From the Bookshelf of The Sword and Laser…

Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)

Ann Leckie

Start date: November 1, 2013

Finish date: November 30, 2013

Discussion: 2013 Reads

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2013 Reads

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What Members Thought

Mar 25, 2015 Matthew rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, audio-book

Apparently tea is universal.

This book was fantastic and is going on my "favorites" shelf. Ancillary Justice is a great sci-fi book that touches upon one of the classic sci-fi tropes, the question of artificial intelligence, and then uses it as a jumping board to explore emotions such as love, revenge, justice and more.

The reader is taken on a journey through a galactic empire that is on the brink of tearing itself apart and the book uses that starting point to explore why, even on a personal l ...more

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Sep 02, 2015 Justin rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

This book is an absolute triumph of worldbuilding, but it certainly doesn't hold the reader's hand. Leckie takes show-not-tell to the extreme, leaving the intricacies of setting and the convoluted knot of flashbacks up to the reader to figure out as Honored Breq moves closer to taking her revenge. The slippery gender pronouns are disorienting at first, but soon slide easily into the narrative and do a lot of work in creating a sense of the alien. The book's big weakness is how slow it is; things ...more

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May 21, 2014 Tom rated it liked it

Given the amount of critical acclaim lavished on this book, I really wanted to like it. But I never recovered from my confusion in the first half enough to get past a 3 star rating.

In the first half of the book, we have two timelines running, approximately 1000 years apart. I never attached real emotional significance to the "older" story, and I suppose that's what it's there for... to get you connected to a secondary character and give you some shocks. It didn't work for me. And of course the t Given the amount of critical acclaim lavished on this book, I really wanted to like it. But I never recovered from my confusion in the first half enough to get past a 3 star rating.

In the first half of the book, we have two timelines running, approximately 1000 years apart. I never attached real emotional significance to the "older" story, and I suppose that's what it's there for... to get you connected to a secondary character and give you some shocks. It didn't work for me. And of course the trick with the gender usage/mis-usage was incredibly distracting. Our hero, a space ship AI, does not recognize gender, and so all characters are referred to as "she". The author could have kept that trick, but helped the readers along with secondary characters correcting/eliminating the confusion, but she does not do that. Having read the entire thing through, I'm still uncertain of the gender of some pretty important characters. Very disconcerting. Added to that, a ship has multiple "ancillaries" or bodies that it inhabits. And the emperor/ruler of the main space civilization also inhabits many bodies. So you are uncertain when characters are referring to space ships or individuals, not to mention the many factions they end up dividing into.

I suppose the literary experts all point out that this is intentional and a very clever way to communicate the story and the hero's perspective; not to mention making a statement on feminism, individualism and a whole bunch of other "isms". But I just don't want to invest that much effort into my entertainment reading. I'd guess a second or third reading would reveal a lot of other layers that I frankly glossed over. But "ain't nobody got time for that!"

Once the timelines merge together, things do become more straightforward, and the story becomes much more entertaining and readable.

So... if you're a committed sci-fi reader looking deep meaning and a whole bunch of layers in they way a story is told, this is for you. If you're a casual sci-fi reader looking for a good space opera, this probably isn't for you.

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