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.
Leckie plays with a large number of big ideas here, but at times it feels at bit too much like eating your spinach.
Full review here:
http://fedpeaches.blogspot.com/2013/10/so-many-ideas-so-little-time.html
Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from Net Galley.
Ancillary Justice is science fiction crammed full to the brim with wild ideas. The main character, Breq, is an “ancillary soldier” cut off from her ship for almost twenty years, but she isn’t exactly human, at least not by the standards of her society, the Radch. The Radch, it seems, were aggressive about expansion over thousands of years. As part of that expansion they captured entire civilizations and turned the leftover bodies into these ancillaries – soldiers that shared a mind with their ships, that were effectively as much a part of their ships as any piece of the hull. Corpse soldiers, to quote a slang term.
Breq, who comes from a ship called the Justice of Toren, has spent the past twenty years tirelessly working towards revenge against Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch, who …
Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from Net Galley.
Ancillary Justice is science fiction crammed full to the brim with wild ideas. The main character, Breq, is an “ancillary soldier” cut off from her ship for almost twenty years, but she isn’t exactly human, at least not by the standards of her society, the Radch. The Radch, it seems, were aggressive about expansion over thousands of years. As part of that expansion they captured entire civilizations and turned the leftover bodies into these ancillaries – soldiers that shared a mind with their ships, that were effectively as much a part of their ships as any piece of the hull. Corpse soldiers, to quote a slang term.
Breq, who comes from a ship called the Justice of Toren, has spent the past twenty years tirelessly working towards revenge against Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch, who shares one similarity with Breq and other ancillaries: she has thousands of bodies under her control. This, naturally, complicates Breq’s plan for revenge. In the current day scenes, Breq searches for an artifact that will help her carry out her plans while also caring for a petulant drug-addicted former solider who once served on her ship. These alternate with flashbacks to Breq’s time spent as an ancillary soldier on the last planet annexed by the Radch.
Leckie does a great job of slowly revealing more and more about Breq’s past and the nature of the tragedy that befell her ship. She also takes fairly simple building blocks and turns them into fascinating philosophical mind-benders. What, after all, does it mean for Breq’s I to mean the ship Justice of Toren but also all the hundreds of ancillary soldiers in her hold? The narrative is simultaneously first-person and omniscient, jumping from place to place as the ship’s many perspectives build to a greater whole.
Leckie also sets up the Radch society as one that does not distinguish between the genders when speaking. In practice, this means that everyone in the book is ”she” regardless of gender. Further complicating matters for Breq is the fact that she has a hard time distinguishing gender traits when in other societies, and tends to use incorrectly gendered pronouns. At first I found this a bit confusing, but once I got used to it, I found myself not really worrying about the gender of characters. Leckie drops hints here and there as to the actual gender of certain characters, but in practice it doesn’t actually matter.
The scope of Ancillary Justice feels simultaneously personal and global; Breq’s actions are deeply rooted in events from her past, but the result of her fight against the Lord of the Radch could have far-reaching repercussions. The world-building is pitch-perfect, and never feels heavy-handed or overwhelming. As soon as I finished this book, I checked to see if Leckie has any plans to continue writing in this world, and she does – apparently this is the first book in a loose trilogy. That said, it feels like Breq’s quest is contained; the end does set up possible future stories, but I couldn’t begin to guess where else Leckie might take the world of the Radch. However, I find that exciting.
I think my favorite part of this book was the way that Leckie took so many truly alien elements and made them feel natural and believable. The characters are human, but a type of human thousands of years removed from our society, and changed in many strange ways. We don’t ever meet any non-human characters, but they lurk just at the edge of the story, menacing and dangerous.
I can’t wait for the next book in this series, and I’ll definitely be checking out Leckie’s short stories as soon as possible.
If I am truthful I tend more toward fantasy than science fiction in my own reading. Sure, I have read a smattering of earlier science fiction works, like Childhood’s End by Clarke, Come Hunt An Earthman by Phillip E High and I have tried reading and listening to PK Dick but find him not to my taste.
My love of science fiction started, I think with Star Wars and probably deepened a little later with Frank Herbet’s Dune. So recent Space Opera works like Leviathan Wakes have hit that sweet spot - space adventure on a more or less epic scale but obeying the laws of physics a little tighter.
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice sits nicely in my comfort zone but is a little more epic in scope than SA Corey’s work. We have a galaxy spanning empire, sentient ships with corpse soldiers on ice but it’s also refreshingly grounded …
If I am truthful I tend more toward fantasy than science fiction in my own reading. Sure, I have read a smattering of earlier science fiction works, like Childhood’s End by Clarke, Come Hunt An Earthman by Phillip E High and I have tried reading and listening to PK Dick but find him not to my taste.
My love of science fiction started, I think with Star Wars and probably deepened a little later with Frank Herbet’s Dune. So recent Space Opera works like Leviathan Wakes have hit that sweet spot - space adventure on a more or less epic scale but obeying the laws of physics a little tighter.
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice sits nicely in my comfort zone but is a little more epic in scope than SA Corey’s work. We have a galaxy spanning empire, sentient ships with corpse soldiers on ice but it’s also refreshingly grounded in its description of other human cultures, of a humanity dispersed throughout the galaxies. The blurb describes it aptly as “Inventive and intelligent space opera”.
Our protagonist is an AI, more specifically a sentient ship called the Justice of Torren, one of the many sentient ships of different sizes that the Empire of the Radch has used in its ever expanding annexations(read invasion and subjugation) of other human societies. The Empire is thousands of years old, old enough for most humans to have forgotten that they originated on Earth, for other societies to have risen and fallen.
Like all good stories Ancillary Justice is set at a time of change, the very last Annexation has taken place. Justice of Torren orbits the planet Shi's’urna and concurrently, serves through its capacity to operate as Ancillaries (corpse soldiers under the control of the central AI), as a security force and aide to the human Lieutenant who acts as a de facto governor on the planet’s surface.
Or at least that’s half the tale – because when we meet The Justice of Torren it is the last remaining Ancillary, Torren One Esk or Breq as she/it prefers. Leckie switches between the scenario above and the arrival of a singular Ancillary on the planet Nilt. The annexation of Shi's’urna has occurred twenty years previously and Leckie delightfully builds tension as she switches backwards and forwards in time.
From very early on the reader knows that The Justice of Torren, the ship that can see through the eyes of thousands of Ancillaries, has been reduced to only one in the present, some great calamity has befallen it. How that happened and the implications unravelling that mystery reveals, is what drives this novel for much of its length.
A character who narrates in the first person but that for a good portion of the novel is almost omniscient presented, I am sure, some challenges for Leckie. How do you present a character that simultaneously observes from dozens of different points, who can measure the heart rate and temperature of everyone on the ship and a large number of people on the surface of a planet? Although it felt a bit unusual at first (in a narrative sense), Leckie’s solution builds on itself and gives a sense of what it might be like to be Justice of Torren without bogging down the flow of the story.
The approach to gender in Ancillary Justice was also clever. Justice of Torren is an AI who can inhabit a ship, a body or bodies. It has experienced a number of cultures and annexations and frequently in the text it expresses a concern over whether or not it has used the right gender pronoun for the language/culture it is engaged with. Consequently, sometimes the same character is referred to as he or she or designated male or female.
I get the impression that the pronoun she was used far more than he, that most of the characters were female. I even have to stop myself from referring to Justice of Torren as a she above because that’s what I feel though I don’t think that’s explicitly stated in the novel.
Have I made this assumption because culturally ships are female or because there is a preponderance of female pronouns in the text. If I were asked who the male characters were in the book I couldn’t name them with certainty. Their are characters referred to as both male and female depending on who Torren is communicating with but this seems distanced from any biological markers. What I think Leckie was going for was a book where gender was largely irrelevant, where it was fluid dependent on culture and where it didn’t matter really to Torren or the story. I would be interested to read reviews by female readers or even a gender queer response to it.
In terms of a reading experience the initial mystery and world building drew me in and by the time I was hooked the disparate timelines had coalesced into one and the story picked up speed toward its conclusion. I am left with a sense of depth in the world building and genuine desire to see where the story goes. If you like a bit of mystery and a fresh take on galaxy spanning empires I think its very much worth a look.
This book was a review copy provided by the publisher.
