Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Well, I'm feeling practically with it in the sci-fi world all of a sudden, because now I've read *two* recent Hugo winners. (The other was The City and the City, which won in 2010.) But even before Ancillary Justice won the Hugo last year I was interested in it, largely based on holyoutlaw's description of the book's approach to artificial intelligence. When akirlu chimed in with her own recommendation a few months ago, I was primed to give it a try. Then because of the Puppies brouhaha this year, I suddenly felt compelled to vote in the Hugos, and the second book in the series, Ancillary Sword, was on the ballot, so I felt I needed to read it, which meant I needed to read the first book first.
I really enjoyed Ancillary Justice, although I confess that by the end I was pretty confused about what was going on, which as far as I could tell was also how the narrator felt. Leckie builds a nicely complicated system of artificial intelligence, in which she seems to build off of Iain Banks' ideas about AIs embodying themselves in ships and in avatars that can be having independent adventures of their own while still part of the same Mind. In Leckie's version, AIs are embodied in ships, but they also run a multitude of what are called ancillaries, which are sentient beings that have had their own consciousness erased and replaced by the AI consciousness. They are living robots of a sort. One of these is the narrator of the novel, and we gradually learn why it is capable of independent action when it normally would be a kind of only semi-autonomous slave or appendage.
All this is taking place in a political system called the Radch Empire that until recently has been rapidly expanding through a process called annexation in which other culture's are invaded, militarily crushed, and forcibly assimilated into the Radch. The Radch are a rigidly hierarchical, totalitarian polity, and not only do their military ships employ slaves in the form of ancillaries, but obedience to the Radch political system is enforced on non-AI citizens through brainwashing and re-education. This aspect of Leckie's world-building reminded me of Cherryh's Cyteen, which is the second of this year's Hugo-nominated novels to remind of Cyteen, so either Cherryh has had a huge influence on modern SF or I've got her on the brain. In any event, there is revolution afoot in the Rach Empire, and given the deeply embedded nature of artificial intelligence in the political system, the political rupture is also a rupture in consciousness, which is part of what makes the novel so confusing in the end. It's hard to tell who is on which side, or what the side are when they seem to be just different aspects of the same mind.
Well, there's a lot going on in this novel, even if much of it is variations on themes we've heard before. One of the neat things Leckie does is to posit that emotions are a necessary ingredient in decision-making even for machine intelligence such as an AI. That was another way this novel reminded me of The Goblin Emperor, too, because both books are very focused on the emotional spasms and nuances of their protagonists. Whether it's an innovation or not (I don't read enough contemporary SF to say), I was also impressed (if also occasionally confused) by the way she depicted the multi-layered awareness of the AI protagonist when it had several ancillaries doing different things at the same time. In the brief interview with Leckie at the end of the book, she notes that it allowed her to stretch the normally limited boundaries of first person narrative, which I thought was a great literary insight. Katherine Addison employs the royal we in The Goblin Emperor, reflecting a pretense that the emperor embodies the state, but in Ancillary Justice first person plural would be an accurate reflection of the multiple perspectives of a complicated consciousness.
So now I'm ready to plunge into Ancillary Sword, which seems to have gotten a more mixed reaction than the first book. Still, it made the Hugo ballot despite the Puppies slates, so it apparently pleased a lot of people in its own right.