Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Galactic Empires, Sentient Ships, Fragmented Identity, Estranged Gender-- Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice (2013), winner of the Hugo and Nebula and other awards, is a mostly original, thoughtful, and moving space opera. The setting is the millennia-old galactic Radch Empire. For a long time the Empire was bent on constant expansion, the annexation of new worlds and cultures fueling its growth and requiring more annexations, until the Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai, who had divided herself (himself?) into many different bodies so as to better rule the far flung galactic empire, started warring against himself (herself?), one side wanting to stop the aggressive expansion, the other wanting to continue it. This, by the way, is similar to how the ancillary system works: the crew and soldiers of each sentient Radch starship are comprised of up to thousands of human bodies (taken from annexed civs), each simultaneously controlled by (possessed by) the ship AI. In the present of the novel, the protagonist Breq is the sole surviving "ancillary" of a sentient starship called the Justice of Toren which one Mianaai avatar (probably an expansionist) destroyed 19 years ago when its loyalty was sorely tested by being made to kill an officer the ship liked. Breq, then, narrates chapters that alternate between the past and the present, the flashback chapters growing ever closer to the present ones till they merge for the climax of the novel. My favorite part of the book was early when I had no idea what was going on: who Breq was or what had happened or what she was up to or why he/she/it had rescued a former Lieutenant (Seivarden Vendaai) of the Justice of Toren or what connection there was between the two time streams or why Breq referred to everyone as her/she. The delicious disorientation of good sf. As I learned the answers to those questions and everything started to make sense, the freshness of the novel began to thin. This was especially so during the climax, which is more like a standard, albeit exciting, space opera with a civil war breaking out on a space station between a (so far) obviously bad side and a (so far) obviously good side. If the plot ultimately felt a little typical, one thing did continue to estrange, gender, because Leckie defamiliarizes our own "standard" view of gender. Despite having two genders and procreating in more or less the standard human way, the Radchaai, have no differences in gender roles or traits or status, to the extent that they don't use different gendered pronouns, but only "English" feminine ones. Because Breq regularly offends non-Radch people by mistaking their genders (and feels relief among other Radchaai when she doesn't need to care about such distinctions) and never describes people with the gender-coded signs that we use when describing people in our culture, we can't know the gender of most of the characters most of the time. Seivarden is probably male, according to how Strigan (a person from a gender difference culture like ours) refers to "him." Strigan also categorizes Anaander Mianaai as male. And someone else from Strigan's culture says to Breq, "Aren't you a tough little girl." But those could be mistaken perceptions from a gender-divided culture like ours, so I finished the novel still not 100% sure even of Seivarden, Mianaai, or Breq's genders, and no idea of most other characters'. Leckie, then, makes us the aliens and our "normal" gender roles and divisions the bizarre exception. As happened when I read The Left Hand of Darkness, I ended up reading Leckie's characters as human beings without caring about their genders. So Leckie is doing something similar to what Le Guin does, though from a linguistic-cultural rather than a biological-cultural angle. Until the two time streams of the plot merge, Leckie's novel is also interesting because of its fragmentation and multiplication of identity, as in this scene narrated by the Justice of Toren: "My bodies sweated under my uniform jackets, and, bored, I opened three of my mouths, all in close proximity to each other on the temple plaza, and sang with those three voices, 'My heart is a fish, hiding in the water-grass…' One person walking by looked at me, startled, but everyone else ignored me--they were used to me by now." In addition to her interesting approaches to gender and identity, Leckie does neat things with religion, singing, memory, and especially love. The love of a sentient ship for its officers, the love of an ancillary (supposedly a non-human entity conditioned to obey) for one of its spaceship's officers, the love of a human soldier for something non-human, the love between people from high and low social classes, and so on. With her subtlety and restraint (and lack of sentimentality), Leckie writes potent scenes that give all the technological wonders and political schemings and galactic empire trappings in her novel a heart, as when an officer is ordered to kill a group of civilians, or Seivarden falls and Breq jumps off a sublime alien bridge, or Breq reveals to a young officer that the ancillary knew her as a child. Fans of intelligent space opera like that by Iain M. Banks (galactic empires, sentient ships, ID fragmented into multiple bodies, dual narrative time streams, less is more world building, etc.) should like this book, though keep in mind that it's the first volume of a trilogy. View all my reviews
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