Ancillary Justice

Second read, this time without me training speed reading so I actually enjoyed the book a lot more. It has some very original ideas and following one AI that's at the same time a ship and (theoretically) hundreds of ancillaries (AIs in human bodies) is quite refreshing even when the idea is utilized only in the first third of the book. The rest basically follows one of those ancillaries, the last surviving one. The best thing about this concept was that some of the dialogues happen parallel to each other because the AI can be in many places at the same time. It's a gimmick but I like it a lot.

Characters are three dimensional, especially One Esk/Breq/the AI but of course the novel would hardly work without the main character having emotions despite being AI. World is also very interesting, a space empire that uses ancillaries to conquer worlds. It's a mix of Orwell's 1984 and Roman Empire with a pinch of Indian castes.

Empire of Radch uses its own language and has actually only one pronoun for both genders which makes things incredibly confusing until someone from outside of Radch mentions the genders of main characters “in different language” that uses pronouns. It's ballsy on paper but falls flat in execution. Especially when the AI has issues recognizing the gender even based on facial and body features. That is simply ridiculous! Makes me wonder how the doctors treat patients when they have only one pronoun but genders need different treatments in some cases. Why even go through the trouble and making it so unless it was to score some cookies with the woke feminist crowd. It's confusing for the reader and must be even more for people living in that world.

It would be 5 stars if the author made it less confusing - if Breq, as a super smart AI, was able to identify gender at least for us readers and if the ending didn't skip one or two weeks when Breq was unconscious and basically everything important happened then. It's lazy writing to push the story forward and when it nears the climax to knockout the main character through whose narration we see the world only to wake her up after everything is resolved.

Probably more of a 3.5.

I remember buying this trilogy a while ago because it's award winning and I've heard about it a lot, but I never got around to it because I wasn't sure if I would actually enjoy what I thought was a very hardcore sci-fi novel. So when one of my book clubs chose it as March's BOTM, I thought I had no more excuses and decided to start listening to the audiobook. And now I have to unpack a bit about how I feel.

The first thing that strikes as unique immediately in this Radch empire is that it is a gender less world and everyone is referred to using the “she/her” pronouns (I suppose that must be their default). So it was actually very interesting to see characters from the Radch trying to figure out the pronouns of people whom they meet in other locations where they do have genders and sometimes wear markers to specify it. Its particularly troubling for anyone from the Radch because they are very focused on formality and would never want to insult anyone by addressing them wrongly. In a similar vein, the Radch are very religious and have their own god and rituals and believe everything is the will of Amaat, but what I found interesting was that how they incorporated the gods of their annexed lands into their own pantheon. I've just never seen such a unique combo of religion and sci-fi before, but it might not feel the same for more veteran readers of the genre.

The aspect of this world that is most important (it's in the title ofcourse) is the use of ancillaries, who are multiple human like beings who all share the same AI mind of their ship. Because the ship in this case is one of our main narrators, we get an almost omnipresent perspective and we see multiple events/conversations happening at the same time through the eyes of a different ancillary. This idea leads to some very interesting questions about identity, the amount of agency each of the ancillaries have, and if they can survive as individuals.

The writing of this definitely surprised me, mostly because I don't expect Hugo award winners to have easily accessible writing styles. But even having a dual timeline didn't trouble me at all and I understood everything quite easily. The past timeline was definitely the interesting one, with an annexation as well as a rebel conspiracy which leads to why our main character is hell bent on revenge in the current timeline - but it's the present story that was very unexpected. I thought it would be action packed or very tense, but for more than half of the book, it was very slice of life and could even feeling boring to some readers because of the slow pace as well as a non existent plot. However, the audiobook narration was very well done and kept me engaged much more than the book would have. The main character also enjoys music a lot, so it was quite surprising and fun to listen to the narrator sing many times during the story. But the core reason which drives the main character gets resolved in such a way towards the end that felt slightly disappointing.

Breq is our main character who is on a revenge mission and it was very interesting to see her motivations, how they evolved, and how much the transformation from being part of a ship to an individual has affected her personality. Seivaarden on the other hand is a long lost military captain come back, trying to find her identity in a world which feels very unfamiliar to her, and hoping to find a new purpose and meaning for her existence. I thought their dynamic was interesting, where they both seem very indifferent to each other's wellbeing but act in the exact opposite manner. And I can't wait to see how it develops across the trilogy. I also liked the side characters Lieutenants Awn and Skaiaat, whose presence maybe limited but are very memorable as well as an unexpected driving force of the story.

But it's definitely the Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai who was most fascinating to get to know. A ruler who has a penchant for power, who decides to replicate herself into multiple bodies, which then leads to very unexpected circumstances and tragedies - is something that I found to be quite intriguing and the way the author uses her writing to show us the differences between the various instances of the Lord was pretty impressive.

In the end, I can see why this may have won awards but it's also not something that everyone will like. It hits the sweet spot for a world with unique gender exploration, colonization, discussion of class privilege and prejudices arousing from it, as well as the idea of finding one's identity in an unfamiliar world. But it also comes with a very slow pace, non existent plot for most of the book, and a dry narrative style that might not suit everyone's tastes. I definitely found the audiobook to be a much better format to enjoy this story, so that would be my recommendation. And I'm also looking forward to see where this is going.

I don't think this book was for me. Which is surprising because the synopsis would argue otherwise. The main character is an AI, a two thousand year old star ship trapped for the past two decades in a single human body, on a quest for answers and revenge. That's gold right there. But this book consistently felt like work, and while I like my reading to be challenging, I'm not too proud to recognize when something is just a little bit out of my league.

What gets talked about the most about this book is the setting and the language, specifically that everyone is referred to a gender-neutral “she.” Which is disorienting and kind of exciting. You can essentially imagine any character as any gender you feel like, or keep them all genderless if that's your fancy. The only characters with specified genders is Breq, our hero, formerly the Justice of Toren, who has a woman's body, and Sevairden, a man she rescues from a drug habit for no other reason that he was a former officer of hers. Breq and Sevairden's relationship is a fascinating one. He (he is referred to as she in the book, obviously, but I'm going to try to be a little less confusing here) was not one of her favorite officers, as she consistently states, and she feels no real attachment to him. Over the course of the book, the feeling is clearly not mutual. Whether its because Sevairden subconsciously recognizes his former ship or because he fell in love with a person who selflessly cared for him when they didn't have to is hard to say- like many things, Leckie leaves this intentionally ambiguous.

In Ancillary Justice, you have to consistently think about what you're reading. You have to think about what it means for an AI to have “favorites” and overturn an entire empire out of grief for a lieutenant she was forced to murder, you have to question your assumption that all figures of authority are male even when they're referred to as “she” (I learned some shit about myself in this, for real), you have to keep track of what the fuck is going on when an omniscient all-powerful AI splits into multiple parts and starts acting against itself. When the climax hit, it was exciting and intense, but a big part of me was just like “I have no idea what they fuck is happening.”

There's also a lot of talking. There's exploration of cultures that consistently feel alien, discussion of morality and philosophy between an ancient AI and humans who don't understand its value. Everything feels at an arm's length, and the use of pronouns has a bit to do with that. When you're constantly questioning how you've interpreted character, its hard to just be in the moment and get absorbed into the story. There are great emotional elements to this - the fact that Breq is so stoic makes when she does get emotionally invested so much more valuable, and the story of Lieutenant Awn is gripping and sad to say the least - but mostly I felt very detached.

I'm really torn about whether I want to read the next book. I really like Breq, or Justice of Toren. I want to see her interact with other AI (the interactions with Station and a Mercy were really interesting but brief), and I want to see where her relationship with Sevairden goes. But I think I might read something a little more straight forward next.

For the 2018 Read Harder Challenge category of sci fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author. This was a challenging book! It had a wealth of details about worlds and space travel, elaborate military titles and family names, puzzling hidden meanings within conversations, but also a great climactic ending. Most interesting to me was the skillful way the author represented gender fluidity throughout. “She” is used as the default pronoun, and the main character is often chagrined when she happens to select the wrong pronoun when referring to individuals she doesn't know. That is, I think the main character is female...

I greatly enjoyed the world-building in this novel (luckily there is a sequel out there already!) and the POV of the main character, once part of a larger “hive mind,” so to speak, now struggling to live inside his/her own head while trying to figure out what happened to the rest of him/her. I can't pick a pronoun because one of the features of this book is a language where the default pronoun in use is “she.” So, a) I don't really know what the gender of the main character is and b) I had to work at remembering that not every character in the novel was female and I guess c) I had to consider whether it mattered. This is one of the things I enjoy about science fiction/speculative fiction - having to think about non-human perspectives makes you really consider what your definition of “human” is in the first place. A very interesting read.

I really wanted to love this but deeply struggled with it. Part it feels like it wants to be hard SF, but is actually written like a Becky Chambers novel. I love Becky Chambers’ books because of how different they are from “traditional” SF, and this book, unfortunately, was not able to stick that landing.

The last 17% of the book was very interesting to me, but it resolved too quickly and easily. I’m giving it a three because I thought the premise was interesting, but it’s probably more of a two because I don’t know that I’d actually recommend it to anyone. An interesting thought experiment, I suppose, but not good enough to make me want to read the next two and endure more of the same.

Absolutely magnificent. Took me a while to see just how contemporary this novel about an empire of the privileged and constantly monitored is - an empire that is literally at war with itself. Writing this now it seems ridiculous that I didn't notice just how perfectly Leckie manages to mirror us, right here, right now.

This book was a bit slow to get into; the unique first person narration and cultural oddities of gender in the Radch made for a confusing start, but it builds to an exciting and very satisfying final third.

A fresh and different take on a galaxy spanning sci-fi revenge story; definitely worthy of the Hugo!

Every once in a great while, a book comes along that makes me very angry to have a job.

If I didn't have any responsibilities, I probably would have devoured this book in a solid, sleepless binge. It is that good. I have never read anything quite like it before, and the fact that it is Ann Leckie's first novel is an absolute shock.

The uniqueness is the main reason I'm so in love with it. The story is told from the point of view of a ship's ancillary, an AI in a human body, separated from herself by a series of events that unfolds smoothly as the story progresses. As such, her point of view is oddly unhuman, though never inhuman. She has emotions, grasps human thought, but she has to overthink her actions to appear human.

She's partnered by Seivarden, a former captain now drug-addict a thousand years removed from the current timeline. Seivarden's character is almost more interesting than the main characters, and the changes in this character and her/his relationship to the plot and to Breq kept me engaged whenever the story had to slow down.

What everyone is talking about, though, and the reason this is a five instead of a four is the story's treatment of gender. Breq is an AI and while seemingly in a female body (I think. At one point someone calls her “little girl,” but even that is questionable given Breq's inability to parse gendered terms) and she uses feminine pronouns and language as her default. Her “native” language has no gendered characteristics and she finds it incredibly difficult to guess the gender of others, a problem in societies like ours where the insult of using the wrong pronoun is huge. Leckie's decision to default female makes this book a stand-out. When I think of any other sci-fi I think of ships filled with male soldiers, male leaders, male protagonists. Leckie makes my brain automatically view every character first as initially female instead of the other way around. They I think only Seivarden is announced as a male character, though always referred to with female pronouns. As I read, I assigned gender to certain characters in the same way I might assign a hair color, a skin tone, a race. Things I choose based on my imagination that are in the end, unimportant to the plot of the story.

Making gender as unimportant as hair color is a truly significant feat, particularly in the male-dominated world of sci-fi literature. This feat is accomplished against a complex plot of political and actual warfare, a series of thoroughly developed world cultures, and the very human drama of our protagonist and her allies. I cannot recommend this book enough to anyone who loves sci-fi and wants a fresh take on the space opera. Read it.

This was a good book but it is slow going. But there is a lot of world building which is very thorough. Some things are never really clear which takes a bit of getting used to. Mainly the fact of gender is never clear. But once you can get past that it is really good. The author uses flashbacks to explain some stuff which is interesting and helpful.By the end I really was into the book and could not put it down. It seems like there is room for a sequel.

Given that many of my closest friendships were forged in the fires of shared literary interests, actually, I have very little overlap in tastes with my real life friends. So despite the fact that my best friend and I both obsessively read science fiction and fantasy, her recommending this to me was not particularly encouraging. She convinced me to read it by pitching the agender society and neurodiversity of the main character, but reading it I found the things that I would have used to pitch it to her in abundance: a deeply created society, such that every utterance of a character was pregnant with meaning, songs and poems that had built up layers of nuance over generations and elaborate rituals. Unlike the sorts of books she typically reads, most of this was implied so that Leckie developed the feel of an intricate created society without the burden of pages and pages of exposition. So I, who hate slow books actually quite enjoyed it.

I liked the exploration of how do very diverse societies clock gender, what does it mean to be an entity (is continuity of consciousness real?) and how do societies change over time