Micah reviewed Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch, #1)
CHOO CHOO all aboard the trilogy train
4 stars
A bit meandering at times with the world building, but some good, juicy sci-fi. Really keen to see where it goes.
English language
Published May 8, 2023 by Orbit.
A bit meandering at times with the world building, but some good, juicy sci-fi. Really keen to see where it goes.
writing a protagonist who is several different people wrapped into one consciousness, and is for some part of the story, not necessarily reliable as a storyteller, feels like it would've been a challenge, but ann leckie made it seem natural
the worldbuilding is, typically for good sci fi, brilliant. i felt absorbed into it. the constant surveillance within the radch is disturbing and feels connected to the real-life present. the colour and the characters are lovely.
i also noted that this is ann leckie's first full length novel and i'm super impressed.
i'm eager to read the next 2 in the series, though i'm going to read something else in between so i don't get series burnout!
J’ai eu du mal à me mettre dedans, les règles grammaticales sur le genre étant non seulement confusante mais désagréable (j’ai eu l’occasion de lire un livre où tout était genré au féminin « elle pleut », « la bébé », mais ce n’est pas pareil).
Après quelques chapitres (et ayant appris que la version originale était aussi « perturbante » et que ce n’était pas une aberration de traduction), j’ai enfin profité du livre.
Une histoire complexe et très bien ficelée, originale, que j’ai trouvé très rafraîchissante.
Really enjoyed this book. In some ways it's a classic space opera but there's enough twists on the formula that it feels super fresh. Fascinating explorations of identity, language, and class. The writing was fun and engaging, I ate this book up.
The idea of a split awareness, of “self” being distributed among multiple bodies drew me in, but I think I enjoyed the concept more than the story itself. I found the present-day story in the first half slow going. I don’t know how necessary the dual timeline was. The Radch (Radchaai?) culture was interesting, with its rituals, religion, tea and inter-house politics. That said, many of the cultural details seemed there more as unrelated background, and the story could have played out in a similar way in a very different setting.
The characters and there decisions didn’t always make sense to me, which maybe kept me from being fully engaged. Overall, I’m glad I read this, but I’m not in a rush to pick up the sequel.
There's a lot of death and destruction happening throughout the book and the Radch is quite an evil Empire. Nevertheless, the two main characters grew on me quickly. Great world-building but done in a restrained manner. The story itself is quite the wild ride. It also stands on its own, despite being the first book in a trilogy.
Leckie's novel explores so many different worlds and how the worlds see each other that it provides interesting insights into what makes something alien. The transhumanist space ship AI as a first-person character also asks questions about what it means to be alive. One of the central themes of a society with a genderless pronoun also forces the reader to consider if gender matters in this future world, while also examining why certain characters are expected to have a specified gender.
A fascinating exploration of colonialism, gender, and the question of human agency told through a remarkably human, arguably nonhuman protagonist. A must-read for anyone who enjoys outside-the-box thinking and sci-fi worldbuilding.
What a slow burner this book is. By the time you realize how really really good it is, you're more than halfway done, so it definitely requires patience.
The first-person narrator is Breq, who felt a bit like a prototype for our beloved Murderbot from the Martha Wells series. Breq is an ancillary, a human body controlled by the AI of a ship, in this case the Justice of Toren. Only Breq's ship no longer exists, so instead of having hundreds of bodies and eyes and all that comes with being the body of a ship, there's just her, on her mission to kill the Lord of the Radch, the leader of the Empire of Radch.
Along the way she gets stuck with Seivarden, one of her former officers who's struggling with substance abuse after waking up a 1000 years after her ship was destroyed.
In order to understand this …
What a slow burner this book is. By the time you realize how really really good it is, you're more than halfway done, so it definitely requires patience.
The first-person narrator is Breq, who felt a bit like a prototype for our beloved Murderbot from the Martha Wells series. Breq is an ancillary, a human body controlled by the AI of a ship, in this case the Justice of Toren. Only Breq's ship no longer exists, so instead of having hundreds of bodies and eyes and all that comes with being the body of a ship, there's just her, on her mission to kill the Lord of the Radch, the leader of the Empire of Radch.
Along the way she gets stuck with Seivarden, one of her former officers who's struggling with substance abuse after waking up a 1000 years after her ship was destroyed.
In order to understand this much of the plot, you have to be like 40% into this book because you get tossed right in, with lots of flashbacks to Breq's previous life. Nothing makes sense! And what's with the gender stuff, generic feminine gender in an English language book, what gives? And it takes a while to settle in how brilliant that is. The Radch have no concept of gender and so always use the feminine, and after a while you really stop asking yourself what gender the characters in the book really have. Does it really matter if Seivarden or Anaander Mianaai are male or female? It totally doesn't.
When things get rolling, you're totally glued to this book, or rather, I was. I want to learn more about the Radch, all the backstory, and I definitely want to see how Breq or rather One Esk, will go on when she's back on a ship, but one that's not herself.
I wanted to give modern sci-fi a proper go and where better to start than the book that won every single sci-fi book award? I was pretty disappointed and a bit baffled by the wide praise it’s received.
The book has some grand ideas about individual vs. collective identity and a society where gender is ambiguous. However, these ideas aren’t really taken anywhere interesting or challenging and it just feels like there’s no follow-through. All that might be OK if the plot was engaging and the characters engrossing. I found the dialogue unbelievable and the characters two-dimensional.
I’ll not give up on trying modern sci-fi just yet, but I’ve certainly not been converted to it.
Inutilmente complicato e onestamente non mi ha entusiasmato. Forse non l'ho capito io o forse sono troppo legato all'hard scifi classica.
A thoroughly engaging read. I very much enjoyed the author's exploration of what it means to be a person. The hero's native language is genderless so all people are referred to with female pronouns regardless of their gender expression. While on the one hand, it makes it hard to envision some of the character, it also works to make the distinction between sexes a meaningless one for the story. That combined with the fact that the main character is a severed shard of an artificial intelligence inhabiting a human body, programmed to believe she is less than human, makes for a very interesting viewpoint (especially when people around her come to a different conclusion while she remains oblivious). The action builds nicely into a satisfying climax, but only comprises the opening act for a larger story. Now, if you'll excuse me, time to dig into the sequel.
I think my brain just melted. On the face of it, this looks like a simple(ish) story of betrayal and revenge but there is so much packed into the plot that it really does push you to think about a whole range of issues - the largest and most obvious being the question of identity and what makes us who we are.
This book is fantastic.
An interesting read. I can't remember the last time I read a fiction novel and walked away without a certainty that, were I magically transported to that place, I could survive rather well with the knowledge the story had shared with the reader. The characters here are simultaneously sympathetic and alien, and their culture is so unlike our own as to require a fair bit of the story to explain even the smallest details.
All in all, though, a decent world-build, and some truly creative narrative choices. I found the use of only the feminine pronoun an oddly soothing choice, as it dismissed any concerns over gender or possible sexual tensions. And writing from the POV of a stranded hivemind was an inspired choice.
Not bad for a novel, great for a first novel. Sometimes story was a bit confusing, but I was hooked to the end.
Objectionable material: Some violence, some uncomfortable stuff if you think about it (where do ancillaries come from, Mommy?) and a few foul words.