Ancillary Justice

Perhaps I had my hopes up too much for this novel. I've read such great reviews about it and I love space opera, but unfortunately Ancillary Justice just did not deliver for me.

I can appreciate the creativity and ingenuity in the plot. The idea of sentient AI is certainly not new, but the author takes it several steps past a simple sentient AI. The ships of this empire are individual AIs themselves, but they are also distributed amongst host bodies. Another fun twist is that the AI doesn't differentiate gender, and so the author deftly describes everything as ‘she' or ‘her'. I loved that.

Despite all the coolness in the ideas, I just didn't like the story. I think perhaps I didn't “get it”, I did not know what was going on even as the end was approaching. The story wasn't compelling to me, I did not care what happened to the main character, and that really takes the joy out of reading for me. I didn't care about the empire presented, nor did I care about the other characters.

Part of this is probably that the main POV character is a an AI, and doesn't think and feel exactly like a human. Obviously I'm used to reading the perspective of a “normal” human being. I could definitely sense a coldness in the main character, no sympathy for others from her/it. I didn't understand why she did what she did.

Definitely some great ideas here, but the story was rather confusing for me.