English language
Published Sept. 23, 2022 by Springer International Publishing AG.
NB! This is not Ancilliary Justice, but a crititical companion.
This book argues that Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice’s exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.
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.
The consequences of (space) colonisation and imperialism, the limits of humanity and how they need to be expended, the relation between gender and language, the irrelevance of gender... So good
A bit slow to catch my attention, once I got into this I fell in love with the protagonist. Eagerly diving into the rest of this series.
Inutilmente complicato e onestamente non mi ha entusiasmato. Forse non l'ho capito io o forse sono troppo legato all'hard scifi classica.
This is an interesting story concept and perspective. There is a huge expansive universe created for this story. I am interested to read more from this universe.
This book got a bit of publicity for the author's choice to make the language of the ruling empire (Radch) have only one pronoun, which defaults to female. So every character in the book is a "she" to the narrator, regardless of whether they actually are. This makes the first part of the book in particular a little confusing; it took me a while to figure out, and I'm still a bit confused about who exactly wasn't actually a "she". Which, I suppose, is an interesting way for the author to have made the point that it doesn't really matter, and also why NOT default to "she" as much as anything else?
Anyway, pronoun choices aside, the book's a very interesting SF story following the Justice of Toren, a sapient battle ship in the Radch military fleet. Justice of Toren is manifested in hundreds of "ancillaries", each ancillary being a …
This book got a bit of publicity for the author's choice to make the language of the ruling empire (Radch) have only one pronoun, which defaults to female. So every character in the book is a "she" to the narrator, regardless of whether they actually are. This makes the first part of the book in particular a little confusing; it took me a while to figure out, and I'm still a bit confused about who exactly wasn't actually a "she". Which, I suppose, is an interesting way for the author to have made the point that it doesn't really matter, and also why NOT default to "she" as much as anything else?
Anyway, pronoun choices aside, the book's a very interesting SF story following the Justice of Toren, a sapient battle ship in the Radch military fleet. Justice of Toren is manifested in hundreds of "ancillaries", each ancillary being a formerly human person whose original personality has been removed, and whose body has been converted to use as essentially a remote tool for the ship. The ship inhabits hundreds of ancillaries all simultaneously in order to maintain a physical presence everywhere needed. This book is the story of one of them that has become separated from the ship (for reasons we eventually find out about half way through the book) and is now living independently, trying to be a person but with the memories of being a massive multi-consciousness battle ship thousands of years old. Which, not surprisingly, is taking some adjustment.
The story flips back and forth in time, mainly between the events leading up to getting separated from Justice of Toren, and the present time where our protagonist is on a journey related to the earlier event. Along the way it also meets several people it knew from when it was a ship and embarks on what seems like a particularly crazy mission for revenge.
It's hard to describe the plot too much without spoilers, but if you enjoy sapient ships and AI (like "The Ship Who Sang", or "Children of Time") and don't mind putting in a little mental effort into figuring out what's going on at the start of the book, it's a pretty unique set of characters and a very interesting galactic empire and set of challenges to overcome. I enjoyed it, but 4 stars rather than 5 as I did find it confusing in places and also most of the characters aren't particularly likeable, which is always a problem for me.
This is the first of a trilogy, and while the story wraps up pretty well without a suspenseful cliffhanger, it's still clear there will be more to come should you wish to pick up the next.
This is a really good read, with great concepts. Definitely a page turner!
Dass von allen Figuren durchgehend als she/her die Rede ist, obwohl gleichzeitig klar ist, dass sie irgendwelche Geschlechter haben und für andere als das Ich-Erzählwesen auch als Angehörige dieser Geschlechter erkennbar sind, das fand ich gut und interessant. Den Rest nicht, oh Gott, der Plot, irgendein vielhundertseitiger Feudalismusquatsch mit Blumenschmuck und Ritualen. Ich hab es nur aus Starrsinn zu Ende gelesen.
The key twist in this fun sci-fi novel is that the narrator is a single AI operating as a person, but also simultaneously a ship and ancillary parts. This allows the author to give us a god-like perspective while also keeping the narrator just relatable enough to empathize with. It's a great way to play with perspective and it's well-played throughout the novel. Recommended.
I only made it half-way. I had no idea what was going on and I didn't care enough to find out.
