Ancillary Justice & Ancillary Sword
I read a lot.
This week, I read a pair of novels by Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword. Ancillary Justice on a ton of awards, so I had high expectations. At least another novel is planned, so prepare yourself, it won’t end neatly in these two volumes.
These books blend some straight up scifi with elements of grander space opera, plus some really interesting world building.
Spoilers as always.
Ancillary Justice is written as two alternating plot lines, one in the past, one in the present. In the past, the AI of the ship Justice of Toren is slowly being put in an untenable position, a position which ends with the AI murdering, by command of the head of society, one of its own officers. This is particularly fraught because of the structure of the AI; in addition to the ship’s own AI, the intelligence is spread across many (hundreds/thousands) of “ancillary” units. Ancillaries are humans that have had their own personalities replaced with a linkage to the AI. So the Justice of Toren is actually not contained solely in the ship, but is spread across many ancillaries.
So when one of the ancillaries is cut off from the rest of its consciousness and ordered to murder Lieutenant Awn, it does so. Shortly thereafter, the ship is destroyed, and the remaining ancillary is left as the only survivor, no privy to some very dangerous knowledge about the ruler of the civilization. Just an augmented human body, driven by an artificial intelligence.
In the present, this same ancillary finds a recently unfrozen, nearly dead former officer from the Justice of Toren, and decides to save her. Nursing her back to health consumes a lot of time.
These two strands eventually end in one present day timeline, at about the three quarter mark.
I’ll be honest, the first 75% of the book was slow for me. The showdown with The Lord of the Radch is cool, but is also somewhat predictable. The root of the problem the ruler faces, however, is not. This is because the ruler is, like the AI, split across many, many bodies. Many hundreds (indeed thousands) of bodies. This has caused a … problem. When you an I have internal disagreements we are just grumpy until it is worked out. When the ruler of a star spanning civilization disagrees amongst itself across a thousand bodies, well, things get dicey. For everyone. Bodies choose sides. Chain of command gets wobbly.
The world building is very neat, and the author proffers a unique idea: the Radch are gender blind. She shows this by having all her Radch characters refer to everyone with the feminine pronoun. In the first hundred pages of the book it drove me nuts; after that I forgot about it. Interesting idea, not sure it was worth the reading friction.
The second book, Ancillary Justice, was nearly $10 for the Kindle version (thanks Hachette). If I hadn’t gotten the first for $4, I would have passed on price alone, but together it was a reasonable deal. If the third one is also $10, I’ll probably be passing. Just an FYI for frugal readers.
Ancillary Justice follows the remaining ancillary, now a Fleet Captain with his/her own ship, to an important system. The system is important because of the people in it (one person in particular) as well as the economic resources it contains. This book moves much faster, but suffers from much more simplistic local villains. The climax is great fun though.
To Sum Up
The prose in both books strongly reminded me of Herbert; indeed, Dune sprang to mind on multiple occasions.
On the plus side, the world building, obviously. The interplay between AI and ships’ officers is neatly written. The problem faced by the Lord of the Radch is really interesting — this drives the plot in fun ways. I appreciate the near 400 page length of each book too; they were not over too quickly.
On the downside, having a reserved-verging-on-emotionless AI as your central POV character makes for some dry reading. Sometimes really dry reading. One Esk Nineteen (or Fleet Captain Breq in the second book) can be a very boring stick indeed. And the character who is awakened from cryosleep is sad that her family is gone, etc., but has no trouble immediately using current technology, which was a plot hole that bugged me like crazy. Was the Radch civilization at a technological standstill for a thousand years?
On balance? Pretty good. I’m not sure it will be a trilogy as there is ample space for five or six books easily; so if they stay at $10 a pop it might get expensive. I’ll be watching.
