Clare L. Deming

I have had Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie on my to-be-read list for some time. It recently came up as a selection for one of my book clubs, so that gave me the impulse to finally read it. Ancillary Justice won the Hugo and Nebula Awards and is the first book in the Imperial Radch series (paid links).

Here is the blurb:

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.

I was not a fan of this book at all, to the point where I’m sitting down to write this review and I can barely remember what it was about. I think part of my reaction is because I found it to be a difficult book to get into, and I never empathized with any of the characters.

The main point-of-view character is Breq, the last remaining body of an intelligent ship who formerly inhabited numerous human bodies that had been captured through imperial conquests. The story also follows two different timelines, filling in backstory while the main plot progresses.

I had heard that this book presented gender in a unique way, with the Radch language only using feminine pronouns, but I found that this distracted me from the story and didn’t really add anything to my experience of the characters. I read that this was intended to let the reader decide what gender the characters were, but the topic of gender didn’t have any true bearing on the story or any particular theme it presented.

I thought that the science fiction idea of the ships and their human bodies was nicely done. The author presented some scenarios that used this concept in interesting ways. I liked how Emperor Mianaai also had multiple bodies that could act independently, but I also wasn’t clear on where or who the real Mianaai was (but perhaps that is something to be determined in later books?).

This book contained some nice action scenes and tense situations, but I couldn’t get past the dry prose and unengaging characters. I don’t think I’m going to read the other books in the series, but I’d be open to different story by the author.

Have you read Ancillary Justice or any other books by Ann Leckie? Which would you recommend? Let me know in the comments.

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