Title: Ancillary Justice
Author: Ann Leckie
Publisher: Orbit
Publication Date: 2013
Genre: Science Fiction
Price: $9.99 (ebook), $15.00 (trade paperback)
Reviewed by: Julia Dvorin
Hello fellow Heroines of Fantasy readers! Julia here again,
this time with a little bit of a “cheater” review. Why “cheater”? Well, because
I usually try to review something from a small press here, and this time I’m
reviewing something from a member of the Hachette Book family (Orbit). But I
just had to read this book...not only because it just won the Nebula Award for
Best Novel and got nominated for the Tiptree Award, which alone would have made
me curious (especially as a debut novel)—but because I just met the author, Ann
Leckie, at WisCon, and she was such a nice, fun to be around “bird of a
feather” that she was instantly absorbed into our writer posse. I do try to buy
books from people who impress me personally, and I’m always worried that I
might not like their work as much as I like them—but whew, in this case that
was not a problem. I loved the book. And here’s why.
First of all, Ancillary
Justice does a great job with some of the basics for why we read science
fiction in the first place: it gives us fascinating speculative ideas in a
fantastical, original otherworldly setting. It’s basically shaped like a
revenge story set in a far future age of high tech civilizations, space travel
and interstellar war, but it’s so much more than that. We get some big ideas to
chew on here, about identity and the nature of the individual, about revenge
and justice, about choices, consequences and what it might mean to “do the
right thing”, about culture clash, about expansionism and colonial empire, and
about what being “civilized” means, set against a backdrop of galactic
politics, alien cultures and intriguing technology.
It’s also really well written. Leckie set herself a couple
of major challenges here, and pulls them off beautifully: she switches back and
forth between past and present storylines; her main character is a leftover bit
of a larger artificial intelligence in a reanimated human body and the story’s
emotional punch has to be filtered through this character’s perceptions and
understanding; and since the main character’s language does not recognize
gender, so all personal pronouns in the book are by default gendered female
whether they refer to females or not, which takes some getting used to. Her
evocations of the different settings where the story takes place—ice world!
Swamp world! Space station! Shipboard!—are really well done.
And finally, the characters are solid and well-rounded. You
really do begin to care about the fates of the various characters, and the ways
in which they grow and change by the end of the book feels real and keeps
things interesting.
Ancillary Justice
has all the trappings of space opera, but it is no escapist cartoon- it is a
complex, dense, and somewhat challenging read that takes a while to orient yourself
to—but when things finally start to click and make sense, it really comes
together in a satisfying way.
So if you like your science fiction fresh and mind-bending,
with big ideas, intriguing worlds and relatable characters, check out Ancillary Justice.
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