Book #30 of 2016:
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch #1)
I thought this book was incredibly slow at the beginning, to the point where I almost put it down several times. I’m very glad I didn’t, however, as the story gets great about a third of the way through, and from then on it’s a real page-turner. The main character’s story comes out slowly, but essentially she (?) is the last remnant of a computer AI that at one point ran an entire spaceship along with hundreds of “ancillary” units that are basically dead human bodies with the computer software piloting them. After an incident that I won’t spoil, only one of those ancillary bodies remains, and she is engaged in some sort of mysterious quest when we start the novel.
The author’s choice to keep readers in the dark for so long about what the main character is doing and why definitely weakens this story, but once the flashbacks catch up to the present action, everything snaps into place nicely. This is a hard sci-fi space opera, but the culture is nicely fleshed out and the book raises some really interesting issues about personal identity and how people can – quite literally – be at war with themselves, despite ultimately being the same person with the same goals. There’s also an interesting gender dynamic, since the language in this civilization doesn’t mark that at all, leading the main character to refer to everyone as “she.” Sometimes this includes characters established in the text to be male, and sometimes (as with the main character) there are no clues whatsoever about a character’s gender. The result makes for a fascinating sort of egalitarian society, filtered through the viewpoint of an artificial mind.
I’m hopeful that these issues get taken up with even greater consideration in the sequels, which to my surprise I am actually quite looking forward to.
★★★★☆
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