Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1) in Crazy Challenge Connection

Feb 26, 2017 Chaitra rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: space-opera, science-fiction, first-of-a-series, hugo-winners

ETA: 02/25/25: Same rating, because I'm not completely sold on the book. But two things: 1. Adjoa Andoh is an exceptional narrator who made this a much more enjoyable experience and 2. Happily, my Libby has the audiobook for the second book of the series, so I'll finally read that one soon.

**

A couple of things make Ancillary Justice unlike anything I've read. One, the main character happens to be a sentient spaceship with corpse ancillaries. Two, the language of the Radch, the human civilization ETA: 02/25/25: Same rating, because I'm not completely sold on the book. But two things: 1. Adjoa Andoh is an exceptional narrator who made this a much more enjoyable experience and 2. Happily, my Libby has the audiobook for the second book of the series, so I'll finally read that one soon.

**

A couple of things make Ancillary Justice unlike anything I've read. One, the main character happens to be a sentient spaceship with corpse ancillaries. Two, the language of the Radch, the human civilization that has most of space colonized, has no specific gender modifiers, the one they use is feminine. In theory, the two points gave the book a lot of potential, but practically, it didn't quite get there.

As for the first point, I loved everything that involved Justice of Toren, the troop carrier. This was the backstory. In the present story line, Justice is gone. Everything that's left of her is in one corpse ancillary - One Esk Nineteen, the nineteenth segment of the One Esk decade of the ship. One human body. The present story line therefore had none of the complexity of a hive mind juggling several hundred tasks at once, and that made it pretty regular. But because she's a ship, the lady is necessarily cold and distant. Unless she isn't - she isn't too consistent and makes some strange choices that she can't justify to herself, which I thought wasn't possible when you're an AI and - see? It's pretty regular. The past was great, and I liked the weirdness of it all, but at around 2/3 of the book, the past catches up and we're stuck with one storyline. Which is kind of boring.

Second, I did not like what the ship's sidekick Seivarden was doing while we waited for the past storyline to finish. He slept a lot. And when he was awake, he contributed nothing, because Breq (the ship) and whoever she was talking to was speaking in a language he didn't understand. But he was there. Why? Why could Breq not have come across him after she achieved phase 1 of the plan, and when he would actually be useful to her? That would give her vast intelligence some credibility. She's supposed to kick ass, and she does a bit, but because there is this main thing she does - picking up Seivarden - that she cannot justify to herself for a large portion of the book, it looks half assed.

The gender thing was about as annoying as the first year I learned Hindi at school. Hindi is one of those languages that assigns gender to non living objects, and from what I still think, it's an arbitrary assignment. As I learned the language it became better, but the first year was extremely annoying. That's pretty much how it was here - it bugged me because most of the people they come across do have male or female characteristics, including the Radch. Everyone who isn't Radch use gender modifiers, and it would have been easier to just concentrate on the story if Breq didn't have the kind of trouble with it that she did have - she's a ship, and even though she's just an ancillary, the idea is that she is one and the same as her ancillaries. Anyway, I may have a better handle on this as I read the rest of the books, just as Hindi bugged me less as I became used to it.

It's not that there are no positives. Obviously I really loved the portions that dealt with Justice of Toren intact. The politics and the action (or lack of it), the heirarchy, the whole deal with the Lord of the Radch, I loved all of those too. But it's not wholly the book I anticipated, and I'm slightly disappointed because of that. I'm pretty sure the second book will be a better reading experience, if only because I've tempered my expectations a little. ...more

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