Ancillary Justice (AJ) is a great modern space opera. It also happens to be Ann Leckie's debut (she's won a bunch of awards for this book already).
The first half of AJ is split among two PoVs. Both PoVs happen to be the same "person": a starship's AI. One section is a flashback where the AI recounts how her ship ended up getting destroyed while the other, set in the present is a quest story dealing with only one segment, called an ancillary, of that AI. The segment, Breq, is on a quest to get a thingamajig that can enable her to exact revenge on the Lord of Radch, the Emperor type personality who rules the universe, who also destroyed Breq's ship.
The story is compelling from the get-go, you are curious to know just how Breq has ended up where she has, and also what she will make of it. The writing is crisp and although the middle of the book sags somewhat it is completely forgivable with regards to the exciting climax.
I loved the ideas that Leckie keeps throwing at us. The inherent instability of conquest-based empires which is what the Radch are, but they look at themselves as anything but. (The Radch have shades of Rome, Imperial China and of course Britain. There's also lots of tea drinking involved). The undead AI protagonist makes for a different look at humanity. The worldbuilding is great, and one gets the feeling that Leckie has only shown a glimpse of her fascinating universe, one she has thought out in great detail.
The thing that grabs at most readers though is gender. AJ uses the female pronoun throughout. The Radch don't have gendered pronouns in their language at all (and Leckie hints that her universe is not binary gendered). This makes for insightful and great reading when the gender of our characters is left ambiguous and even when we do get definite hints about their gender, Breq continues to use "she" because to her, that is default (actually, like most of SF, Breq doesn't actually think in English, but to our "translations", "she" has been handed down as default).
AJ leaves its readers with a powerful message on how cultural traits and constructs, whether they be about gender, class or religion can constrict or define our thinking. All the praise it has garnered is fully deserved. Just about the only negative thing I can think about it is that AJ was maybe a 100 pages too long, and some of the dialogue was expository. But as it's only the first novel of what is sure to be an exciting series, I'll be eagerly waiting for more.
Read from: 06-04-2014 to 07-05-2014; kindle copy
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
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