If you’ve read Ancillary Justice and enjoyed the hell out of it, then yay: you’re my kind of people. Maybe you’ll enjoy this little parody I wrote a while ago.

If you haven’t read the Nebula and Hugo award-winning novel Ancillary Justice and its sequels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, then a) this cartoon won’t make a lot of sense, and b) do I ever have a treat waiting for you, especially if you like brilliantly imagined literary entertaining-as-hell space opera.

This cartoon has been bopping around in my mind (and more recently my sketchbook) for a while now. I was kind of delighted, kind of chagrined, when I saw that author Ann Leckie tweeted pretty much the same joke yesterday. But then…

https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/684436984060854273

 

https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/684440806590164992

Awfully decent of you, citizen.

And now, a few tweaks to the cartoon idea later, here we are.

Quick briefing if none of this makes sense to you: Ancillary Justice‘s narrator usually refers the story’s characters as “she” regardless of their gender. And the Bechdel Test (or Bechdel-Wallace Test) arose from a great Alison Bechdel comic where one character says she only sees movies that have at least two women in it, who talk to each other about something other than a man. Oh, and iPhones get warm if they work hard.

By the way, I do believe this cartoon passes the Bechdel-Wallace Test. :)