Ancillary Justice

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.