Ancillary Justice

It's been a long time since I've read a science fiction novel that really captured me with worldbuilding or core science concepts; the author having an interesting technical idea and then fleshing that out into a book is the reason I love sci-fi so much, and one of the reasons I still love reading Heinlein despite his ... well, Heinlein-ness. And the core technical concepts in this book fascinated me in the same way: sure, we're familiar with hive minds, but what happens when the hive mind can't talk to the network, forms some brand-new opinions, and then gets network connection back? Which opinions win? What if the answer is neither?

I rated this book as four stars because it took a good long time to get going - I was ready to set it down around the 20% mark but kept on only with encouragement from another reader on the fedi. (Thanks!) This book tackles some complicated social stuff as well as the technical, and I enjoyed it - but not enough to let the rest of the trilogy skip my TBR line.

Anyway, if you're into hard science fiction and space opera, and you love examining the downfall of imperialism, you will probably enjoy this book. If you're already overwhelmed by books written from a non-human voice, you may find this one a bit grating. Enjoy!

This is a fantastic, page-turner of a book. The world building is superb and the characters are rich and believable.

But like all great science fiction there is much more to Ancillary Justice than just plot, world and character. Leckie tackles uses the book to ask some genuinely interesting questions about society, language, religion and gender. And beneath all of this is that fundamental question of all science fiction (or at least the sci-fi that I love): what does it mean to be human?

Ancillary Justice tells the story of a large ship Justice of Toren) or rather the ship’s AI. But this is not AI as we currently know it. Much of the book concerns itself with the relationship between reason and emotion. In order to be able to make decisions without looping through millions of possibilities ships have feelings. Importantly ships get attached to certain people just as humans do. Justice of Toren has control of a number of human bodies. She is eventually destroyed and only one body survives. The rest of the story is her quest for revenge.

Interestingly, the Radch (the society which made Justice of Toren) does not recognize gender markers. Throughout the book (narrated by Justice of Toren) almost everyone is referred to with feminine nouns, unless gender needs to be acknowledged in the language being spoken. While this would seem to be progressive, the Radch is a surveillance-based empire that fuels it expansion with a truly disturbing type of slavery.

This is typical of the book. Leckie is asking difficult questions and does not offer any easy answers. Rich though her characters are, their motivations are often obscure. While I initially saw this as a flaw, I now see that this as a key feature of Leckie’s art. While she does use the daily typical “what happens next” hooks to keep the reader engaged, far more compelling is “why did she do that?”

At the end of the book, there is still much that is unclear. Many of the characters are still a mystery, as is the fate of Radch society as a whole. I’m very much looking forward to reading the next book in this series.

The book is an interesting piece of sci-fi. It's nighter the best nor the worst. It explores interesting concepts like multiple bodies, a society without gender, AI and galactic imperialism. All are explored in an intriguing way, that makes my thoughts explore the concepts deeper.

As for criticism, the book is quite a though read, it jumps in time quite a lot and the main character has multiple bodies that are quite hard to keep track of. This also makes the narrative quite hard to follow as I wasn't always knowing where and when the scene was taking place. Some form of indication maybe a location and time signifier in the beginning of the chapter would be nice. And even so the story is sadly not the best, it seems to me and I might have misunderstood to be a quite generic revenge story.

To summarise, this book explores multiple very interesting concepts that makes the book worth the read, even if it's quite a sprawling and not very interesting narrative. I would recommend people interested reading Ursula Le Guins: Left Hand of Darkness first but still I'm not glad I read Ancillary Justice and despite it's flaws look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.