Book Review: Ancillary Justice
So THAT was pretty awesome.
I admit I found it hard going for the first quarter, and difficult [1] going for the next quarter to a third, and then WHAM OFF TO THE RACES. Which isn't quite how it went because I didn't turn pages frantically and fast, but that's because this isn't that sort of book. Except where it is.
Lemme 'splain.
The protagonist and first-person narrator of the book is the last remaining part of a large AI that once consisted of a battleship and a large number of "ancillaries": people who have been wiped of their own memories and personalities and made into Borg-like extensions of the ship. The whole system is rather like a collective, each piece thinking of all the other pieces as themselves. It's complicated, but in the best way.
I've mentioned before how I hate 1st person narration anymore [2]. But this book is a perfect example of the right time and right reason to use it. The story is very much about the journey of Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen [3], and her reasons for everything she does are intrinsic to her nature as a formerly collective, now singular, AI. Her perceptions of the world and events are crucial. Her way of thinking and perceiving (both as the collective and as the singular) are different from our human experience, so her narrative voice is unique.
JoTOEN takes on the alias "Breq," so that's how I'm going to refer to her for the rest of this review.
ANYWAY... The structure of the book has a backstory and a current timeline alternating. They do catch up to each other in the middle, and we go strictly forward from there. That's the point where the book takes off for me.
I'll admit to spending some time in the beginning being irked by the chunks of potted history. But because everyone has been raving over the book, I was more willing to accept that it would eventually become clear why it was there, and that Leckie wasn't just dumping words of auctorial indulgence. And indeed she was not; those scenes are needed, and the slower pace they create is, now that I think about it, a benefice that allows the reader to slowly immerse in the difficult mindset of a broken AI.
I'm not the ideal reader for a "difficult" book. Generally I like my books to go down easy, with the author's writing style and my reading style a smooth match from the get-go. On one level, the style here matched me just fine: Leckie's prose is solid and forthright, without extraneous ornamentation. (This is entirely appropriate for the narrator's voice. I imagine Leckie could write a different way if she chose.)
The tricky bit is in the details, which are simultaneously a hindrance to the reader by introducing new protocols, yet some of the coolest stuff of the book. Biggest example: The people of the Radch, the empire Breq is/was part of, don't make gender distinctions. The gender-neutral pronoun for their language is "she," and other terms are generally feminized (by English-speaker standards) regardless of the gender of the actual person being referred to. When (secondary character) Seivarden is introduced, the narration does mention he is a male human, but persistently refers to him as "she" and "her." This gave me some difficulty in forming a mental picture of him, and a lot of mental hiccups until I got used to it.
Ditto with lieutenant Awn, though by the time he shows up, my brain was already starting to make the adjustment. But there are characters whose gender is never really clarified, and I more or less had to pick one (I forget if Awn was clarified or if I just chose him to be male. I think there were clothing references that made me assume this). This is, presumably, part of Leckie's point, and it's a good one. Once I got the gears of my brain to adjust to this twist in language, the reading went easier.
But seriously, I'm not even positive Breq is female.[4] It would be interesting to do a survey of readers and see if we all cast particular characters as the same gender or if there's variation from reader to reader.
Other cool things included the worldbuilding, and all the notions of colonization, elitism, nationalism, slavery, etc etc etc that are shown in and around the book without ever once clubbing the reader over the head. This is assisted by the ambiguously multipart nature of the antagonist, who is herself not technically an AI but shares a lot of the traits by consisting of 1000+ individual clones of the same person, all with communication/enhancements similar to that of AIs such as Justice of Toren.
If this review is confusing, good: so is the book. But in a good way. It slowed the reading considerably in that I frequently had to stop because my brain had been twisted enough for one session, but it was also fascinating, which is the whole freaking point of science fiction. It's not a "sit down and zip through it" book, but it paid off on every promise it made, completely rewarding the effort of giving my brain the workout.[5]
It also did the thing I'm discovering is crucial in a book: the pace continuously accelerated. The beginning unfurls at a measured pace; the middle starts to pick up on action and problems and revelations; the ending is an explosion into crisis.
It's been a long time since I read a book where the ending was so satisfying. The largest plot arc is unresolved, but the situation has clearly changed for Breq and everyone else; there's a distinct endpoint to the plot of this book. The next book will presumably follow Breq and Seivarden in their new situation, both personally and in the larger situation happening in the Radch empire. Very much looking forward to it.
[1] slightly less hard than "hard going"
[2] My main complaints about 1st person narrative are that we get a lot of similar sounding voices in entirely different books, and that I hate hearing people's insecurities and whining from the inside. IMO, the two best recent uses of 1stP have been this book, and The Hunger Games, largely because in both the author skillfully conveys a lot of information to the reader that the narrator is oblivious to, and it's entirely believable. It's also a very difficult trick to accomplish!
[3] Justice of Toren is the ship, One Esk is a particular division of ancillary soldiers of the ship, and the protag was number 19 of that division
[4] Also, I assume the people that are made into ancillaries are of all genders. OTOH, their individuality is completely subsumed to the AI (except where it's not--plot point!), so I don't know if they think of themselves as any particular gender. Breq does not appear to.
[5] The last book to do this was Mirror Dance by Bujold. That one also started off as a difficult read, and worked through a complex, multi-layer structure that entirely paid off in the end.