Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1) in The Toast

Jan 29, 2017 Hannah Notess rated it really liked it

For when you're not just a robot but a bunch of robots. ...more

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Sep 29, 2018 Sarah rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fi

Thematically, Ancillary Justice is basically a masterpiece. It's centered on completely fascinating questions of morality and identity, and what exactly happens after you've done something for which you will never forgive yourself. It's about the shattering of identity in the aftermath, and about piecing together parts of your person again even when you're not sure that you are one, or ever were.

All of those thematic questions are wrapped up in a deeply creative world of spaceships and imperial Thematically, Ancillary Justice is basically a masterpiece. It's centered on completely fascinating questions of morality and identity, and what exactly happens after you've done something for which you will never forgive yourself. It's about the shattering of identity in the aftermath, and about piecing together parts of your person again even when you're not sure that you are one, or ever were.

All of those thematic questions are wrapped up in a deeply creative world of spaceships and imperial politics. Our protagonist is an AI in a human body, who used to be a spaceship and also sort of an army, and who would vehimently deny being human herself but for whom things like music, religion, and human relationships matter very deeply. Our world is an imperial nightmare, for which colonial conflicts have dragged out over thousands of years and far past the line where anything could be justified. Our languages are a fascinating exploration in how language interprets identity, wherein gendered nouns aren't really the default and different forms of speech frame the importance of any gendered identifiers differently. (Which is just so cool, because it's such a fitting sci-fi thing that should be used one hundred percent more often - why should gender mean the same thing in futuristic space empires? There's no reason that it should. Social identities are social identities - and in different social space, they absolutely should mean different things). Leckie clearly worked on building this world for a long, long time, and it shows. It's fascinating. It's detailed. It's original as all hell.

But the book's one major flaw also stems from how carefully and complexly this world is constructed, because sometimes it is so busy being a clever new world that the story sort of abandons itself. There are a hell of a lot of aspects of the world that become too complicated to make consistent sense of - not because they aren't well thought-through (I'm actually very certain that they are), but because the time it would take to bring the reader up to speed would take up too much space, and the context clues are left to do more work than they're really equipt for. The end result is that chunks of the novel read like they require either creating some kind of forty-page cheat-sheet of explanation or just bumbling through it like when you're semi-fluent in a language and just have to let some things go. I chose the second option. It worked fine, but only in the way that sort-of-speaking a language works fine temporarily, but you kind of know the wheels are going to fall off at some point and then you'll be lost.

But the thematic nature of Ancillary Justice is so deeply compelling and completely fascinating that I'm willing to forgive almost anything, including that partial-fluency bumbling feeling. Also, it's a debut novel, and those always have some working-out-the-bugs flaws. I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of this series. ...more

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