Name: Katy Watkins's review of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Item: Ancillary Justice
Rating: 5
Author: Katy Watkins

Ann Leckie

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction, Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance. In the Ancillary world: 1. Ancillary Justice2. Ancillary Sword3. Ancillary Mercy

Imperial Radch: Book 1

Ancillary Justice

Szymon

This was a reread. I often just reread the last two books in this series because I love them so much, but then I read this one again and remembered nope, all three are phenomenal. Probably my favorite series ever, and for sure the one that most rewards rereading. (Though it’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea.)

Katy Watkins

The Imperial Radch Series, book 1

Jasper

0xADADA

Very compelling take on the future of sentient general artificial intelligence, but ultimately I never cared about what happened to the characters because i was never attached. Perhaps that is by design because she "is just an ancillary" or "just an AI", in which case it was a success, but it didn't make me want to finish reading. I enjoyed the use of word play around gender and language, clever.

TL;DR, Well written, interesting ideas and concepts, but what was said in 386 pages could've been done just as well in 50 pages with some good editing.

Cody Degen

Rohit Arondekar

Fascinating world which I'd love to know more about. The main character is an AI with multiple bodies and a ship as it's main body. The whole concept is amazing but also handled really well. I loved the switching between viewpoints and the inner dialogue of the main character. I'm definitely going to read the next book in the series.

Joy Bush

This book is complex, and even though it drops you into the middle of the universe and the story, with not explaining any of the background, it still felt slow to start. For a long time I thought this might be a 3 star book, I wasnt even sure I liked this book. This isnt a book that I could judge based on gushing feelings. This book is more intellectual and made me sit and think about it. 

The MC is an AI ship, Justin of Toren, with hundreds of ancillaries. Which are human bodies that have been stored until needed, and then integrated into the ships AI. So you get multiple POV but its still all the main character. 

The Radchaai culture also doesnt use gendered pronouns in their language, so the default is everybody is She. Its weird at first but then you get used to it and realize that the genders of the characters doesnt matter at all to the story. 

When the main character, One Esk/Breq, escapes and its ship and every other part of itself is destroyed, it spends 20 years on a plan to get revenge for what happened to her. 
If you are willing to put in a little bit of work for this complex world, it ends up being really worth it. I cant wait to start book 2!

altlovesbooks

"Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings."

This is a difficult review to write, because I thought there was a lot to like in this book! I also thought there was a lot that bothered me about this book too! I'm terrible at math and am not sure where my book calculus is going to lie on this one.

I'm going to skip a casual recap of the story, because it's a very hard story to summarize without spoilers. A lot of the reveals aren't really major story twists, but just small things the reader has to put together for the overall story to make sense. I feel like summarizing the story would do it an injustice (hehehe), so I'll just say that this is a civil war-esque story in a sci-fi setting with an interesting main character viewpoint and some twists on standard ideas of gender and identity.

To get what I disliked out of the way first, I sort of didn't like how the book onboards the reader. While normally I don't have a problem with books that start you out in the middle of the action, there's usually enough in-the-moment exposition to at least orient the reader and get them moving in the same direction as the author/story. I feel like more could be done to make the reader feel less lost, as I didn't start putting pieces together until maybe a third of the way through. I also felt like the last chapter was weak, when compared with the rest of the book. Without spoilers, it felt tonally different than the rest of the book, like it only existed to carry the reader from book 1 to book 2. 

I will say that once the story started coming together for me (literally, about halfway through), I really felt drawn in and interested in what was going on. I liked the uniqueness of the main character's viewpoint, and even the side characters all felt interesting and varied (if a little disposable, when compared with both the main character and the antagonist). The twist on the idea of gender was also unique, ultimately leading me to the idea that gender didn't matter in this book. I also liked the exposition on identity and what it means when you're not human.

I give this 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 out of respect for the friend who recommended it to me and the fact that Goodreads doesn't do half stars. I'll definitely continue the series some point soon out of curiosity to see where the story goes.

Gavin

Extremely similar to Left Hand of Darkness: undidactic gender-bending, bonding on an ice world, the grey realpolitik of empires, cultural interpenetration, high variance in tech levels.

Leckie's world has a lot of detail but she mostly manages to avoid this kind of opaque sentence:

  On Shis'urna, in Ors, the Justice of Ente Seven Issa who had accompanied Lieutenant Skaaiat to Jen Shinnan's sat with me in the lower level of the house.


Best bit is the implications of high-tech dictatorship: the dark emperor has surveillance footage of everything within their domain, and thousands of clones of themself, and can edit memories, etc. This makes for extreme stability.

(The bit that reassured me, early on, that this wasn't going to be irksome is that the Terrible Galactic Imperialists are the ones with the post-gender society.)

The politics aren't that prominent; the quest looms larger. There is this section, which doesn't manage to be as thoughtful as Oscar Wilde in 1891:

  here's the truth: luxury always comes at someone else's expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn't generally have to see that, if one doesn't wish. You're free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.



That seems to be true of her imperialists, the Radch. But why? They have extremely competent superhuman AIs, like the protagonist, but for some reason their economy is still scarce and material.

The protagonist One Esk is quite good; think Commander Data plus an oath of vengeance. The superior force serving a blithe master: I'm actually reminded of Jeeves (high praise). That said, the morality of her vengeance quest is dubious: she knows she's setting off a galactic civil war and doesn't even think her assassination will accomplish anything. Maybe the next book will do a Dune Messiah and turn the triumph of this book to ashes and despair.

---------------------------

How does it do as Serious science fiction?

 Social development: Some. Lots of different genderings and a nice baroque Space Feudalism.

 Software development: None.

 Actual Science: None?

Jeff James

Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from Net Galley.

Ancillary Justice is science fiction crammed full to the brim with wild ideas. The main character, Breq, is an “ancillary soldier” cut off from her ship for almost twenty years, but she isn’t exactly human, at least not by the standards of her society, the Radch. The Radch, it seems, were aggressive about expansion over thousands of years. As part of that expansion they captured entire civilizations and turned the leftover bodies into these ancillaries – soldiers that shared a mind with their ships, that were effectively as much a part of their ships as any piece of the hull. Corpse soldiers, to quote a slang term.

Breq, who comes from a ship called the Justice of Toren, has spent the past twenty years tirelessly working towards revenge against Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch, who shares one similarity with Breq and other ancillaries: she has thousands of bodies under her control. This, naturally, complicates Breq’s plan for revenge. In the current day scenes, Breq searches for an artifact that will help her carry out her plans while also caring for a petulant drug-addicted former solider who once served on her ship. These alternate with flashbacks to Breq’s time spent as an ancillary soldier on the last planet annexed by the Radch.

Leckie does a great job of slowly revealing more and more about Breq’s past and the nature of the tragedy that befell her ship. She also takes fairly simple building blocks and turns them into fascinating philosophical mind-benders. What, after all, does it mean for Breq’s I to mean the ship Justice of Toren but also all the hundreds of ancillary soldiers in her hold? The narrative is simultaneously first-person and omniscient, jumping from place to place as the ship’s many perspectives build to a greater whole.

Leckie also sets up the Radch society as one that does not distinguish between the genders when speaking. In practice, this means that everyone in the book is ”she” regardless of gender. Further complicating matters for Breq is the fact that she has a hard time distinguishing gender traits when in other societies, and tends to use incorrectly gendered pronouns. At first I found this a bit confusing, but once I got used to it, I found myself not really worrying about the gender of characters. Leckie drops hints here and there as to the actual gender of certain characters, but in practice it doesn’t actually matter.

The scope of Ancillary Justice feels simultaneously personal and global; Breq’s actions are deeply rooted in events from her past, but the result of her fight against the Lord of the Radch could have far-reaching repercussions. The world-building is pitch-perfect, and never feels heavy-handed or overwhelming. As soon as I finished this book, I checked to see if Leckie has any plans to continue writing in this world, and she does – apparently this is the first book in a loose trilogy. That said, it feels like Breq’s quest is contained; the end does set up possible future stories, but I couldn’t begin to guess where else Leckie might take the world of the Radch. However, I find that exciting.

I think my favorite part of this book was the way that Leckie took so many truly alien elements and made them feel natural and believable. The characters are human, but a type of human thousands of years removed from our society, and changed in many strange ways. We don’t ever meet any non-human characters, but they lurk just at the edge of the story, menacing and dangerous.

I can’t wait for the next book in this series, and I’ll definitely be checking out Leckie’s short stories as soon as possible.

Jay Harris

I like the book's concept and ideas, and I wanted to love it, but for some reason I struggled to connect with the characters, story and central conflict while reading it. Wanted to give a second Ann Leckie novel a try, but I almost DNF'd this one as well.

Ancillary Justice is Ann Leckie's stunning debut -- the only novel to ever win the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards -- about a ship's AI who becomes trapped in a human body and her quest for revenge. A must read for fans of Ursula K. Le Guin and James S. A. Corey. "There are few who write science fiction like Ann Leckie can. There are few who ever could." -- John Scalzi On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren -- a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.

Becky A

Overall, very very good. The first third moved a little slowly for me - it was a lot of jargon and concepts thrown at the reader at once, with a focus more on setting up worldbuilding than getting into the story. But once it picked up it was really engaging, and I appreciate how much thought went into the world it presented. 

I still was doing a lot of "okay, sure, let's go with that" nodding along at the end; the situation with the villain doesn't make a lot of sense to me. (Vague, I know, but not spoilery.) But by the time I finished it, I really wanted to grab the next book immediately, so it's a win.

Ryan LaFerney

incredible world-building complete with sentient starships and a rogue "ancillary" unit (a human body controlled by AI) hell-bent on revenge makes for one of the best science fiction thrillers I've ever read.

There’s this mix of exceptional worldbuilding with a very well-crafted mystery aspect. There’s just a bunch of cool ideas at play in this book and it mostly lands its mark. The main character is cool as hell. Some things happened too fast for my tastes, especially as we started wrapping up, but that’s a personal feeling and nothing egregious. I read this book really fast by my standards and really enjoyed it.

Jules

Janice Hopper

February 2020: rereading this for my SF book club. I think I followed everything that was going on a little better this time. All the multiples of one character got a little brain-explodey for me the first pass through. The fault is mine - the author handles the non-linear narrative well. It's an interesting world.

_____________________

Very interesting book, interesting point of view, interesting way to shape a main character. I liked it.

Magnus Dahl

Ewan

OK OK, to start with this was difficult for me, I had just finished off the Hyperion "Cantos" , all 4, back to back . So jumping straight into another space opera was possibly not the wisest idea. My mind kept mixing up the two worlds. 

But, this is a cracking read, well it becomes one after an OK-ish start. The POV is unique, the questions on gender work (to the most part) and the pay-off made me want to read the next one. The characters, sadly, have not stayed with me as much as I would have liked. That said, I have just started the next one, Ancillary Sword and 20 pages in am finding myself glad to be reunited with Breq et al (I am often proved wrong!)

Still, it is one of those times I wish Goodreads would have a 10 star rating system as this is really a 7/10 or a 3.5 (I always round up)

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren--a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.

Sonja H

Ohne Frage ein sehr gut geschriebenes Buch. Ich war völlig fasziniert, weil ich nicht weiß, wie jemand auf solche Ideen kommt und solche Figuren erschaffen kann. Aber irgendwie habe ich bis zum Schluss das Gesamtkonstrukt nicht verstanden. Das nächste Buch werde ich nicht lesen.

Naty Corbett

I don't know why I put off reading this series for so long, but I'm happy I finally got around to it. 
It's most everything I like in a book, queer, feminist, sci-fi, space. What's not to love?

Cindy Lieberman

Imagine if you had been part of a nearly omniscient hive mind to wake up one day and only be able to see what is directly in front of you, out of your one-and-only pair of eyes? That happens to Breq, an AI who once inhabited a ship and a battalion of crew and soldiers. We follow (default) “her” as she figures out the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other stuff whilst pursuing a valuable piece of equipment to help right some wrongs. 

I found myself a bit distracted while listening to this as an audiobook, but managed to appreciate the world building, customs (everyone, everywhere in the future will drink a tea or tissane of some sort), gender fluidity, and plain ol’ adventuring.

Irem

Aldığı ödüller göz önüne alındığında oldukça yüksel bir beklenti ile başladım ancak seri kitaplarda alıştığımız ilk kitaptaki evrenin açıklanarak konuya girilmesi burada hiç kaale alınmamış. Kitaba başladığınız anda bilmediğiniz bir dünyaya düşüyorsunuz. Yavaş yavaş anlatımın arasınsa dünya ile ilgili bilgiler düşmeye başlıyor önünüze ama bu o kadar yavaş oluyor ki okuma keyfini kaçırıyor. Fikir çok güzel ama detaylandırma ve anlatım konusunda çok da sevemedim. Seriye devam etmeyi şimdilik düşünmüyorum.

Sheila

HOLY SHIT this is amazing sci-fi! All other contemporary sci-fi needs to bow down because they wish they were Ancillary Justice. Compared to many other sci-fi series I've read, I had little difficulty picturing the settings & tech in my mind; it all flowed naturally. I did kind of imagine the ships & their ancillaries as "Cylons lite" without the whole hellbent-on-destroying-humanity kick. 

Additional bonuses were: having the narrator be essentially sentient AI, having all the characters be genderfluid, gender neutral and/or basically female, NEARLY ALL NON-WHITE CHARACTERS, & mentions of aliens called Rrrrrr eheheheh

I can't wait to start Ancillary Sword & so glad Ancillary Mercy is coming out this year bc this is a great story.

Barry Hess

Unable to finish. Couldn’t click with this one.

Jason Porterfield

Absolutely brilliant, and the best science fiction I've read in a while.

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Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

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