in the trilogy is not quite as good as the first one, largely because the plot moves a little too slowly for much of its length. It's effectively a prolonged piece of scene-setting with the main events all squeezed into the last 20% or so... which couldn't be said of the first book. Having said that, the scene-setting is good, and is really the main point of it. This time, the story is set entirely within the Radch, so that mostly what we're seeing is an examination of their culture, with both its strengths and weaknesses - in particular, there's a strong critique of well-intentioned imperialism.

The fact that we don't leave the Empire also means that the biological sex of most of the characters is even less clear than before. Mostly, this doesn't matter, but there's a nice twist towards the end where one of the few characters that I had thought of as clearly being a particular sex turned out to be the other, forcing me to evaluate why I'd felt that way about them. You couldn't do that sort of thing in a story written in regular, gendered, English (or in a video format).

Once the plot finally gets somewhere, the result is also entertaining, with some dramatic denouements and moments of action. Perhaps it only scrapes the full four stars, being a little bit too leisurely in places, but it's certainly both interesting and memorable.