Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
This is one of the most complex books I’ve read in a long time. It’s hard science fiction of the sort that explores notions of guilt and consciousness and AI and class privilege. It spans centuries, and has two different viewpoints, one from a ship who had many ancillaries, and one from a ship who only had one.
Ancillaries are human subjects kidnapped during a conquering phase, who are impressed into service as bodies for a sentient ship or station. Think about that for a while, and think about how cool it would be to have a lot of different bodies. Then think about how horrible that would be if you or your loved one was taken as a corpse soldier to be the mind and eyes and ears of a sentient ship owned by the conquerors. In other novels, the author might explore the possibility of the orignal body’s owner reasserting its personality, but Leckie leaves the body as owned by its possessor mind.
Not that Leckie doesn’t delve into plenty of other ideas to chew on. We have Breq, hell-bent on a mission that she doesn’t explain to the reader until well over halfway through the novel. We know she’s a ship, and that she doesn’t always know why she does things, and we know that she’s also the Esk One who attends to Lieutenant Awn in the other viewpoint, but nothing comes easily. This isn’t a novel you can skim. Multiple factions, multiple races, multiple viewpoints, each character having more than one name…I had to reread several passages to figure out what was going on. Adding to the confusion–though I have to say it’s one of the things about this book I found utterly brilliant–was that the narrator uses “she” for everyone. Breq can’t tell male from female, and their culture has only one pronoun that doesn’t distinguish gender, so everyone is “she” even if Breq learns that someone (ie. Seviarden) is male. The result, for me, was that I started to think of almost everyone as either female (Breq) or genderless. However, it did confuse me, especially when one character is talking to another character about one of two people not present and everyone is “she”.
It’s a dark novel, as you’d expect from a culture that routinely conquers other planets and impresses their citizens to be corpse soldiers. There’s not much levity, but there is beauty. I liked the culture of Issk, which reminded me of Act III of Diablo, or a world of Martha Wells’ creation. I also liked Nilt, especially the glass bridges. I loved the idea that the ships were friends with each other, and that the ships liked some people more than others. The romantic entanglements confused me, mostly because the house and status of the characters were so Byzantine that I couldn’t comprehend the power structure. (And what does that say about me, that I can’t understand a romantic entanglement without understanding their relative status?) One character would warn another character about not getting involved with someone, and I couldn’t understand if it was teh “now don’t go hitting on the enlisted girls” or “you shouldn’t think that handsome captain means for this to be long-term.”
I usually like to read books quickly, preferring action adventure, YA, and fast-paced, easy-to-ready stories. This novel isn’t easy to understand, and demands close reading. If it hadn’t been highly recommended by a reader I trust, I might not have dug in and stayed the course, but after a while, I found I liked Breq and found the world so compelling that I was willing to finish it for its own sake. This is a good book for a science fiction book club. It’s also a good book if you want something that will stand up under second and third readings. I almost think you need to read it at least twice to really have a good handle on what was going on.
