[book review] Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch book 1)
Twenty years ago Breq was a spaceship, a consciousness spread across multiple ancillaries and the audio-visual system of the ship itself. During an orchestrated uprising on the planet on which she was stationed her connection with her other selves was severed, and one of her selves witnessed yet another massacre of innocent people at the orders of the Radch, the empire she serves. Spaceships have a long memory, and Breq isn’t as unhuman as people assume. Her ship is destroyed and only one ‘part’ of her, an ancillary reanimated human, escapes, with all the memories of the ship, and now she has to adapt to being in a single body, with the limited view that implies. So begins a solitary journey for revenge, but Breq knows there is something else that compels her on her quest-but it’s something her conscious mind can’t access. Breq is also far from the only person spread across multiple bodies, and she knows well that a shared history is a shared identity, and what happens when parts of the ‘self’ realize things the other parts do not.
Admittedly this book first came onto my radar because it won the Everything (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Clarke, etc) in 2014. While the awards selection process itself isn’t perfect the books on the ballot tend to be solid, and I have yet to be lead into reading something that was a total waste of my time. I wasn’t disappointed this time, either.
This is a space opera that takes place across millennia and intergalactic spaces, and yet it focuses on a small cast of characters. It’s very intimate in that sense. This takes what feels like an intensely personal story with personal consequences and unfolds into something that can affect the entire universe, and it does this rather organically. There are copious well-used tropes here but they are rendered with such skill, it’s a joy to read. And, indeed, that is what is so amazing about this book: tropes that tend to cluster around hackneyed pulp and beginning writers are exploited in full and played straight, to wonderful effect. A Chosen nobody takes on a pointless suicide mission and changes the world. Sleeper agents. Android existential angst. The new Roman empire under Big Brother’s constant watch. Intrigue and sabotage. Space religion. Zombie soldiers. Sentient space stations. Space junkies. Backwater planets. Folk song and child’s rhyme motifs. The self divided, made flesh. Class warfare. It’s all fucking rad. And there’s still plenty of new concepts woven through, too.
I realize my word choice might lead people to think I mean “rad” in the sense that it’s played to exaggerated genre-savvy effect. This is not what I mean to imply. When I say played straight I really do mean played straight, not with an exaggerated self-conscious postmodern lampshading. And you don’t even realize these tropes are in play until you think about it, for a moment. It’s not something that bludgeons the reader. You’re just following a compelling story, and upon reflection you realize the universality of these themes. I do think that a lot of this subtle integration is a product of the aforementioned intimate feel of the story-it doesn’t feel like a grand space opera with a cast to scale, even though it is. This is a personal story, with a few key people. It is an interesting tone. I also find it interesting that a character whose consciousness was once simultaneously aware of the most intimate details of millions of people at once is the protagonist of this intimacy. It must feel very isolating, and lonely.
The book is written in first person, which is easy to do but hard to do well. It is an interesting take because for a significant part of the book the narrator, Breq, is a fragmented consciousness, in that she is-literally--twenty different places at one time. This can get a little confusing but not by lack of writing skill; it’s just a confusing situation. The narrator’s native language is gender neutral and the author chose to use the feminine pronoun for all of the characters, not the hitherto-universal masculine. There is discussion of the effect of language on perception of gender. It’s implied in text most of the characters are various shades of Not White, and on her blog the author discusses being afraid of any film adaptation of her work getting the “Earthsea treatment”.
I heard through the author grapevine that given this book’s success, publishers are now looking at space operas again. I keep forgetting how small science fiction and fantasy book fandom actually is when I realize this book is considered that influential, and yet, I bet I could survey 100 people on the street and be lucky to find one who has even heard of this book. I’d even say at a (non book-focused) science fiction con I’d be lucky to hit positive with one in ten.
Leckie joins that group of much-acclaimed first-time authors. She’s been writing for a long time but it looks like this is her first novel. I do not envy the pressure she is now under to perform, but I am so glad she put her work out there, and I am excited to read more of her work. Orbit packaged up a handsome volume, with good, heavy paper and a quality cover. I hope all these decent covers I have seen lately indicate a trend toward not-crap fantasy and sci fi covers.
I have the next book in the series, Ancillary Sword, and it’s next on my reading list.
(Also, the title of the third book has been announced, and motherfucker I called it! Ancillary Mercy. Read the book and you’ll see where I got that. And apparently Fox has optioned the series for TV. My faith in their ability to not fuck it up isn’t very high.)
Admittedly this book first came onto my radar because it won the Everything (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Clarke, etc) in 2014. While the awards selection process itself isn’t perfect the books on the ballot tend to be solid, and I have yet to be lead into reading something that was a total waste of my time. I wasn’t disappointed this time, either.
This is a space opera that takes place across millennia and intergalactic spaces, and yet it focuses on a small cast of characters. It’s very intimate in that sense. This takes what feels like an intensely personal story with personal consequences and unfolds into something that can affect the entire universe, and it does this rather organically. There are copious well-used tropes here but they are rendered with such skill, it’s a joy to read. And, indeed, that is what is so amazing about this book: tropes that tend to cluster around hackneyed pulp and beginning writers are exploited in full and played straight, to wonderful effect. A Chosen nobody takes on a pointless suicide mission and changes the world. Sleeper agents. Android existential angst. The new Roman empire under Big Brother’s constant watch. Intrigue and sabotage. Space religion. Zombie soldiers. Sentient space stations. Space junkies. Backwater planets. Folk song and child’s rhyme motifs. The self divided, made flesh. Class warfare. It’s all fucking rad. And there’s still plenty of new concepts woven through, too.
I realize my word choice might lead people to think I mean “rad” in the sense that it’s played to exaggerated genre-savvy effect. This is not what I mean to imply. When I say played straight I really do mean played straight, not with an exaggerated self-conscious postmodern lampshading. And you don’t even realize these tropes are in play until you think about it, for a moment. It’s not something that bludgeons the reader. You’re just following a compelling story, and upon reflection you realize the universality of these themes. I do think that a lot of this subtle integration is a product of the aforementioned intimate feel of the story-it doesn’t feel like a grand space opera with a cast to scale, even though it is. This is a personal story, with a few key people. It is an interesting tone. I also find it interesting that a character whose consciousness was once simultaneously aware of the most intimate details of millions of people at once is the protagonist of this intimacy. It must feel very isolating, and lonely.
The book is written in first person, which is easy to do but hard to do well. It is an interesting take because for a significant part of the book the narrator, Breq, is a fragmented consciousness, in that she is-literally--twenty different places at one time. This can get a little confusing but not by lack of writing skill; it’s just a confusing situation. The narrator’s native language is gender neutral and the author chose to use the feminine pronoun for all of the characters, not the hitherto-universal masculine. There is discussion of the effect of language on perception of gender. It’s implied in text most of the characters are various shades of Not White, and on her blog the author discusses being afraid of any film adaptation of her work getting the “Earthsea treatment”.
I heard through the author grapevine that given this book’s success, publishers are now looking at space operas again. I keep forgetting how small science fiction and fantasy book fandom actually is when I realize this book is considered that influential, and yet, I bet I could survey 100 people on the street and be lucky to find one who has even heard of this book. I’d even say at a (non book-focused) science fiction con I’d be lucky to hit positive with one in ten.
Leckie joins that group of much-acclaimed first-time authors. She’s been writing for a long time but it looks like this is her first novel. I do not envy the pressure she is now under to perform, but I am so glad she put her work out there, and I am excited to read more of her work. Orbit packaged up a handsome volume, with good, heavy paper and a quality cover. I hope all these decent covers I have seen lately indicate a trend toward not-crap fantasy and sci fi covers.
I have the next book in the series, Ancillary Sword, and it’s next on my reading list.
(Also, the title of the third book has been announced, and motherfucker I called it! Ancillary Mercy. Read the book and you’ll see where I got that. And apparently Fox has optioned the series for TV. My faith in their ability to not fuck it up isn’t very high.)