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A review by thesinginglights
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
3.0
Oh boy. Ancillary Justice. Lot of hype around this book and pretty much every major SFF award under its belt. Oh, and did I mention that it's a debut? Worthy accolades so early on. It's also a book that's not particularly prone to really explaining absolutely every aspect of the tale, a common bane of many great SFF writers. It's not as though you get nothing--it does explain a lot of things--but you really have to focus and pick up details for yourself and pay attention. I imagine it's a more rewarding trip the second time around.
So now you might be asking yourselves why the three stars. Well, for all its uniqueness, it does suffer a bit. Let me get into it.
The Good
Breq/One Esk/Justice of Toren was a wonderfully realised protagonist. The prose is brisk and deceptively simple but underneath is a whole range of experiences and nuance. The tone of the prose is very cool and removed, as we would expect from a first-person perspective of an AI, but again underneath there is clear emotional life in Breq, albeit different to our own somewhat. Our story starts off in the present day and details Breq a ship's AI named Justice of Toren. Ship AIs observe every detail of their crews and manage all the mundane tasks you would expect. Now the AI, for a more hands-on approach, are filtered through human bodies called "ancillaries" (or corpse soldiers by people who are not part of the dominant galactic power, the Radch). These act as the eyes and ears for ships and allow for simultaneous communication and experiences. One of the ancillaries is named One Esk (Nineteen, I think), now going by Breq, and an act of treachery has destroyed all she was before, leaving her just a solitary body and a hunger for revenge. For someone (or thing) whose primary purpose was to be spread across multiple bodies, this is pretty disorienting.
The plot of book alternates for about 70% of the novel between Breq in the present day and Justice of Toren's heyday, about 20 years prior.
An interesting thing is the treatment of gender in the book. The Radchaai (the dominant, world-conquering superpower) do not differentiate gender in their language, as well as their culture. Gender is exceptionally fluid and so it seems they have no need of differentiating pronouns. The text uses "she" and "her" as gender-neutral substitutes. In the early stages I often found myself trying to figure "man or woman?" but towards the end I stopped and allowed myself to understand that's not of massive concern (although some characters are given clear identifiers). This does cause Breq some pains in trying to use appropriate pronouns outside of Radch space. A little confusing to begin with but you soon get into the groove.
The strength of this book derives from this idea of a ship's AI and the idea of multiple bodies. Across the novel interesting ideas about identity are satisfyingly eked out. In many of the scenes in the past Leckie has set herself the difficult task of trying to explain what it's like to be a seemingly unitary consciousness split across multiple bodies each doing their own thing. I think for the task set upon her she succeeded. It does require some focus on the part of the reader but not in a sense that detracts too much from the experience. In fact, since we're here, the real powerhouse of this book is the execution of the Justice of Toren as Justice of Toren storyline. The last chapters in this sequence were especially compelling for their pacing and characterisation, and are definitely the highlight of this book.
Other cool things were the different cultural aspects of Radchaai with bits of things pertaining to language. Overall, the multiple bodies was a particularly striking concept that was both explored and executed well.
The Bad
So this book is divided in two, as we've established. The present storyline is a revenge story; our protagonist is going to hunt the bastard who made her less of what she is now. Excellent motivations for a classic revenge plot. Unfortunately ... we don't really get all that much in the way of actually moving plot. I'll keep it spoiler free, but for a while Breq has been hunting for the means to exact her revenge. It just so happens that this quest has taken her the better part of 19 years (the 'Verse is a big place, let's not mince words here). That's not my issue. My issue is the surprising amount of focus to the extremely dull Seivarden. The beginning sequence sees Breq pulling him out of a ship's wreckage. She doesn't even know why (I don't, either, to honest)! Over the next hundred or so pages (close to two) we get a drug-addled man who offers nothing much in the way of the plot. Some expansions of the world itself in terms of their significance to the Radch Empire's history but they do little else but moan or follow Breq like a dog. Honestly, by the end, I found myself being bored by him. In fact, the characters overall, barring Breq, a dusting of secondary characters, as well as the antagonist, are particularly uninteresting. I found myself having little concern over their general well-being. Lieutenant Awn in the past story was much more compelling and I wondered why Leckie didn't develop her present cast to that same quality. Also, the story didn't progress for the longest of time. It was sluggishly paced and I was clamouring for more about Lieutenant Awn in the colonies. The last third of it was rewarding but not merely enough to justify how long it took to limp along.
There's enough in it that I'd come back for more but I feel like some oversights with the plotting that I hope get rectified. With the high-concept space opera stuff, Leckie thrives. I'm very glad that her unique ideas succeeded. She shows demonstrable power with characterisation but it's very uneven. I'm hoping that the next book will balance things a bit more, but I could see myself going the whole nine yards with Breq and her story. I'd also be intrigued as to what Leckie will write after her trilogy.
So now you might be asking yourselves why the three stars. Well, for all its uniqueness, it does suffer a bit. Let me get into it.
The Good
Breq/One Esk/Justice of Toren was a wonderfully realised protagonist. The prose is brisk and deceptively simple but underneath is a whole range of experiences and nuance. The tone of the prose is very cool and removed, as we would expect from a first-person perspective of an AI, but again underneath there is clear emotional life in Breq, albeit different to our own somewhat. Our story starts off in the present day and details Breq a ship's AI named Justice of Toren. Ship AIs observe every detail of their crews and manage all the mundane tasks you would expect. Now the AI, for a more hands-on approach, are filtered through human bodies called "ancillaries" (or corpse soldiers by people who are not part of the dominant galactic power, the Radch). These act as the eyes and ears for ships and allow for simultaneous communication and experiences. One of the ancillaries is named One Esk (Nineteen, I think), now going by Breq, and an act of treachery has destroyed all she was before, leaving her just a solitary body and a hunger for revenge. For someone (or thing) whose primary purpose was to be spread across multiple bodies, this is pretty disorienting.
The plot of book alternates for about 70% of the novel between Breq in the present day and Justice of Toren's heyday, about 20 years prior.
An interesting thing is the treatment of gender in the book. The Radchaai (the dominant, world-conquering superpower) do not differentiate gender in their language, as well as their culture. Gender is exceptionally fluid and so it seems they have no need of differentiating pronouns. The text uses "she" and "her" as gender-neutral substitutes. In the early stages I often found myself trying to figure "man or woman?" but towards the end I stopped and allowed myself to understand that's not of massive concern (although some characters are given clear identifiers). This does cause Breq some pains in trying to use appropriate pronouns outside of Radch space. A little confusing to begin with but you soon get into the groove.
The strength of this book derives from this idea of a ship's AI and the idea of multiple bodies. Across the novel interesting ideas about identity are satisfyingly eked out. In many of the scenes in the past Leckie has set herself the difficult task of trying to explain what it's like to be a seemingly unitary consciousness split across multiple bodies each doing their own thing. I think for the task set upon her she succeeded. It does require some focus on the part of the reader but not in a sense that detracts too much from the experience. In fact, since we're here, the real powerhouse of this book is the execution of the Justice of Toren as Justice of Toren storyline. The last chapters in this sequence were especially compelling for their pacing and characterisation, and are definitely the highlight of this book.
Other cool things were the different cultural aspects of Radchaai with bits of things pertaining to language. Overall, the multiple bodies was a particularly striking concept that was both explored and executed well.
The Bad
So this book is divided in two, as we've established. The present storyline is a revenge story; our protagonist is going to hunt the bastard who made her less of what she is now. Excellent motivations for a classic revenge plot. Unfortunately ... we don't really get all that much in the way of actually moving plot. I'll keep it spoiler free, but for a while Breq has been hunting for the means to exact her revenge. It just so happens that this quest has taken her the better part of 19 years (the 'Verse is a big place, let's not mince words here). That's not my issue. My issue is the surprising amount of focus to the extremely dull Seivarden. The beginning sequence sees Breq pulling him out of a ship's wreckage. She doesn't even know why (I don't, either, to honest)! Over the next hundred or so pages (close to two) we get a drug-addled man who offers nothing much in the way of the plot. Some expansions of the world itself in terms of their significance to the Radch Empire's history but they do little else but moan or follow Breq like a dog. Honestly, by the end, I found myself being bored by him. In fact, the characters overall, barring Breq, a dusting of secondary characters, as well as the antagonist, are particularly uninteresting. I found myself having little concern over their general well-being. Lieutenant Awn in the past story was much more compelling and I wondered why Leckie didn't develop her present cast to that same quality. Also, the story didn't progress for the longest of time. It was sluggishly paced and I was clamouring for more about Lieutenant Awn in the colonies. The last third of it was rewarding but not merely enough to justify how long it took to limp along.
There's enough in it that I'd come back for more but I feel like some oversights with the plotting that I hope get rectified. With the high-concept space opera stuff, Leckie thrives. I'm very glad that her unique ideas succeeded. She shows demonstrable power with characterisation but it's very uneven. I'm hoping that the next book will balance things a bit more, but I could see myself going the whole nine yards with Breq and her story. I'd also be intrigued as to what Leckie will write after her trilogy.