Let it be said first, I'm a massive fan of this writer. There's nothing she's written that I haven't at least enjoyed or even absolutely loved, so I suspect I am ground zero for a collection of short fiction, much of which is written in and around the worlds she's created in her longer fiction.

This is a collection of all her shorter fiction to date, some of which (e.g. 'She Commands Me and I Obey' or 'The God of Au') I'd read before and really loved and some of which was new to me this time around. I liked it a lot, have added a paper copy to my lengthy Want To Buy list (sorry Ann, you might have to wait) and recommend it to anyone who's enjoyed her novels.

<I>I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, via Netgalley. This is my honest review of the book in question.</i>

Reviewed on Bluesky:

I've been parceling out Ann Leckie's Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction over the last couple of months, a story a night before going to bed. I don't think there's anyone who does it like her.

Some of the stories are set in the Imperial Radch universe, others in the setting of The Raven Tower, and the rest are original. But always, there's a depth of worldbuilding that hits you as soon as you start reading. A richness to the setting that you don't get in most short fiction.

The thing about Leckie is that as soon as you start reading something by her, you know you're in the hands of a master storyteller. She makes it look so easy that you can almost take it for granted. But then you read this book, which is one banger after another, and you remember what a feat that is.

For context, I came to this collection having read (and loved The Raven Tower but not any of Leckie's SF.

Ann Leckie is such a skilled writer that I don't think she could ever write anything *bad*, but my impression from relatively early on in this collection--and which persisted throughout--is that she is really a novelist at her core. The stories were all enjoyable, some of them even memorable, but there was that x factor lacking which really elevates the best short fiction for me. I've seen another review say that Leckie's short stories read like she's figuring out ideas and working through them before applying the finished product to her novels, and I definitely agree; there was a sense of unfinished-ness to a lot of the stories, a feeling that the story just ended rather than came to a proper close--and I say this as someone who loves short stories that 'leave early'. In addition (to again plunder another reviewer's observations) Leckie is very much concerned with the same handful of themes. This wouldn't be a problem, except that given so much of the collection involved stories in a single setting, placed back to back--especially the Raven Tower section, which comprised a full half of the book--it felt a little like reading the same story told over and over again. It was a particular shame as I found the Raven Tower stories overall the strongest, but know I'd have enjoyed them more individually than grouped together.

In summary, while I did enjoy the collection, and I'm definitely keen to read more of Leckie's long form writing, I probably won't go out of my way to pick up her short form stuff in future; and would probably only recommend this collection to diehard Leckie fans.

Thank you very much to Little, Brown UK and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my review!

I love Ann Leckies books and was very excited as a short story collection was announced. So thank you for giving me the chance to explore the shorter fiction of this author.

The short stories are divided into three parts: ones in the world of the Raven Tower, those in the world of the Radch Empire and some without any context to these two worlds.

I loved the first two parts of the collection but had a lot of problems with the ones from the god-filled Raven Tower world. But more about those later.

The first part had a lot of great stories and showed how diverse Ann Lackie can write. I adored especially Footprints (short and sewwt horror!), The Endangered (I mean … dinosaur like creatures escapted the extinction via space travel and have such an awesome way of preserving history and dealing with disputes?) and Bury the Dead. Also great was Another Word for World. Instantly I thought of Le Guins novel which I haven't read yet. But of what I know it seems like an hommage to the story but with more hopefulness.
Leckie proves that worldbuiling is an strength of her writing but is also able to craft such wonderful characters that exist inside this world.

The second part got into more familiar territory. I even knew Night's slow poison and was surprised by how much I remembered - almost nothing =D I love how the theme of poison and snake's poison in particular is like a thread throughout the story. The tension between the slowness of the travel and the threat of the Radch Empire. It makes me want to read the books again!
Another highlight was She Commands Me and I Obey because the use of names, their meaning and what our protagonists endure is phantastic. At the beginning I struggled a little bit with the setting but that was solved very quickly.

And then the stories set in the world of the Raven Tower, the ones I struggled most with. I think my problem is that The Raven Tower was a perfect book for the perfect moment for me. And those additional stories often confused me more than gave me something. And sometimes I really was confused because for example in The Snake's Wife I couldn't understand how our protagonist fell in love. That was in my opinion a complete different reaction than I expected from what happened to him.
The solution in the end was good like in every story in this part of the collection but I only really liked "Marsh Gods".
What I especially learned with this part: It is not good to take a break in the middle of one of those stories because it was quite confusing to remember who I follow and what the actions of them were up to the point I picked my reader up again.

It is unfortunate that the collection ends with (in my opinion) the weakest part. I still want to read everything by Leckie but I look forward to the two novels I still have on my tbr.

I got this from NetGalley but ended up reading the paper copy I had pre-ordered anyway. It's new Leckie, what else is one supposed to do.

And it's just so profoundly satisfying. There are a couple of stories that I didn't quite love (the humour of Saving Bacon was hit-and-miss, for instance) but the entirety of the collection was lovely. I particularly enjoyed visiting the world of The Raven Tower, which I would love to see followed up with another novel set there. But really, I'll read anything Leckie writes. She has a way with words but, more importantly, she writes people and their ways of living in the world in a way that feels real and moving. It was a treat to see her earlier short work, and I hope new novels and stories will follow.

I was excited to read this short story collection by Ann Leckie, as it collects a lot of her short stories set in the universes of Ancillary Justice and The Raven Tower, two books I really enjoyed, along with some stories in original settings. Strangely I found my favourite stories to be the ones in the original setting, although there were certainly some good ones in the other settings too. It's quite a varied collection, and well worth reading for fans of her work. The stories in the Raven Tower universe felt quite detached from that book, using the general way gods worked in that world to tell lots of different types of stories, rather than expanding on any areas or people we'd already seen. Overall a good read

Lake of Souls collects the short fiction of multi award winning science fiction author Ann Leckie. The collection is divided into three sections. The first group of stories are just general speculative fiction tales, the second group are from Leckie’s Imperial Radch Universe (also sometimes known as the Ancillary Universe due to the award winning trilogy from this setting) and the third group are from the Universe of Leckie’s stand alone fantasy novel The Raven Tower.
The first group of eights stories is a diverse bunch. From the title story which is about a young alien looking for its place in the world and first contact to another great Leckie-esque story about communication and translation Another Word for World. But these are is also a kind of strenge zombie story (Bury the Dead) and super short but effective stories here including the terrifying Footprints and the laugh out loud The Sad History of the Tearless Onion.
Of the group of three Imperial Radch stories only the first, Night’s Slow Poison feels like it requires any knowledge of that universe. The best of these three is the second She Commands Me and I Obey set on a world where a ball game has both fatal and political consequences. The third of these, The Creation and Destruction of the World, is the most tangential and feels more like a folk tale than anything else.
The set of seven stories set I the world of The Raven Tower are the most cohesive and enjoyable. The Raven Tower established a world populated by gods who’s power increased and decreased depending on the level of their observance by people. God’s made deals with people to increase their power but these were always laden with tricks for the unwary. The key thing is that gods must tell the truth and if they are caught lying their power diminishes. Interestingly the short stories these a most reminiscent of are Isaac Asimovs robot stories in which he tested and stretched his three laws od robotics. Similarly, Leckie takes her rules and sees how far she can twist them in different circumstances (for example in The Snake’s Wife can a prediction based around someone marrying the daughter of another king be fulfilled by trying to turn one of his sons into a woman?).
This collection of stories dates from between 2006 and 2015. It shows a writer who is comfortable not only in the long form but also the short form of speculative fiction. While not all of these stories is successful, it is likely that different tales will appeal to different readers. For Lecki fans this is definitely a collection worth exploring.

I have enjoyed Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, and I thought a venture into short stories with an author I enjoyed before would possibly be the turning point that unlocks a new love of short fiction. Unfortunately, I am definitely a a novella over short stories type of reader.

Generally, the writing was good and painted strong pictures of the enviroment and themes the stories are discussing. I had moments where I wished certain stories were developed further into a novella and other stories I felt like I would be happy to skip in future re-reads. #

Top stories for me were:
Lake of Souls
Another Word for World
She Commands Me and I Obey
Marsh Gods

El año pasado tuve la suerte de entrevistar a Ann Leckie en el Festival 42 y entre otras cosas, me recordó a esa señora mayor que te da un tupper de croquetas porque te ve desmejorado. Pues bien, siguiendo con este ejemplo os diría que, por desgracia, las croquetas-relatos de esta recopilación están un poco revenidas.


Las obras recopiladas en Lake of Souls se dividen entre bloques: las independientes, las del universo de Radch y las del universo de Raven Tower.

Las del universo de Radch son lo más salvable que tiene la recopilación, pero claro, esto puede ser debido a que conozco el contexto y no a la propia calidad de los relatos. Por desgracias las del universo de Raven Tower, que no he leído, se basan todas en la misma idea de que los dioses no pueden mentir porque todo lo que dicen se tiene que cumplir y quizá no tengan poder para hacer realidad lo que dicen. Además el poder de los dioses se basa en cuántos seguidores tienen, una percepción muy mercantilista pero nada original, ya que sin irnos muy lejos ahí tenemos la Craft Sequence de Max Gladstone o la saga The Tyrant Philosophers de Adrian Tchaikovsky. Lo del uso del lenguaje pues puede tener gracia como recurso en una relato, pero no en todos los del universo, se acaba haciendo muy cansino.

Y ya el remate del melonar son los relatos independientes, que es que no hay por dónde cogerlos. Aunque el que da título a la colección y es el primero que leemos tiene cierto interés, recuerda demasiado a The Long Game, la contribución de la autora a la recopilación Far Reaches. A partir de ahí, cuesta abajo y sin frenos. “Footprints” es tan corto como innecesario, “Hesperia and Glory” recurre a unos trucos muy burdos para justificarse, “The Endangered Camp” tiene un pase porque lo protagonizan dinosaurios y todo es mejor con dinosaurios aunque sea un relato sobre exploración espacial justo cuando cae el meteorito que ya conocemos… para cuando llegamos a “The Sad History of the Tearless Onion” lo que apetece es llorar sin cebollas de por medio.

No puedo recomendar para nada el libro, que para mí ha sido una tremenda decepción.

I started this book with no previous experience of any world developed by Ann Leckie and nearly got more than I could chew as there were stories set in the different worlds she created.
It was a fascinating experience and I was left wishing I could visit those world soon.
Ms Leckie is master storyteller and I was enthralled and fascinated. It' entertaining and intriguing.
An excellent read, highly recommended if you already read the series but it can be enjoyed in any case
4.5 upped to 5
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Lovely book with one big problem: a reader is expected to be familiar with all of author's worlds. I love her books about the Imperial Radch, but had no clue what happened in her other series, and it really impeded my enjoyment of the last third of the book. My view is mostly that short stories from different series should be divided into separate books.

This is the first Ann Leckie book that i have read and it did not disapoint me. The short stories are divided in science fiction, fantasy and stories in the worlds of her other books (Ancillary justice and Raven Tower). Some stories were better than others, and this is expected in a collection. My favorites were Lake of Souls, Another Word for World, Night's Slow Poison, The God of Au, The Snake's Wife. Between all of these The Snake's Wife and Lake of Souls were the stories that I wanted more of, like a novella of them, I don't know. Anyway, the book helped me to start in Ann Leckie's world and made me want to read all her other books.

Thank you Netgalley and Little, Brown Book Group UK for the ARC.

The ARC copy I had was so corrupted with InDesign codes and duplicated pages that I couldn't read it.

To that end I can't give a sensible review and my score is simply in the middle.

Shame.

Overall I think I would give this collection 3 stars, but I'm generally not a huge short story lover. A few of them stood out and nothing was really bad, but some were just too short to care about at all and I found the whole thing pretty hard to review. I love Ann Leckie's novels, and wish a few of these had been novel (or at least novella) length.

Lake of Souls: 4 - I wanted more of this despite the brutality.

Footprints: 2 - too short to care about.

Hesperia and Glory: 3 - intriguing premise but I wanted more (didn't care about the non-Hesperia part).

The Endangered Camp: 4 - concise but well contained and a fun concept.

Another Word for World: 4 - one of my favourites. I think one of the problems I have with short stories is I always want to find out what happened next and I rarely get to. These characters were great though, and the adventure was compelling.

The Justified: 2 - didn't get on with this at all.

Bury the Dead: 2 - short and insignificant.

The Sad History of the Tearless Onion: 2 - also short and insignificant.

Tales from the Imperial Radch

Night's Slow Poison: still 4, still an upsetting end.

She Commands Me and I Obey: still 3, still took me ages to grasp the naming convention even though I've read it before.

The Creation and Destruction of the World: 2 - I found this one bland and tedious.

Tales from the Raven Tower Universe

The God of Au: 3 - nice to be back in this universe, it has a very comforting Leckie feel and the gods are so interesting. This took a while to get going though.

The Nalendar: 4 - I loved Umri and the fun interactions with the skink god. Despite these stories always being about tricky deals with gods they are all pleasingly different.

The Snake's Wife: 3 - a little ramble and a lot brutal.

Marsh Gods: 4 - Voud was pretty good fun and it had a satisfying end.

The Unknown God: 3 - Not particularly memorable, but not bad either.

Saving Bacon: 3 - Average, had a pleasingly women-centric society, but not much else going for it.

Beloved of the Sun: 2 - I did not dig this one at all. It seemed mostly pointless.

It feels so great to be able to spend more time with Ann Leckie's new writing, and the short story collection format was an absolute treat! Predictably, I loved the Imperial Radch selection most: heartfelt and zany is still the brand, and I am all for it. I loved the standalone SFF stories as well, and they show her craft as a storyteller beautifully. As for those stories set in the Raven Tower world, those were perhaps ones I was least interested in (because I didn't fully connect with Raven Tower itself) but I was pleasantly surprised by them as well! I think if anything, existing in a shorter format makes the humor of that set-up more accessible to me, whereas I struggled with it in a full-fledged novel length.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an early review copy, I thoroughly enjoyed myself!

Welcome to the Leckie-verse. This collection of her short fiction to date falls into three zones. There are stand-alone sci-fi stories - of which the standout Another Word for World touches on language and communication through the old standby set up of a crashed spaceship leaving two very different people to survive. There are a fistful of stories set in the Imperial Rach universe - of which two leap out: the trapped-on-a-spaceship mystery of Night’s Slow Poison, and the delightfully bonkers She Commands Me And I Obey, which imagines a game with the violence of Rollerball and the ritualistic complexity of the Greek Olympics. Finally, there’s Leckie the fantasy writer with a set of stories set in her Raven universe, a world in which there are thousands of local gods who can inhabit fish, ants or bears to speak to human acolytes. These can lean somewhat on the quirky, but there’s a welcome dash of humour to many of these centred on gods who have a clearer eye for the small print in a contract than a Brooklyn lawyer.

Collectively these touch on many of the key Leckie concerns: language and communication across societies; sexual politics, reproduction and gender and the ossification of rigidly hierarchical societies. Would I recommend a reader new to all this to start here. Absolutely not - the Rach stories in particular will make so much more sense after reading the Ancillary novels. But for those already immersed in her worlds this is a great addition.

All these stories, but particularly the last set, do suffer from the box of chocolates effect. After six the delight has diminished somewhat through simple repetition. My recommendation would be to mix up the reading order and don’t try and wolf the whole lot at once.

Description:
Three sets of Leckie's short stories - one set in the Imperial Radch universe (the one the Ancillary... series is set in), one set in the universe of The Raven Tower (where gods are everywhere and very mercantile!) and one set which fall outside of both of these.

Liked:
Really loved a lot of the stories from the world of The Raven Tower - given that that book is standalone and the central conceit was so interesting, I'm really glad we got to see more. The God of Au, The Nalendar and The Snake's Wife are my favourite of these (although The Snake's Wife is pretty ridiculously grim...). Of the other two sets, my clear favourite was She Commands Me and I Obey, where a ball game determines who gets political power. It's very dense -- you'll need to pay attention -- but well worth it. The titular Lake of Souls and The Justified were both interesting too.

Disliked:
I felt the length of some of these worked against them; there were a few where I'd only just gotten my head around the vocab and naming conventions etc by the time the story was through. A couple felt a bit derivative - namely Hesperia and Glory, which felt like a better-than-average example in the almost uniformly mediocre genre (sorry…) of eldritch horror/weird fiction, and Another Word for World, which felt like a budget Le Guin. The former of those I could definitely be legitimately challenged on, so if you wanna know more, please ask. I feel mean with both of the above, so I'll clarify that it's only because I think so highly of most of Leckie's work that I'm being fairly exacting about the weaker specimens in this collection.

Would absolutely recommend, although if you haven’t read Ancillary Justice or The Raven Tower, go away and read them first :P

Thank you to Little, Brown Book Group and NetGalley for providing me an eARC to review!

After recently reading and really enjoying the original Imperial Radch trilogy, I was looking forward to trying something new from Leckie. Unfortunately, I think a lot of elements of why I liked that series are missing because of the short story format.

In the novels, you have time to really build out the world without info dumps, and to create compelling and complex characters. Here, none of that really happens, so you're left with fragments you don't really care about or if you do start to care, the story is over before you can really get too into it.

I also think it's weird to have grouped these three 'eras' together as they are - the stories in the first section are all pretty separate from each other, but then the other two sections feel pretty reliant on you having read the series (and even so they suffer from the same issue as the above).

Sadly a bit of a miss for me, but I hope that it finds its audience, perhaps with fans who have read all of Leckie's catalogue and are hungry for more.

Imaginative, intricate worldbuilding, a wide variety of characters and stories---this collection of short stories is remarkably impressive with its playful experimentation with perspective and language. The first titular short story sets the tone for the wild and wide variety of content and themes seen throughout the collection. Immersive, indeed.

Thanks to Netgalley and Little, Brown Book Group for providing me with the e-ARC/DRC in exchange for an honest review.

I have loved reading science fiction short stories for a long time. My first Wollheim/Carr anthology came my way in my early teens. I was gifted the classic Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (edited by Brian Aldiss) as a teenager, too. The pleasure of a short story anthology is that sense that you shift from one set of ideas and one narrative voice and style to another. Sometimes these shifts are abrupt, but a gifted editor can take you on an emotional and satisfying journey.
When the short stories are all by the same author, on the other hand, I feel the need to set the book (or the Kindle) down between stories, because you need a reset and a moment of decompression before you embark on the next. And because they’re the same author, you often get a similar tone and narrative voice; there isn’t enough contrast.
That said, this was a largely enjoyable collection, with some notable highlights that rank with the best anthologised science fiction I have read. Ann Leckie is well known for her Imperial Radch trilogy, which started with Ancillary Justice in 2013, and has been supplemented by two “standalone” novels set in the same universe, Provenance, and Translation State, which I reviewed last year. As well as these science fiction novels, Leckie has published The Raven Tower, a fantasy novel set in a world of multiple competing gods. And on top of all this, Leckie is a prolific writer of short stories, many of which have now been collected here.
The collection starts strong, with the title story, which reminded me of the kind of thing the great editor Gardner Dozois would have chosen to anthologise. “Lake of Souls” is set on an alien planet upon which the sole survivor of a human ship lands. Unexpectedly, there seems to be intelligent life there. The point of view effects here are really interesting and the story gets the brain working.
“Hesperia and Glory” is another strong entry. It reminded me of a kind of ERB Mars-and-canals classic, but also contains the idea that reality is created by the mind. There is no well.
Leckie is at her best when she uses language and point of view as a way of evoking an alien culture. “Another Word for World” is a case in point. A negotiator crash lands with a religious leader and they have to walk to safety across hostile territory. There only means of communication is through a translation gadget which (it turns out) has been programmed with loads of errors. This is all very Jean-François Lyotard: the Differend.
This collection is divided up into three sections. The first contains standalone short stories like the ones mentioned above; the middle section has three stories from the Imperial Radch universe; and the final (and longest) section consists of stories of various gods and humans from the world of The Raven Tower.
The stories from the Imperial Radch universe don’t really add anything to your knowledge of the main sequence, though I quite liked “Night’s Slow Poison”, an early story set in the Radch universe but nothing to do with the wider story. It features a ship negotiating an area of slow space known as The Crawl—with a spy on board.
The stories from the Raven Tower universe sent me scuttling back to remember The Raven Tower. Again, I’m not sure how I feel about these adjunct stories. Some of them are entertaining and work well. I’d rather they worked in their own terms rather than relating to a whole bunch of others. I think I’d always rather a short story was a standalone thing. I suppose this is a bit like the extra tracks you get on deluxe versions of albums.
Overall, this is an enjoyable collection, but perhaps one for established fans rather than those new to the author’s work.