A Strange Thing That Turned Out Not So Strange, Strangely Enough
A few weeks ago I picked up Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie. a first novel that has won every major award lately, including a Hugo. I picked it up because of this trick highlighted in every review: The story is narrated in first person by the last surviving segment of a warship's conscience, which belongs to a race that doesn't have a social use for gender differentiation, while the physically telllng external details are so indifferent to both sexes to be of no use (body enhancement and modification are the norm), and thus in speech they refer to every person by default as our equivalent of "she". I was soo curious to see how it worked!
So I was curious, and then, as it says in the tin, it turned out quite easy to get used to. The book is stranger than that. It's told in flashbacks and present time, and the story has a bit of Le Guin (mostly the part that takes place in the past, in a recently annexed planet, that was the best achieved part of the story , to me) and part Ian M Banks "The Culture" series books in the rest, what with the sentient ship and the outreaching empire. The rest is noise.
I finished it, but apart from the relative strangeness of the worldbuilding, the main argument: the ship's consciousness contained in a last single soldier is looking for a weapon to kill the emperor... well, it was too convoluted and at the same time too easily achieved to be engaging to me. The worldbuilding, as I said, is quite interesting, and the part when you get to see that gender actually doesn't really matter that much was really surprising to experience. It is the first in a trilogy, so I think I'll be reading the second one.
So I was curious, and then, as it says in the tin, it turned out quite easy to get used to. The book is stranger than that. It's told in flashbacks and present time, and the story has a bit of Le Guin (mostly the part that takes place in the past, in a recently annexed planet, that was the best achieved part of the story , to me) and part Ian M Banks "The Culture" series books in the rest, what with the sentient ship and the outreaching empire. The rest is noise.
I finished it, but apart from the relative strangeness of the worldbuilding, the main argument: the ship's consciousness contained in a last single soldier is looking for a weapon to kill the emperor... well, it was too convoluted and at the same time too easily achieved to be engaging to me. The worldbuilding, as I said, is quite interesting, and the part when you get to see that gender actually doesn't really matter that much was really surprising to experience. It is the first in a trilogy, so I think I'll be reading the second one.