Paperback, 416 pages
English language
Published Sept. 30, 2013 by Orbit Books.
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.
This took two tries to read, and I'm not sure I entirely like it per se, but it was thought-provoking about things like empire and identity, I suspect I will revisit it, and now I can read the rest of the series.
Longer review to follow at patreon.com/riversidewings
writing a protagonist who is several different people wrapped into one consciousness, and is for some part of the story, not necessarily reliable as a storyteller, feels like it would've been a challenge, but ann leckie made it seem natural
the worldbuilding is, typically for good sci fi, brilliant. i felt absorbed into it. the constant surveillance within the radch is disturbing and feels connected to the real-life present. the colour and the characters are lovely.
i also noted that this is ann leckie's first full length novel and i'm super impressed.
i'm eager to read the next 2 in the series, though i'm going to read something else in between so i don't get series burnout!
There's so many good bits and little shiny details in this epic redemption journey. In the past, a simple occupation mission by an atrocious all-conquering invasion force goes awry with a mysterious conspiracy coming to a head. The protagonist is an AI ship consciousness multiply embodied in enslaved human soldiers. A crisis builds under the watchful eye of an empress that rules from within thousands of bodies.
In the present, the aftermath of the crisis is our protagonist singly embodied, troubled by the atrocities it committed and dedicated to a hopeless mission of vengeance.
There is a lot of dealing with a... not an untrustworthy narrator but an extremely neurodivergent naive narrator. Lots of fun gender issues and language issues that present as interesting puzzles for the reader.
This is the second time I've listened to this book, and I've loved it both times.
J’ai eu du mal à me mettre dedans, les règles grammaticales sur le genre étant non seulement confusante mais désagréable (j’ai eu l’occasion de lire un livre où tout était genré au féminin « elle pleut », « la bébé », mais ce n’est pas pareil).
Après quelques chapitres (et ayant appris que la version originale était aussi « perturbante » et que ce n’était pas une aberration de traduction), j’ai enfin profité du livre.
Une histoire complexe et très bien ficelée, originale, que j’ai trouvé très rafraîchissante.
The idea of a split awareness, of “self” being distributed among multiple bodies drew me in, but I think I enjoyed the concept more than the story itself. I found the present-day story in the first half slow going. I don’t know how necessary the dual timeline was. The Radch (Radchaai?) culture was interesting, with its rituals, religion, tea and inter-house politics. That said, many of the cultural details seemed there more as unrelated background, and the story could have played out in a similar way in a very different setting.
The characters and there decisions didn’t always make sense to me, which maybe kept me from being fully engaged. Overall, I’m glad I read this, but I’m not in a rush to pick up the sequel.
Super cool gender, identity, cultural and existential stuff. A new gold standard I think. Felt like home, finally.
On the recommendation of a dear mustelid, I've read:
Ann Leckie's "Ancillary Justice" (2013), a space opera following an expansive battleship AI who's found herself lost and reduced to a single human body, and is seeking to do... something, to perhaps avenge that loss.
Themes include gender blindness and what I'm reading as commentary on the vastness and heterogeneity of the human mind.
10/10: I wasn't bored for a single page, or paragraph-- much more than I can say of most favorites.
There's a lot of death and destruction happening throughout the book and the Radch is quite an evil Empire. Nevertheless, the two main characters grew on me quickly. Great world-building but done in a restrained manner. The story itself is quite the wild ride. It also stands on its own, despite being the first book in a trilogy.
I loved the book, especially enjoyed the narration by Adjoa Andoh.
"Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings."
This is a difficult review to write, because I thought there was a lot to like in this book! I also thought there was a lot that bothered me about this book too! I'm terrible at math and am not sure where my book calculus is going to lie on this one.
I'm going to skip a casual recap of the story, because it's a very hard story to summarize without spoilers. A lot of the reveals aren't really major story twists, but just small things the reader has to put together for the overall story to make sense. I feel like summarizing the story would do it an injustice (hehehe), so I'll just say that this is a civil war-esque story in a sci-fi setting with an interesting main character viewpoint and some twists on standard …
"Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings."
This is a difficult review to write, because I thought there was a lot to like in this book! I also thought there was a lot that bothered me about this book too! I'm terrible at math and am not sure where my book calculus is going to lie on this one.
I'm going to skip a casual recap of the story, because it's a very hard story to summarize without spoilers. A lot of the reveals aren't really major story twists, but just small things the reader has to put together for the overall story to make sense. I feel like summarizing the story would do it an injustice (hehehe), so I'll just say that this is a civil war-esque story in a sci-fi setting with an interesting main character viewpoint and some twists on standard ideas of gender and identity.
To get what I disliked out of the way first, I sort of didn't like how the book onboards the reader. While normally I don't have a problem with books that start you out in the middle of the action, there's usually enough in-the-moment exposition to at least orient the reader and get them moving in the same direction as the author/story. I feel like more could be done to make the reader feel less lost, as I didn't start putting pieces together until maybe a third of the way through. I also felt like the last chapter was weak, when compared with the rest of the book. Without spoilers, it felt tonally different than the rest of the book, like it only existed to carry the reader from book 1 to book 2.
I will say that once the story started coming together for me (literally, about halfway through), I really felt drawn in and interested in what was going on. I liked the uniqueness of the main character's viewpoint, and even the side characters all felt interesting and varied (if a little disposable, when compared with both the main character and the antagonist). The twist on the idea of gender was also unique, ultimately leading me to the idea that gender didn't matter in this book. I also liked the exposition on identity and what it means when you're not human.
I give this 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 out of respect for the friend who recommended it to me and the fact that Goodreads doesn't do half stars. I'll definitely continue the series some point soon out of curiosity to see where the story goes.
I’m not usually one for caring about plot but, I could have used more in this case. The discussion about identity was interesting at times but overall didn’t really go deep enough from me, and the relationships all fell flat too. Still there’s some interesting ideas and concepts explored so it’s worth a read, but I think Leckie got too involved in the the concepts to come up with a plot for them to be important in. Maybe the next book will help to flesh out the relationships and world a little more.
2021-07-05: 2nd reading: absolutely loved this book. Maybe because I've already read the series and that made it far less confusing this time, or I was just in the right mood this time. For whatever reason, really enjoyed this book.
2018-08-13: Original reading: Needlessly confusing language about ships and titles, so much so that I almost stopped reading. But then I missed the story so picked it up again via audiobook, and loved it overall. Still think I don't totally understand what a "justice", "mercey" is. More in the confusion and some guesses here: www.goodreads.com/questions/1376602-i-m-half-way-through-the-book-thought-i/answers/743517-my-understanding-of
не певен... окремі фрагменти читаються цікаво й легко: ті, де події розвиваються швидко. решта — повільні, заплутані діалоги або монологи, в якх я плутався (на слух, бо аудіокнижка) як мале дитя... коротше кажучи, таке.
What a slow burner this book is. By the time you realize how really really good it is, you're more than halfway done, so it definitely requires patience.
The first-person narrator is Breq, who felt a bit like a prototype for our beloved Murderbot from the Martha Wells series. Breq is an ancillary, a human body controlled by the AI of a ship, in this case the Justice of Toren. Only Breq's ship no longer exists, so instead of having hundreds of bodies and eyes and all that comes with being the body of a ship, there's just her, on her mission to kill the Lord of the Radch, the leader of the Empire of Radch.
Along the way she gets stuck with Seivarden, one of her former officers who's struggling with substance abuse after waking up a 1000 years after her ship was destroyed.
In order to understand this …
What a slow burner this book is. By the time you realize how really really good it is, you're more than halfway done, so it definitely requires patience.
The first-person narrator is Breq, who felt a bit like a prototype for our beloved Murderbot from the Martha Wells series. Breq is an ancillary, a human body controlled by the AI of a ship, in this case the Justice of Toren. Only Breq's ship no longer exists, so instead of having hundreds of bodies and eyes and all that comes with being the body of a ship, there's just her, on her mission to kill the Lord of the Radch, the leader of the Empire of Radch.
Along the way she gets stuck with Seivarden, one of her former officers who's struggling with substance abuse after waking up a 1000 years after her ship was destroyed.
In order to understand this much of the plot, you have to be like 40% into this book because you get tossed right in, with lots of flashbacks to Breq's previous life. Nothing makes sense! And what's with the gender stuff, generic feminine gender in an English language book, what gives? And it takes a while to settle in how brilliant that is. The Radch have no concept of gender and so always use the feminine, and after a while you really stop asking yourself what gender the characters in the book really have. Does it really matter if Seivarden or Anaander Mianaai are male or female? It totally doesn't.
When things get rolling, you're totally glued to this book, or rather, I was. I want to learn more about the Radch, all the backstory, and I definitely want to see how Breq or rather One Esk, will go on when she's back on a ship, but one that's not herself.
