SF Lineage: Le Guin Through Cherryh To Leckie

On March 4 I reported back on my reading of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which might fairly be said to have been the SF book-de-jour of 2013-14 in terms of awards and accolades.

And I, like many other readers and commentators, “mentioned with approval” the way the book plays with our notions of gender by:

“…the Radch Empire’s universal use of the personal pronoun “she” and the gradual realization that all the “she’s” I was meeting could equally well be female or male. After a while I got u...