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.