Ancillary Justice

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.

This really seems to be a case of a bandwagon gone insane. I was looking forward to this book after seeing very high recommendations from a lot of high-profile people: Veronica Belmont, John Scalzi (I think?), Felicia Day, NPR books, I know I am forgetting more... and nearly every review here is five stars. How could I not love this one? Well, recently, I have discovered that I am really not fitting in with the mainstream. I have had terrible luck lately with ridiculously popular books and Ancillary Justice is no exception.

I was excited to see Ann's treatment of gender due to the now famous use of "she" as the default pronoun in the book. Unfortunately, it doesn't work at all. What could have been a very interesting take on gender became a gimmick that just didn't fit. "She" in this case comes across as a mistranslation. It is a word that, in English, is very closely associated with the feminine. There are a few exceptions, like boats, guns, or cars, where people will refer to the genderless object as a she. If translating from a language or culture that doesn't recognize a difference between masculine and feminine, one would definitely not choose "she". Sure, it doesn't make for such clever marketing. However, before I get drowned out by cries of "misogynist!", one would not use "he", either. We already have a word for the neutral gender: "it". If that seems too impersonal, one could refer to "the person" throughout the book. It doesn't flow very well and definitely doesn't hold any gimmick value, so it is a lame choice, but it would still make more sense.

Now, aside from the gender issue, the book was a muddled mess. Ann apparently had terrible difficulty with descriptions, using "angry" or "anger" just about a hundred times by my count. She used the word "gesture" a hundred times, as well. There were gestures for everything: polite gestures, gestures of "ambiguity" - whatever they would be, apologetic gestures, negating gestures, more gestures of ambiguity, "abortive" gestures, gestures showing a lack of concern or helplessness. It really came across as what it was: an author's first time at bat.

The story seems to have been thrown together by the writer making angry gestures while holding a pen. Characters would be walking along, talking - and then falling, suddenly. Ok, so you needed to get the story going, but just a sudden fall down hundreds of meters? Maybe my copy was missing a few pages? The story focused on local, regional and galactic/universal politics. If that is your bag, give it a shot. In my mind, though, it read like Tom Cruise's movie Mission Impossible: convoluted story lines going everywhere but nowhere at the same time, characters that were undeveloped to the point where I was indifferent to their fates and actions, and a stupid plan that was the foundation of the whole plot.

Stupid plan? That isn't nice! Honestly, the whole idea of the book is that a guy has a terrible plan. Somebody wants to steal a gun and kill thousands of bad guys, yet she (see what I did there? Gimmick!) knows she may only successfully kill a small handful? To make it worse, there are mind-reading ships that can tell if you are stressed or sweating, which just may be significant if your goal is the assassination of one thousand clones of the galactic empire's supreme leader! Conveniently, though, these clones all seem to hang around common ships and hang onto the outside of escaping ships, trying to shoot their way in. Lazy. Wow. This is the last Ann Leckie book I am going to waste my time on. Sorry, Ann, I don't mean to hurt your feelings, but I am sure that my review certainly won't sink your next book or movie deal.

I have written low star reviews of popular books before and have received angry messages from fanboys intending to intimidate me into giving more stars (really!), so I feel it necessary to provide this explanation of what a book review site is: it is a collection of different opinions. If you don't like somebody's opinion of your favorite book, sending messages to that person to give a better review completely reduces the value of the review site as a whole. If every offended person here got everybody else to give a book give stars, every book would have five stars. How does that help you find your next book to read? Instead, there are a billion five star reviews for Ancillary Justice and a few low ones. If you agree with the tastes of the low star reviewers, maybe the book isn't for you. If you want to play the numbers game, read the book, you will probably love it.