After struggling so much with my last read, I rewarded myself with a book that I knew I was going to like, and wow, did this one deliver for me. Interestingly, one of my complaints about The Two Body Problem was the diverse cast of characters and the complex plot structure. Yet, in Ancillary Justice, there is a sentient starship who divides herself into multiple “ancillaries” to run the ship, a complex plot involving a backstory from 20 years ago and the present day, and the main POV character can’t determine gender accurately in a language that uses gendered language. So, clearly, it isn’t the complexity of the story. Instead, let’s be honest, a story with spaceships and aliens is going to grab my full attention.
This debut novel won the Hugo and the Nebula and tied the BFSA award in 2013 with Gareth Powell’s Ack-Ack Macaque (which is actually how I learned about Leckie… Powell has blogged about how tying with her was a win in his book). I had intended to read this book to get some craft pointers but that will have to wait for a second read as I finished it in a week and as soon as I was done I ordered the two sequels. That is how much I liked it.
Breq is an Ancillary, one of the split bodies of the sentient starship Justice of Toren, one of many build by the Radch, the galaxy spanning (or at least many-star-system spanning) empire. One of the main threads of the story follows the occupation and annexation of a planet (we find out later that this is approximately 20 years in the past). The other thread is “present day” (thousands of years in the future) and follows the journey of one Ancillary on a mission to reach the ruler to give them a message.
It actually is a fairly simple plot but the new culture being explored and Breq has to go on quite an adventure to complete her task. I enjoyed the book very much, 4-star level, until the last 20% or so when it kicked into high gear and I knew that I was going to rate this 5-stars.
There was a lot of world building behind the scenes. each starship has “decades,” and the names of the decades (like One-Esk) are never explained. Some people online have not enjoyed the withholding information here, but I thought it was interesting to allow the reader to discover the world as an outsider… which Breq is also doing in the story. The other big complaint I’ve seen is the use of “she/her” pronouns for everyone by Breq. The Radch do not have pronouns in their language and only late in the book do we finally experience Radch culture and are shown how men and women have blurred their boundaries to appear how they want to appear (and it is implied that it can change with implants and mods). One main character we find out later is in fact male, even though Breq refers to him with “she” pronouns early in the story because the planet they are on has gendered language. I liked the playing with gender roles and tropes; this is something that I know Scalzi has done on purpose as well. I remember reading a blog post by him that said basically that if the gender of a character isn’t really important to the story, he will withhold revealing it and then the reader makes an assumption that a general is a man and then when he reveals that it is a woman several pages later, you are confronted with your own gender biases. That happened to me in one of his books for sure.
Anyway, I am really looking forward to reading the next 2 in the series over the next few weeks!
Be First to Comment