Ancillary Justice by An Leckie

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ambitious scifi told from the perspective of one fragment of an artificial intelligence that doesn't just run but is a spaceship serving a colonialist empire.

This book had the great misfortune of being talked way up to me in ridiculous terms, to the point where I finished it and thought, "yeah, it's good, but come on, it's not that good." And the thing is, it's not, on a technical level. Leckie has an unfortunate addiction to infodumps which largely ruins the pleasure of puzzling out this strange but familiar post human world and its rules. And the last quarter or so of the book stumbles repeatedly with pacing and tension, such that it felt more like a deflation than a climax.

But that said, I am so entirely down with the stuff this book is rolling around in: the ethics of empire; conflicts of the self when the self is not as we understand it – a spaceship or a government rather than a human being; a marvelous intelligence made by humans but entirely not human, and also really, really angry. It's complex stuff, thoughtfully done, with the sort of textural awareness of class issues, in particular, that you just don't see every day.

The different iterations of the conflicted self were particularly effective for me. It seemed to get at the compromised, contradictory, self-deceptive heart of social hierarchies in a penetrating and accessible way, and I dug it.

But all that said. It isn't that good, come on. Let's do this book the favor of not talking about a debut like it's the second fucking coming, because that's a pretty awful thing to do to an author, honestly.




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