Title: Ancillary Justice Series: Imperial Radch #1
Author: Ann Leckie
Published: October 1, 2013
Genre(s): Science Fiction
Page Count: 386
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.
By and large, science fiction remains a genre on the outskirts of my wheelhouse, if not outside it entirely. I feel, though, that if every book in the genre could be as strong as Ancillary Justice, I would quickly become a huge (and I do mean huge) fan. This novel is complex and intelligent, completely unique from anything I’ve ever encountered—as well as being readable, exciting, and fast-paced.
Maybe because of my inexperience with genre conventions, or because of the novelty of Ancillary Justice‘s concept, it took me a bit to get the hang of reading this. Because the narrator is, by essence of being herself, a lot more multifaceted than your typical protagonist, and because the first portion of the book has a split timeline, I didn’t immediately understand what was going on. And maybe this was on purpose at some level, as Leckie was trying to demonstrate how unlike our earth the society of the book is. In any case, by the time the plot really gets going, the reader is fully immersed and the storyline, while complicated, isn’t hard to follow at all.
One of the first points of confusion for me in Ancillary Justice, but ultimately an aspect I deeply enjoyed and appreciated, was how Leckie presents gender. I’m certainly not unique in saying that gender is a socially-imposed performance; this book tackles and challenges that in a whole new way. In our narrator, Breq’s, native language, gender does not exist. There are no pronouns or gendered verb conjugations, etc. Additionally, the people of the society are highly androgynous in appearance and mannerisms. As a culture, the Radchaii place no more importance on your gender (or, for that matter, your sex) than the length of your fingernails or size of your ears. So not only did I find this idea very intriguing from a “wouldn’t it be nice if…” standpoint, I was also completely shook by the linguistic implications.
See, studies have show that what a person can understand/know is limited to what they have the words to refer to. One can differentiate colors based on whether or not the words for those colors exist in a language—the article I read talked about languages with special words for shades of blue that, to an English speaker, would just all be termed as “light blue”. (Also, consider the film Arrival and what happens when Amy Adams’ learns the visitors’ language.) So, going back to Ancillary Justice and its presentation of gender. Here we have Breq, who is used to only referring to everyone as “citizen” and by the gender-neutral “she” pronoun., thrown into a variety of cultures where gender does exist within the language. By observing her fumble with correct forms of address and blunder through what marks an individual as “male” and “female” on each planet, the reader truly sees how arbitrary it all really is. We’ve all heard the “gender is just a social construct” speech, but Ancillary Justice really demonstrates it.
— all of this blathering is inspired by a brief crisis I had on page 5 or so. That concluded, we can now move on to the rest of the book.
So. As I said, the book is a bit complicated when you first dive in, but before long it resolves itself into a pretty straightforward plot: Breq is a girl who used to be a spaceship and is now on a mission to assassinate the ruler of the galactic empire. And once we get there, it’s easy to see that this is exactly the type of story I love. (Ask me sometime about how nuts I am for political fantasy.) Ann Leckie really hones in on the turmoil, history, and issues that go into the situation Breq is in, and manages to explain things on both a grand, sweeping and a smaller, personal scale. To be honest, I just really love stories about corrupt governments and anarchist schemes and manipulative politicians and suchlike.
And then, of course, theres the whole *our protagonist used to be a spaceship* thing, which, yeah. I’m here for it. The set-up is a bit too intricate to describe adequately in a review, which is why you should read the book. The gist is: spaceships are operated by very advanced AI that can divide itself into several entities at once, creating a large body of computers/bodies that are all, essentially, the same AI. Except not. Except yes. Basically, you should read the book because it’s smart and brilliant and fascinating and super excellent.
Like I said before, I don’t have enough experience to say whether or not Ancillary Justice is unique in comparison to the rest of the genre. However, it’s certainly different than what I typically read. And no matter what, it’s a very, very good book. To repeat myself: this is worth a try, at the very least.
