It's been a while since I found new scifi that actually felt novel, perhaps because I was picking the wrong books.

On the surface, Ancillary Justice is a military scifi story set in roman style galactic empire whose culture has a distinctly asian flavour. However our lead character isn't the usual up and coming strapping young lad, but a ship in the vein of Banks' culture series. The main difference here being the 'ancillary' troops alluded to in the title, captured humans who are entirely controlled by the ship.

Many of the challenges she faces come from the distributed nature of her intelligence and will likely be familiar to anyone who has worked with distributed systems. This also gives rise to several passages told from multiple perspectives by the same narrator simultaneously.

The other striking aspect of the book is that gender is more or less a non-issue in the empire most of the story is told in, which leads to all characters being referred to as "she", even when their apparent sex has been clearly identified.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it's the first scifi I've found hard to stop reading in a while. Looking forward to the rest of the trilogy (because it's got to be a trilogy).