Ancillary Justice is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ann Leckie, published in 2013. It is Leckie's debut novel and the first in her "Imperial Radch" trilogy of space opera novels. The novel follows Breq — the sole survivor of a starship destroyed by treachery, and the vessel of that ship's artificial consciousness — as she attempts to revenge herself on the ruler of her civilization.
I read this recently for a book group. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make the actual discussion, so I'm going to write a brief review here.
At first, I wasn't that into the book. I just couldn't pay attention to anything in the first chapter or two, which meant I was hopelessly confused as to what was happening where and when and to whom later on. Even with that, the novel really picked up and became quite absorbing towards the end.
I did quite like the fact that the Radchai empire didn't differentiate between genders. Leckie got around this by using all female pronouns. It was an interesting and slightly disorientating technique; I pictured the majority of characters as presenting as female, even though characters from other societies explicitly read them as male. I'd have been happier with 've' personally, but it's such an unusual conceit that how it was executed is less important right now than that it was.
What was interesting about that was that it made me constantly misgender characters by picturing them all as female-signalling. Ve or Ze wouldn't have had that effect; I'd have remained aware that I couldn't picture any gender signals because they weren't apparent/Breq wasn't picking them up.
I enjoyed the general set-up that we could see of the Radchai empire, and I liked the way it was ruled by one person in endlessly cloned bodies. I'm not totally overwhelmed with interest, so I'm not sure yet whether I'd read the other books or not. Glad to have had the experience though; think I gave it three stars.
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