Book Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

[hrj]

Originally published at Alpennia.com. You can comment here or there.

Given that this book won pretty much every SFF award available in the year it came out, it may seem odd that I'm only getting around to reviewing it now, but perhaps that helps me stand back from the buzz. For the possibly two people among my readers not familiar with the series, Ancillary Justice is the first in a three-part space opera revolving around the social and political consequences of multi-bodied consciousness, including the use of "ancillaries" -- persons who have their original consciousness/personality over-written in order to become interchangeable biological cogs in the larger machinery of the Radch empire. Breq, the viewpoint character, is the only surviving ancillary of the troop ship Justice of Toren and is on a mission directly related to that state that gives every evidence of being a pointless suicide mission. Isn't that how all good space opera begins?

The writing style hit my preferences solidly on target. The worldbuilding is laid out implicitly and released in casual observations and perceptions, allowing/requiring the reader to build an understanding of the setting and its consequences as the story progresses. The non-linear narrative intertwines well with the shifting nature of who and what Breq is in relation to the world. As Breq struggles with what words to use to describe her nature, her perceptions, and her relationships, we come to understand what lies behind those struggles and how they set up the conflict in the book.

At the time of the book's release, there was a great to-do over the presentation of Radch culture as not making distinctions of gender in language or social interaction, and the author's choice to use female pronouns to represent this in the narrative. As a linguist, I confess I found that set-up neither revolutionary nor problematic. Plenty of more familiar languages don't make distinctions of gender in pronouns, although such a grammatical system doesn't preclude a sexist society, it should be noted. And given that Ancillary Justice was written in English, the author necessarily had to make some sort of choice in representing this feature. Any choice would have had significant consequences for how the reader perceives and interprets the characters and story, based on implicit defaults. Given this, the choice of using female English pronouns is far more disruptive to reader expectations than any other choice (as well as being rather refreshing to this female reader).

But a far more radical aspect of the protagonist's voice is how issues of selfhood, personhood, and individuality are handled, as well as the potential for a multi-bodied personality to become divided against itself, which lies at the heart of the plot. If is far more interesting to untangle what it means when Breg refers to some segment of herself as I, we, or she, than the more simple question of whether she'd going to guess wrong in identifying another character as she or he.

In my interpretation of the story's premise, one of the deepest flaws of the Radch use of ancillaries as disposible, interchangeable tools (and it is a flaw essential to the story) is that selfhod and personality are emergent properties of the wetware: you can overlay an existing body with programming, but the nature of biological processes will immediately start modifying that programming with the experience, perceptions, and interactions that the body undergoes. The "ship personality" may be treated as an AI, but in order to perform its functions, it will necessarily acquire "humanity". We see people's prejudices and assumptions about the nature of ships and ancillaries to be challenged and deconstructed, and it is that chaotic, perhaps irrational, and individual humanity on which the outcome hinges.

Space opera, in itself, isn't one of my favorite genres, but when the action hinges around strongly-detailed and interesting characters, as in this book, it's a setting that allows for exploration of some fascinating concepts. I was immersed and carried along in the story...I can't say "effortlessly" because part of the charm is that the book requires you to do a fair amount of imaginative work, but let's say "with great investment in the characters and their fates." The other two books in the series are in the "to read" folder on my iPad and I expect they will continue in the "most likely to read soon" category.

Comments

[chomiji]

*bounces enthusiastically*

I look forward to seeing what you think of the rest of the series!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I ... was asked to cover-blurb "Ancillary Justice". But I didn't. Largely because I bailed about 35% of the way into the manuscript.

The gender thing didn't work for me. I've read "Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand" by Delany; more to the point, I'm familiar with Polari, which Delany got the alternate gender mode from (in Polari, "she/her" is the default; "he/him" refers to the object of sexual interest on the part of the speaker). Merely switching the default to female forms from male wasn't enough, for me, to mask the underlying space-operatic-ness of the text. Nor was messing around with singular/ensemble intelligences particularly innovative (I've got form for doing that in my own work). So, as I was going through a relatively jaundiced phase wrt. space opera and SF in general, the book fell flat ... even though I could tell that it was going to be pretty significant (although I didn't foresee how significant at the time).

Stuff that was an actual turn-off: the colonialist element of the back story. The Radch imperium itself (hey, empires: not romantic, especially if you live in the aftermath of one).

Am working on my own post-intersectional space opera right now. Will be amused to see what elements of it fall flat for other readers ...

(NB: suddenly realized you didn't have access to that corner of my LJ. If you look, now, you'll be able to see the contents of my crit-reader filter.)

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

I absolutely loved Ancillary Justice. I enjoyed the other two, although not as much - but at the end, I still wanted to know more. Which is one of the good signs of universe-building.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I can see how it might not hit the spot for you. I've rather let go of the notion that I can (or want to) try to judge books in terms of objective relative quality. The question for me isn't, "Did this book do the thing it tried to do better than any other book has done that thing?" but rather "Did this book work for me in the particular ways that I enjoy books working?" The Shiny New Ideas aspect is only one component.

For me, narrative structure is a big component of whether a book works for me. It can be in a genre that I don't ordinarily care for, but if the way the narrative and world-building are set up hit my buttons, then I'll enjoy it. There are books that I desperately wanted to enjoy based on characters, setting, and premise, but where the narrative structure was nails-on-chalkboard for me. In contrast, there are books where aspects of the setting/premise are ones I find ethically horrifying (e.g., the Vorkosigan books) but where the storytelling is catnip. (Although that particular series has lost me several books ago, because it stopped doing the narrative/character things that made the setting bearable.)

If I had time to read more books, I might be more invested in comparative reading. I dunno.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I finished Ancillary Justice a few days ago and will be writing up my own review of it soon. I expect to finish the next one (or two!) while in the US in the next 10 days.

But this provides me with a good time to ask a question: What exactly is a "space opera"? Why is this a space opera instead of science fiction?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

If I had to define space opera off the cuff, rather than looking for someone else's formal definition, I'd say that it's a story that uses the setting of space travel but is focused on exploring character interactions rather than exploring the consequences of technology. There's a certain fuzzy area around types of character interactions that are only made possible by space travel (especially faster than light travel).

A related term, though less broadly used, is "planetary romance" (using "romance" in the medieval literature sense) which is a story set on another planet that assumes a space-opera-type context, but where the action and focus is "on the ground" rather than being focused on the space-traveling parts of the setting.