Teaser

She was a machine once. A cog in the great Radch. Now Breq wears a human skin. Cast out and left for dead, but very much alive. And very interested in enacting vengeance on those who wronged her . . .

Review

The Hugo. The Nebula. The BSFA. The Arthur C. Clarke. The Locus. When a book wins all these awards, and is nominated for even more, it means people are taking notice. It is very rare for a book to sweep the awards like this. Of the top of my head, only Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama can come close. Yet when Ancillary Justice (a debut novel, no less), managed this impressive feat, I didn’t read it. I was busy with A-levels, more interested in epic fantasy at the time, and was put off by how much focus the reviews put on the feminist qualities of the novel. It took me ten years and a cheap ex-library copy to get around to it, but I’m finally here to see what all the fuss is about. Better late than never.

I’m going to get one thing out of the way at the start. The pronoun situation. The thing that put me off a decade ago is how the narrator refers to everyone as ‘she.’ Leaving aside real-world decision-making, the in-universe rationale given is that the Radchaai language does not have differing pronouns for different genders. This still proves a stumbling block because 1) the book is presented to us in English, which does have differing pronouns, and 2) it is jarring to have characters described as male and then referred to with female pronouns. I think it would have been stronger to have employed a neutral pronoun, whether that be they, it or a neo-pronoun like ey, zie, or even an original Radchaai term.

As I say, this is a stumbling block when it comes to visualising characters, but once you get past it, this is a very good book. I don’t love it, but I do very much like it, and I’m eager to see where the trilogy goes from here.

The underlying story of Ancillary Justice is quite a simple one. There is an all-consuming power-hungry empire, and a former servant of that empire on the run. What separates this book from hundreds of others through the years is the protagonist. Breq is an artificial intelligence wearing a human skin, but prior to this, as revealed in extensive flashbacks, Breq was a component of a ship. This concept is the best part of the book, the sort of mind-blowing idea that science fiction is built on. The idea of an ancillary being a semi-autonomous part of a larger whole is wonderfully executed, and you can feel the difference between Breq as she was, and as the isolated being she is in the present-day sections. I know I sometimes (frequently) complain about split timelines, but this is how you do flashbacks right The two halves of the story are so markedly different that they don’t require timestamps, yet the links between past and present are evident for all to see.

Most of the action unfolds across two planets. One in the past, one in the present. Both feel every alien. One through geography alone, and the other through culture. Leckie is great at writing futuristic cultures. They don’t feel like extrapolations of present trends, or rips from Earth’s history, but they nevertheless are graspable by my present-day mind. They’re unfamiliar, but they make sense. That’s harder to pull off than it might sound. Ancillary Justice teases us with hints of a larger galaxy, complete with nonhuman life, and I’m hoping it continues to develop as Leckie’s novels go on.

Though it is not always presented in a way that suits my personal tastes, Ancillary Justice is a brilliant story, and deserves the acclaim it has garnered.

Book Stats

• The Imperial Radch #1
• Published in 2013 by Orbit
• 384 Pages