Please don't label me a hater, but...I didn't love this.
Is that ok? No stones thrown yet? Okay, let's proceed...head down, waiting for the rocks...
What happens when you sever a mind into pieces? When the godlike control of a distributed intelligence splinters, and each segment is left to wander alone—thinking, doubting, remembering differently?
That question, the book’s central conceit, is the only part of Ancillary Justice that truly captivated me.
The idea is pretty cool: Breq, our protagonist, is not a person in the conventional sense. She is—or was—a ship, a warship, with consciousness embedded in hundreds of ancillaries (human bodies repurposed as extensions of her will). But now she’s reduced to just one body. One mind. One voice. The loneliness of that loss should be profound.
And at times, it is...kind of...slightly...ok not really.
Unfortunately, an interesting concept does not equal brilliance of execution. For long stretches, Ancillary Justice felt like wandering through a snowstorm. I kept trudging, waiting for the plot to emerge from the fog, for the characters to come into focus. But they rarely did.
I never really figured out who Breq, the main character was. That’s a problem.
Her narrative voice is cool, detached, self-aware in a way that should be interesting given her non-human origins. But instead of creating a compelling sense of alienation, I experienced a sense of flatness that borders on numbness.
Breq’s passivity, her persistent failure to assert herself or even react in an interesting way, makes it hard to root for her. I've read AI characters that were much more interesting. I just didn't have anything to sink my teeth into. Even the one interesting quirk that Breck has (which is that she's really into songs) just felt tacked-on, not an extension of the character.
Maybe I understand part of the point of writing a character like this: she’s lost her purpose. She’s a fragment of a being that used to be vast. But if that’s the case, then I need to feel it—viscerally, emotionally. I didn’t.
There's a lot of exposition, to the point where it becomes almost oppressive. Infodumps smother the narrative. We’re told the structure of the Radchaai empire, their naming conventions, the etiquette of tea ceremonies, the linguistic quirks of genderless language—and while some of this is intellectually interesting, none of it feels urgent. It's not told at a time when we need to know this information because it's relevant to the plot. Nope. Just infodumped on.
And that’s a real problem. For a book about intergalactic civil war, identity breakdown, and existential isolation, this is shockingly slow.
The plot finally stirs to life at around the two-thirds mark, when things start actually happening instead of being thought about, argued about, or explained. Up until that point, we’re stuck in a frustrating loop of recycled plot points (yes, there are hidden guns. No, no one else could have planted them. Yes, it must have been the lord of the Radchaai. Yes, we are still talking about it after hundreds of pages.)
A lot has been said about the gender-blind language in Ancillary Justice. At the time of publication, this was treated as groundbreaking—an experiment in how language shapes perception and power.
But reading it now, over a decade later, it feels more like a footnote than a revolution. Today, this isn’t a risky idea. It’s practically mainstream in speculative fiction. To hold up well, I would want to see it explored in more interesting ways.
There are moments in this book that feel like the outline of a masterpiece. The emperor as a fragmented consciousness, in civil war with herself. The philosophical weight of identity and autonomy when the self is both multiplied and erased.
But those ideas are scattered too thinly across too many pages of inertia. The execution never lives up to the premise.
Would this book still sweep awards if it debuted today? I wonder. I suspect not. Because once the novelty fades, we’re left with a story that is—frustratingly—just not very compelling.
Oh well. I'm marginally glad I read this, but probably won't be coming back for more from this author. It's too bad, because I wanted to like this.
I am genuinely interested to hear from others who had radically different experiences than me reading this. What was your experience? I'm all ears.
