Ancillary Justice
Ratings571
Average rating4
Although the plot and world created in this book are very impressive it did not suck me in. As such I found myself making and effort to get through it instead of looking forward to it. Disappointing but I can see why others may disagree.
Wow! This was really good! Exciting, clever, interesting and has made want to read more science fiction!
Wat is dat met meer dan degelijke debuten, tegenwoordig?
En ook: verdorie, ik had moeten wachten tot na de zomer om dit te lezen. Ik had het al lang volgehouden: Ancillary Justice (2013) en Ancillary Sword (2014) stonden al een tijd op de ‘te lezen'-lijst, maar ik had mezelf voorgenomen er niet aan te beginnen tot Ancillary Mercy (2015) uit zou zijn.
En dan had ik pech: mijn vorige boek was bijna uit, en ik had iemand aan de lijn die net Ancillary Justice gelezen had en het mij aanraadde, en lang verhaal kort, twee en een halve dag later waren de twee eerste boeken van de Imperial Radch-trilogie uitgelezen.
Imperia over millenia en lichtjaren heen, mysterieuze aliens die niet echt in beeld komen maar wel vitaal zijn voor het verhaal, onderdrukte lokale bevolkingen: space opera, hoezee!
Achteraf bekeken leest het als een catalogus van genre-clichés, met een auteur die er op de één of andere manier in slaagt om Iain M. Banks met Anne McCaffrey te integreren. Zeer letterlijk, eigenlijk zelfs: het hoofdpersonage is écht een schip dat zingt. Een Artifiële Intelligentie en geen cyborg zoals bij McCaffrey, maar voor de rest: het schip verzamelt muziek en zingt heel de tijd, er is een complexe relatie tussen schip en kapitein, het kan allemaal nogal sentimenteel worden.
Niet overdreven of zo, en er is genoeg spanning en avontuur en karakterontwikkeling en wereld te ontdekken om het allemaal meer dan interessant te houden.
In de wereld van Ancillary Justice zijn de Radch het dominante rijk in het bekende universum. Hun basis is een Dysonsfeer ergens buiten beeld, en hun modus operandi is al een eeuwigheid: werelden veroveren, onderwerpen en ‘beschaven', en dan de volgende wereld. Ze hebben een technologie ontwikkeld waarmee ze menselijke lichamen kunnen controleren als ‘ancillaries': een centraal brein verdeeld over verschillende lichamen, waarbij de oorspronkelijke persoon die in het lichaam zat helemaal verloren gaat.
Die ancillaries kunnen gecontroleerd worden door AI's, en dan gaat het om tientallen en tientallen soldaten, maar het kan ook een soort decentralisatie van gezag zijn: de Heerser van de Radch, Anaander Mianaai, gebruikt al duizenden jaren clonen van zichzelf als ancillaries.
Het verhaal begint op een verlaten ijsplaneet (echo's van Hoth, iemand?), waar de enige overgebleven ancillary van het schip Justice of Toren toevallig in de goot een officier tegenkomt die duizend jaar geleden verdween. En dan gaat het over en weer tussen de tijd nu, met de relatie tussen die officier en het schip (dat zelfs duizend jaar geleden die officier niet echt sympathiek vond) en de tijd twintig jaar geleden, waar we ontdekken hoe het komt dat er maar één ancillary van een schip overblijft.
Ik weet niet of het zó goed is dat het al die prijzen waard is (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA) want in het grotere space opera-beeld blijft het allemaal toch wat op de oppervlakte, maar hey, het zijn fijne personages, het is een fijn verhaal, het is degelijk geschreven, en het gaat allemaal vooruit.
Aangeraden, dus.
It took a while to get into this one, but by halfway through I was hooked, and even impressed. I loved the idea of an AI that was limited by it's ability to control human subjects – each of which still maintained a slightly unique brain, motivation and mindset. The concept of “I” starts to be a fuzzy concept once “I” becomes a group. The gender ambiguity was also interesting – referring to each character as “she” throughout the book.
It took a while to get into this one, but by halfway through I was hooked, and even impressed. I loved the idea of an AI that was limited by it's ability to control human subjects – each of which still maintained a slightly unique brain, motivation and mindset. The concept of “I” starts to be a fuzzy concept once “I” becomes a group. The gender ambiguity was also interesting – referring to each character as “she” throughout the book.
A thoroughly engaging read. I very much enjoyed the author's exploration of what it means to be a person. The hero's native language is genderless so all people are referred to with female pronouns regardless of their gender expression. While on the one hand, it makes it hard to envision some of the character, it also works to make the distinction between sexes a meaningless one for the story. That combined with the fact that the main character is a severed shard of an artificial intelligence inhabiting a human body, programmed to believe she is less than human, makes for a very interesting viewpoint (especially when people around her come to a different conclusion while she remains oblivious). The action builds nicely into a satisfying climax, but only comprises the opening act for a larger story. Now, if you'll excuse me, time to dig into the sequel.
Absolutely magnificent. Took me a while to see just how contemporary this novel about an empire of the privileged and constantly monitored is - an empire that is literally at war with itself. Writing this now it seems ridiculous that I didn't notice just how perfectly Leckie manages to mirror us, right here, right now.
Have you ever gotten 1/4 into a book and already loved it so much you put a hold on the sequel at the library? yeah, damn good.
Unexpectedly magnificent, Ancillary Justice promises a seamless blend of literary and genre fiction. Unapologetically scifi, the sprawling world is kept in check by tight narration, ruthlessly efficient prose, and a plot that, once it gets rolling, refuses to stop for anything. The twists and turns are genuinely surprising, and that's no small praise for a book taking place in an entirely constructed world, where every plot movement is dictated entirely from the imagination of the author. Yet the rules never seem arbitrary, and the stakes never seem tacked on.
The immediate comparison that springs to mind is The Left Hand of Darkness, and the book serves as a compelling answer to the questions posed in LeGuin's classic. While it's no heir– surely, we're all mature enough not to believe that every shock of modern brilliance is just some inheritance carried down from the ages– it's certainly a thought provoking and modern update. It asks similar questions, but in new and inventive ways, and gets fascinating new answers.
What does it mean to be human? And what is the point of fate? If everything is per-ordained, what is the point of working toward a goal? If people are bred to their roles, do their choices truly matter, or is that fate as well? And if people can be made as well as born, what hand do they have in fate? And what does gender mean to any of this?
If you want to stew in that philosophical soup, read Ancillary Justice. Or if you just want a fascinating trip through a wonderful world with interesting characters, read it.
The only word of criticism I can offer is that the narrative conceit, that every other chapter takes place in another time, can take a while to get used to. This is largely due to the fact that the modern chapters have a much stronger plot than the chapters detailing the main character's past. Still, if one can get through that, the reward is more than worth it.
It's not just about the gendered pronouns, you get used to those eventually. This book has a brilliant story and universe, too.
The book was a page-turner, and the fastest that I have read anything in a while. I have seen comparisons made between Leckie and Banks, but no recent Culture book has given me as much joy as Ancillary Justice, and I cannot wait to read the sequel.
I greatly enjoyed the world-building in this novel (luckily there is a sequel out there already!) and the POV of the main character, once part of a larger “hive mind,” so to speak, now struggling to live inside his/her own head while trying to figure out what happened to the rest of him/her. I can't pick a pronoun because one of the features of this book is a language where the default pronoun in use is “she.” So, a) I don't really know what the gender of the main character is and b) I had to work at remembering that not every character in the novel was female and I guess c) I had to consider whether it mattered. This is one of the things I enjoy about science fiction/speculative fiction - having to think about non-human perspectives makes you really consider what your definition of “human” is in the first place. A very interesting read.
There had to be a reason this book won all the awards this year...
It is that good!
I recommend it to anyone who loves sci-fi, and even those who are not so sure!
And amazing, original, novel!
There had to be a reason this book won all the awards this year...
It is that good!
I recommend it to anyone who loves sci-fi, and even those who are not so sure!
And amazing, original, novel!
the best compliment I can pay this book is that as soon as I finished it I downloaded Ancillary Sword.
I usually struggle with scifi but this was easy to get into and the pace of the book was perfect.
Re-read 6/11/19
Still one of my favorite books of all time. It's been long enough that I didn't remember a lot of it and it was so fun rediscovering my love for it. Will continue my re-read of this series gleefully! :)
Read 10/19/14
I absolutely loved this book because it was a masterpiece and there was so much intricacy to it. The plot was unbelievably creative and brilliant but the main character itself was AMAZING. Can't wait to read the next book!
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.
This book was a bit slow to get into; the unique first person narration and cultural oddities of gender in the Radch made for a confusing start, but it builds to an exciting and very satisfying final third.
A fresh and different take on a galaxy spanning sci-fi revenge story; definitely worthy of the Hugo!
Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice has won every significant sci-fi award this year including the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus awards but I just couldn't get into it. Maybe I need my sci-fi spoon fed to me.
It's got chops certainly, exploring the concept of personal identity and what that means when you're a ship commanding thousands of bodies as a distributed AI now reduced to a single ancillary bent on revenge against a dictatorial galactic emperor that is essentially immortal and spread out over a multitude of bodies that may or may not be plotting against each other. Yeah, that.
I want to read that book, but then I realize I have and was pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. Maybe it's the writing, the shifting pronouns (it's a post gendered society) or maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace to read it.
A warship's avatar separated from it's warship. A little heavy on the social warrior front, but still very interesting.
I struggled through nearly ever page. I found myself constantly disoriented, confused on who the characters were, what side they were on and how long ago certain events happened.
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.