Ann Leckie: Ancillary Justice

[bibliogramma]

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie's debut novel, is nothing less than brilliant. It rests on the boundary between milsf, space opera and suspense thriller, a story about a former member of an imperial spacefleet, witness to military atrocities, betrayed by her leaders, on a quest for justice. But the protagonist, now calling herself Breq, is all that remains of an AI that once gave consciousness to both a battleship, Justice of Toren, and a multitude of once-human, mind-wiped and technologically enhanced auxillary units. And Anaander Mianaai, the leader of the Empire known as the Radch (the word means civilised in the language of the Radchaai), who ordered the slaughter and betrayed her is a human consciousness fragmented between a thousand or more cloned bodies, some of which are at war with each other.

For most of the novel, the narrative alternates between the present, in which Breq has finally, after 19 years as a single-bodied consciousness, ready to take action against Anaander, and past events, occurring when the protagonist was still a battle cruiser with ancillary units, but with a focus on the perspective of the ancillary One Esk, who is most fully a witness to the events leading up to the atrocity and betrayal, and who will eventually become Breq.

There is so much more to this novel than unique characters in a fast-paced and tightly plotted space adventure. The multiple bodies and memories of the two main characters raise profound questions about what it means to be human, and how one defines one's identity. Breq's uncertainty about who or what she is and how she fits into human society has a counterpoint in the third significant character - Seivarden, a fugitive drug addict from the Radch, once a junior officer on Justice of Toren over a thousand years ago, who was lost along with her ship during her first command and drifted in deepsleep for centuries before being found and revived into a future she has no connection too.

Then there are all the issues of a failing empire grown huge and unwieldy on too many assimilated star systems, with a cultural secret - a genocide far greater that the slaughter witnessed by Breq, one that threatens to shatter both the mind of Anaander Mianaai and the future of the Imperial Radch.

In among all of these themes and issues, Leckie also forces readers to think about language and gender, when she makes the Radchaai a people who have no concept of gender as a differentiating characteristic between people. They have more than one biological sex, but this is totally irrelevant within their culture. They use only one pronoun, which translates into other languages as "she/her." Lacking an awareness of gender, they do not understand the cues that designate gender in other cultures - leading to some confusion when Breq must guess at gender when speaking to non-Radch, and often make mistakes. It also allows for sentences such as "She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain."

I fell in love with this book and am eagerly preparing to read the second volume of the Imperial Radch trilogy.