Ancillary Justice

Yo, so this won like every sci-fi award a book can win last year, and I somehow only heard about it last week. WHUT. How?! Why!?

Anyway, I was super excited to read this. It ticked a couple important boxes for me - Strong Female Protagonist (yey), freaky far future stuff - and it had the added extra bonus that, being a Hugo/Nebula joint winner, it fulfilled my spiritual quest/obligation to read all Hugo/Nebula joint winners ever. So, double whammy. Great. Also, the last time I read a Hugo/Nebula double-winner, I was super disappointed. Very ready for a good one.

And this one was a good one. Was it a great one? Meh. It was like a really, very, quite good. But not great. The author, Ann Leckie, has two totally awesome Big Ideas, dressed up with a lot of pedestrian space opera window dressing, and her writing is mostly talky, sometimes inspired. The story follows a rogue AI named Breq, 20 years into her hunt to destroy the emperor of the Radchaai civilization. Big Idea #1 is that Breq is a former spaceship. As in, she was the AI of a spaceship, the Justice of Toren, and, via some super-cool far future freaky sci-fi technology, could seed her AI consciousness out to a bunch of “ancillaries” - human cadavers re-animated by her consciousness to serve as robot troops (but also robot butlers! because, fun!). Now Breq is the last meatspace body she has left! STAKES ARE HIGH, PEOPLE.

Big Idea #2 is that, the Radchaai civilization is so post-gender stuff that they don't even see gender anymore, and don't have gendered pronouns (he/she), and so refer to everyone as “she”. This means you're often having to second- and triple-guess yourself about which characters are which genders. Until you give up because, dammit, it doesn't matter at all to the plot, you gender-obsessed troglodyte! Meta win, though it's a bit of a sledgehammer point, and Ursula Le Guin made the same point in The Dispossessed with much more subtlety.

The plot centers around how and why a spaceship became Super Snow Commando Breq, Mission to Kill. It involves lots of space politics. They felt a little soap opera after Floating Worlds (also far future, also space opera, also lady protagonist, also politics - but much fancier politics). But that doesn't matter, the main selling points are those two big ideas.

Leckie spends a lot of time also explaining Radchaai culture, which is basically a bunch of snobby folks who obsess about tea, conquer planets, and practice what felt to me like Hinduism. The British Raj? Amirite or amirite? They're also sometimes sneakily described as not-white (another diversity win!). But, honestly, I found the Radchaai stuff - like the politics - also a bit ho-hum and usual and shrug. Le Guin and Herbert have done far future space civilizations with a more deft hand.

I want to stress, though, that this book was fun, fun, fun. During the flashbacks, when we live in Breq's head the way she used to be, pre-commando times - as a many-bodied spaceship AI with the wit of Data/Jeeves and the kung fu killer-android vibe of Terminator - it could be amazing. The floating first person POV was fun, and sometimes felt marvelously cinematic. (IMAGINE THE CROSS CUTS.) I thought Breq's love of music, and using her bodies to make impromptu, dispersed choirs, was brilliant. (Again, imagine that on celluloid!) Indeed, I found myself highlighting sections - not because they were well-written or particularly deep, but just because they were SO DAMN APPEALING. I didn't think I could love a spaceship, but, apparently, I can. (And so can Breq's drug-addicted, socially-fallen sidekick, who is so clearly in love with her. Is there fanfic about that pair yet? There must be. THERE MUST BE.)

Recommended, cuz it's pretty awesome. But not highly recommended, cuz it's not highly awesome.