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Ancilliary Justice - book review
Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)
by
by
Ann Leckie (Goodreads Author)
I read this book, then I read it a second time. Then I bought the sequel and read that twice, and likewise the third volume of the trilogy.
It's very well written, and I missed quite a bit the first time around, as there's lots of depth to the culture and also to the plot.
One one level, the story in 'Ancilliary Justice' is almost simple. Breq rescues someone from freezing to death and goes with them on a quest to find a weapon to kill the person responsible for the death of someone she loved.
Except that Breq isn't human. She looks human, and her body was human at one time, but
Breq is a ship. The last surviving part of the troop carrier 'Justice of Toren'. She's an ancilliary - a human with implants that slave the body totally to an AI, in this case, 'Justice of Toren'. The conversion is total. Almost nothing remains of the mind/person that once inhabited her body. The ship itself is gone, destroyed by the leader of the Radch in an attempt to remove evidence of a political threat.
But as far as Breq is concerned, she IS the ship.
I say 'she', but one of the interesting things about the Radch language is that it is gender neutral, and clothing has no gender clues in Radch culture. Everyone is referred to as 'she'. You only every find the physcial gender of a character if Breq is speaking a different language. Breq often feels out of her depth in other languages, because she has to guess at gender in order to get pronouns right, but clues as to gender vary with different cultures...
Seivarden, the person she rescues, is eventually referred to as male, but we never do find out Breq's gender.
It's actually quite fascinating, because it makes you as a reader aware of how much gender stereotyping you do unconsciously.
One of the things I like about this series is that people do not change overnight. Not even when you save their life.
Seivarden comes from a noble family, and tends to look down on everyone else automatically. She expects privilege, and has severe mental health issues owing to accidentally ending up in cryosleep for a thousand years and waking in a time where her family no longer have influence.
The only being who remembers who she was is Justice of Toren. And Justice of Toren never actually liked Seivarden when she served as a lieutenant on the ship...
It's quite a while before Seivarden learns who Breq is, and she will try to change her thought patterns, but it's not easy to shake off the patterns of a lifetime.
This book won a Hugo, it's not hard to understand why. Highly recommended.
It's very well written, and I missed quite a bit the first time around, as there's lots of depth to the culture and also to the plot.
One one level, the story in 'Ancilliary Justice' is almost simple. Breq rescues someone from freezing to death and goes with them on a quest to find a weapon to kill the person responsible for the death of someone she loved.
Except that Breq isn't human. She looks human, and her body was human at one time, but
Breq is a ship. The last surviving part of the troop carrier 'Justice of Toren'. She's an ancilliary - a human with implants that slave the body totally to an AI, in this case, 'Justice of Toren'. The conversion is total. Almost nothing remains of the mind/person that once inhabited her body. The ship itself is gone, destroyed by the leader of the Radch in an attempt to remove evidence of a political threat.
But as far as Breq is concerned, she IS the ship.
I say 'she', but one of the interesting things about the Radch language is that it is gender neutral, and clothing has no gender clues in Radch culture. Everyone is referred to as 'she'. You only every find the physcial gender of a character if Breq is speaking a different language. Breq often feels out of her depth in other languages, because she has to guess at gender in order to get pronouns right, but clues as to gender vary with different cultures...
Seivarden, the person she rescues, is eventually referred to as male, but we never do find out Breq's gender.
It's actually quite fascinating, because it makes you as a reader aware of how much gender stereotyping you do unconsciously.
One of the things I like about this series is that people do not change overnight. Not even when you save their life.
Seivarden comes from a noble family, and tends to look down on everyone else automatically. She expects privilege, and has severe mental health issues owing to accidentally ending up in cryosleep for a thousand years and waking in a time where her family no longer have influence.
The only being who remembers who she was is Justice of Toren. And Justice of Toren never actually liked Seivarden when she served as a lieutenant on the ship...
It's quite a while before Seivarden learns who Breq is, and she will try to change her thought patterns, but it's not easy to shake off the patterns of a lifetime.
This book won a Hugo, it's not hard to understand why. Highly recommended.
no subject
One of the things that made the original novel so fascinating, to me, is the fact that the Radch would be basically 'the bad guys' in any 'Earth-human-written' novel: they are an aggressive expansionist space empire who enslave and mind-wipe their captives for use as cannon-fodder. (They also have some quirky cultural habits around tea and gloves, which the protagonist equally takes absolutely for granted.) And the author depicts this culture from the inside, albeit from the losing side of an internecine conflict, while playing it absolutely straight -- like C.J.Cherryh's Union novels, it presents the human side of a monolithic and objectively very oppressive society, from the perspective of protagonists who (of course) do not question in the slightest their own cultural context. It really gives you the sense of inhabiting an alien mind.
By the time we get to the third novel she has back-pedalled a long way on that and is busy campaigning for liberation of ancilliaries (except, presumably, whoever originally owned Breq's body!) and spending big tracts of the book on a soap-opera of hurt feelings rather than on space opera; poor Seivarden really gets the rough end of the stick, for one. It's a great shame, because "Ancillary Justice" was really outstanding -- but the second novel spends all its time world-building on a single obscure planet (having exhausted the potential of the Radch itself?) and starts its trend towards didactic moralism, and the final one ended up feeling like a real let-down: I became actively annoyed with the book while reading it :-(
no subject
I disagree on the back-pedalling.
Breq is very clear from the beginning that she wants to kill Annander Miainni. Preferably all of her. She doesn't so much question the cultural context, as openly despise it!
She never tried to 'liberate' ancillaries. She's clear that she is opposed to new people being taken, but those who have been fitted with hardware and are held in cold storage, she has no issues with those being connected to ships. Rightly or wrongly (Probably rightly given Tiserwat's personality) she believes that the original person no longer exists.
For me, the interest later on comes from the way in which she works and where she sets her limits.
See - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20706284-ancillary-sword
and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23533039-ancillary-mercy
if you want to read my other reviews.
I actually liked Seivarden's imperfections. I find it really annoying when you save someone's life and they instantly become a perfect person. Seivarden has to work at it. She has good intentions, and she does make progress, but her background makes it very hard to her to see things from a different perspective.
The fact that it's really difficult for her makes it mean a lot more when she does manage to move forward.