WIRED Book Club: How Sci-Fi Author Ann Leckie Taught an AI to Sing With 20 Voices

You might think that every choice a writer makes is highly deliberate, part of a grand master plan that only she is entirely aware of. We certainly felt that way while reading Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie's award-winning sci-fi novel about a spaceship AI that gets trapped in a single body and seeks revenge on her enemies. There are so many details embedded in the world-building--from a fixation on gloves and tea to the use of "she" for all genders--that Leckie surely had reams of unpublished backstory (or at least a yarn chart) to explain and keep track of it all. But as we found out in our WIRED Book Club conversation with the author, Leckie takes a far less structured approach when it comes to creating new universes. Was this series always a trilogy in your mind? Though I'm not sure why, to be honest.