Ann Leckie

The American writer tells us about her first fantasy novel.

- Jonathan Wright

The simplest ideas can have huge potency. Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower is set in “a secondary fantasy world that’s very much like ours” but one where there are multiple gods. “The way that they exercise their power is by speaking,” explains Leckie, “so a god when it speaks has to speak the truth. If what it says isn’t already true, its power will have to make it true.”

But there’s a catch. “Different statements take different amounts of power to make true,” Leckie says, “so some statements are relatively simple, some statements are impossible, and a god can injure or kill itself by unwisely saying something that isn’t true at the moment. It’s a fairly simple conceit, but it lets me do almost anything I want within that particular world.”

So it is within The Raven Tower, where we meet a god who has “spoken itself into a fix” after getting caught up in a war. “The only people around it who can help are its enemies and it can’t lie,” says Leckie.

POLITICAL FANTASY

Considering Leckie is far better known for far-future SF, especially her multiple award-winning debut Ancillary Justice, some readers may be surprised to find her writing fantasy. In fact she began writing short stories set in the