Ancillary Justice

Oh my gawd, what does one say about Ancillary Justice? It's Ann Leckie's first novel, and it has managed to win basically every SFF genre award out there, including the Hugo for Best Novel. It's certainly the sort of book you don't want to talk too much about in front of people who haven't read it, partly because it's a bit hard to explain until you start reading (at which point it's not nearly as difficult to follow as I was afraid it would be) and because you don't want to give anything away. You just kind of want to shove it in people's faces going "IT WON THE HUGO AND THE NEBULA AND THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE JUST READ IT."

This is, of course, insufficient as a book review, and I'm sure will be VERY insufficient as a book club discussion, which is what I've got next Thursday, particularly since everyone at the book club will have read it.

Our protagonist is a soldier who goes by the name of Breq, though this is not her name. She is an AI, and she used to be a much bigger AI: She used to be an entire ship, and all of the cyborg "corpse soldiers"--heavily modified human bodies that all shared one consciousness--that staffed it, known as ancillaries. But Breq, formerly ancillary unit Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen, is the only one left after Justice of Toren and her entire crew were blown up. Now, twenty years later, Breq is hellbent on revenge, and nearly in a position to get it. But there are a couple of complications: One, she picks up one of her former captains, near-dead after developing a drug addiction after being cryogenically frozen for a thousand years. Two, the entity Breq is hellbent on revenge on is none other than the Lord of the Radch, the supreme ruler of the largest imperial human civilization--and the Lord of the Radch has her own ancillary selves, which has led to a whole host of other interesting issues.

The one thing I knew about the Radch going into this book is that they don't mark gender socially--not in language, not in dress, not in mannerism. Unlike Ursula LeGuin in The Left Hand of Darkness, Leckie--through Breq's first-person narration--defaults to referring to everybody as "she," in the dialogue when characters are speaking Radch, and in Breq's viewpoint narration, since her native language is Radch. The result is a book where, 90% of the time, it's easy to read everybody as female, even though there are a few instances where it's pointed out that particular characters are male or female, usually minor ones. I think Sievarden is the only really major character whose gender is ever given; he is male. But I don't know what gender Breq's one remaining body is, or what gender the Lord of the Radch is, or what gender Lieutenant Awn was (although I was strongly reading Awn as female and Lieutenant Skaaiat as male, for some reason). The one excerpt from this book that I had read was a scene where Breq is talking to someone not in Radch and is struggling with picking the right gender markers in the gendered language they are using, and I went into this a little worried that the whole book was going to be like that and be exploring pronoun usage on every page (which would get old fast), but mostly it doesn't--mostly the book zips along just reading like it's all ladies all the time, which I am entirely OK with.

In addition to being a highly personal story of revenge and a highly sci-fi-y story about a ship in the body of a cyborg traveling around a bunch of planets trying to shoot someone with a fancy space gun, this story is also very political. All the conflict and murder and revenging results from a set of policy reforms implemented by the Lord of the Radch, trying to halt the previously inexorable, Manifest Destiny-like expansion and assimilation "civilization" project of imperial Radch. These reforms, of course, call into being the idea that there was something less than 100% ideal with the old way of doing things, which is an idea that is extremely unpopular with many important people, including... ah, but that would be spoilers.

I really wish this book had been out when I was taking Betsy Huang's "Aliens and Others in Science Fiction" course at Clark. Justice of Toren One Esk/Breq's identity stuff is really interesting, especially the stuff about how One Esk differs from the rest of Justice of Toren, and what happens when she gets stuck in one body and tries to pass as human, and ahhhh so much awesome stuff.

Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.co....