*As always,
this review is full of spoilers*
*Secondary warning:
I’m incredibly busy, so I’m posting this without proofreading. There are bound to be a ton of grammatical
errors, so poorly formed sentences, half-baked thoughts, and insufficiently
reasoned comments. My apologies.*
We stumbled
across Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice quite by accident. We were a quarter of the way through The
Children of Dune when we decided a read through the online summary would be
a more satisfying way to learn how the book ended. The next day we found ourselves in Barnes
& Noble looking for a gift for someone else and decided to get a new sci-fi
book for ourselves. Random browsing
through the stacks (a luxury I had not indulged in in some time) brought us to
a boxed set of the three Imperial Radch trilogy. Seeing all the awards Ancillary Justice
won, we decided to give it a shot.
Ancillary
Justice and Ann Leckie deserved every award they won. It is compelling, original, well-written,
well-plotted, and completely absorbing.
The narrator is a single segment of what was once a multi-body
inhabiting artificial intelligence. In
this universe, the Radch people have set out to conquer the known universe purportedly
because of the fever-dream of single woman, Anaander Mianaai, who feared for
the safety of her home planet so fervently that she sought to keep it safe by
increasing the buffer between it and any possible hostile civilization. The A.I.s of the ships and stations under
Radch command have not only full personalities, but a host of human bodies that
have been fitted in such a way to allow the AI to inhabit the bodies while
staying connected to all the other individual expressions of the A.I. These human bodies are called ancillaries. Ancillary bodies were originally the bodies
of enemy combatants who stood against the Radch invasion.
At the
beginning of the novel, our narrator(Justice
of Toren (her ship name), One Esk (her ancillary name), One Esk Nineteen
(her segment name) Breq (her assumed human name)) has been learning to
masquerade as human for nearly 20 years.
She is on the icy plant of Nilt in search of a special gun that has the
power to penetrate Radchaai armor with the intent to kill Anaander
Mianaai. In the opening scene, Breq (we’ll
call her for simplicity sake) finds the body of Seivarden Vendaai, a member of
the Radchaai military who disappeared a thousand years ago when her ship was
destroyed by a resisting army who had been helped by the Presger, a superior
alien race who supplied the army with the guns that could penetrate Radchaai
armor, the very guns whose brethren Breq now seeks.
I had to
write that summary to see if I could write that summary. Like all the best science fiction, the set up
is complicated because the world is complicated, but the actions that make up
the plot are simple and straightforward.
The first 40 pages or so are work as you figure out the lay of the land
and the intricacies of the cultures that are all foreign, but the rewards are
grand. I’ll just break down everything I
loved.
First, the
narrator. Having a 2,000 year old narrator who knows insane amounts of history
not only because she lived through them but because she has computer banks
worth of knowledge inside her head, is a brilliant literary device. She can be on the ship and on the planet and
be in communication with the Sword of
Nathtas halfway across the universe to experience everything first hand to
a certain extent. Breq is practically a
first-person omniscient narrator. Add to
that that she is an artificial intelligence, but one created with emotions, so
she mirrors humanity but is clearly not human.
In a lot of ways, she fits in perfectly with the recent vogue of having
inhuman narrators, and I’m thinking here of Dexter’s sociopathy and Benedict
Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, who is also a sort of sociopath. These are humans who are inhuman in some way,
and Breq is very similar. Like Holmes,
she has an eye that has been collecting data for millennia, and thus can harvest
incredible meaning from the slightest details.
In fact, wisdom is set up in the novel as merely having a large enough
data set to be able to make inferences.
So Breq is both inhuman, painfully human, and superhuman all at the same
time, which makes her both unique and familiar, and overall a fantastic narrator
for the tale.
There is
plenty in the book that ties it to the cyberpunk tradition of cybernetic
implants and the mechanization of the human body, but the book is certainly not
cyberpunk. But it is concerned with a
lot of the same questions as cyberpunk fiction: what makes us human? Where do the lines between human intelligence
and artificial intelligence meet and vanish?
What does it mean to have an “identity”?
Are we unique in our identity?
Leckie’s narrator incorporates all that without ever belaboring the
point. The novel takes a lot of those
questions for granted and then moves ahead with the particular story at hand.
Moving ahead
with the particular story at hand is what Ann Leckie constantly does in this
novel. There is not a lot of authorial
contemplation or insight communicated through passages of contemplation. The insight and contemplation come in the
form or action and plot progression, which some will find especially rewarding
and others will find a little lacking. I
personally am a fan of lyrical prose, and I love an author that can write a
sentence that makes me hurt with its beauty, power, and truth. There was none of that here, nothing that
sent me running to social media to share some exquisite piece of prose. Which is not to say that the writing itself
lacked anything. The novel is very well
written from the sentence level to the plot level. The dialogue is sharp and thoughtful, and
Leckie clearly has a great ear for the subtle music of her language. I know this last bit because I read the
entire novel out loud, and I never got tripped up by her language; it all read
fluidly and easily, which is itself not an easy thing to do.
I of course
love the role of gender in this book.
The Radch have no gender distinction and use the feminine pronouns for
all their people. Breq, being both a
Radchaai creation and an A.I. has a difficult time distinguishing human
gender. The most stressful of her
experiences as she masquerades as human is when she has to guess at someone’s
gender. She does not appear to have more
than a 50/50 success rate. At first, I
tried to figure out the “real” gender of characters, but then realized that 1)
gender is only a construction so what is “real” about it to begin with, 2)
every culture or planet has their own definitions anyway, so even if this
character calls Seivarden “him” it doesn’t mean anything about what Seivarden
might look like. The end result is that
everyone in the book is presented to us as female, which is an incredibly
refreshing stance.
I cannot
help but think that Leckie is responding to some extent to Ursula LeGuin’s The
Left Hand of Darkness. It would be
hard enough to create a science fiction novel that has a genderless set of
humans at its center without referencing Left Hand of Darkness, but
Leckie drives the point home by setting the first half of the novel’s present
timeline on Nilt, an ice planet that is reminiscent of Gethen. But where Genly is obsessed with gender and
cannot view the Gethenians except through is own lens of masculinity and
femininity, Breq has no interest in gender and has no interest in categorizing
people by their sexual roles. Genly
defaults to the masculine pronoun because of his gender biases (see my review
of Left Hand of Darkness if you’re interested in my reading of it), and Breq
defaults to feminine because it is the common linguistic pronoun of her native
tongue. Also, there is an interesting
contrasting nature of the Ekumen who find human worlds to set up trade and open
communication versus the Radchaai’s interest in domination and assimilation. I would love to see a full comparison of
gender in the two novels written by someone much more talented than I am.
And speaking
of native tongues, I love that the whole novel is an act of translation. By that, I mean that Breq makes us aware that
the words we are reading are translated from the various languages the is
actually using. Many times she stops to
explain the various connotations, unwanted and unavoidable, accompany the word
she used in her exchange. That the novel
is in English for us to read is itself an act of translation. I don’t have a reading of what the
significance of that decision is, but I feel like it is important.
And while I’m
on the subject of things I don’t understand, I don’t have a strong
understanding of Seivarden’s role in the novel.
On the one hand, she is central to the story, but on the other hand, she
doesn’t do much, does she? She serves plenty of narrative functions in
telling us about Radchaai culture, but what is she doing beyond that? I feel like there is some importance to the
parallel between her feelings toward Breq and Breq’s feelings toward Lieutenant
Awn. As Breq attends to all of
Lieutenant Awn’s needs, and as Breq is devoted to Lieutenant Awn to the extent
that she is in love with Lieutenant Awn (it is her grief over Awn’s death that
fuels the entire plot of the novel—making it in some ways a revenge tale), so Seivarden
comes to serve Breq and feel greater affection for Breq than Breq feels for
her. Seivarden acts as an ancillary
servant to Breq’s performance of a human.
Breq is rather dismissive of Seivarden and never comes around to really
respecting her even as Seivarden has swallowed her pride, and grown as a human
by subjugating herself. It’s a
potentially painful relationship, but I never found it to be. I kept expecting us to learn that Seivarden
was crucial to Mianaai’s plans or that Breq had been unknowingly programmed to
save her, but that was never the case.
Now it’s possible that we will learn later in the trilogy Seivarden’s
larger role (it can’t be mere coincidence that she was there when the Garseddai
attacked), so I will have to wait for the trilogy to end before drawing any
final conclusions about Seivarden.
I love the
novel’s portrayal of colonial imperialism, this expansion and nationalism
propelled by the basest of feelings: fear.
The Radchaai view themselves as the very definition of civilization even
as they have built the most barbaric of cultures, a culture whose whole
structure is built around never ending military expansion. The in-book debate over ancillaries and
whether they are better (more civil, less violent) than humans is beautifully
done because Breq is well aware of the tremendous act of violence it takes to
turn a human into an ancillary.
I love that
the science in the novel both feel thoroughly reasoned out and presented
without explanation. A.I.’s, for
example, all have emotions because we are told that they won’t function without
emotions, that they cannot make decisions based on facts alone. God damn, I love that. Leckie doesn’t feel the need to get into the
nitty gritty because it would only detract from or bog down the tale at
hand. The same goes for the Garseddai
weapons, Mianaai’s gun that can work in a vacuum, and all the cultural details
of the Radchaai on the Omaugh Palace.
Leckie has done her work as a writer in developing a fully realized
culture, but she doesn’t feel the need to explain any more than is necessary
for the reader to accept the reality they are presented with. In doing so, she makes the whole world feel
rich and three-dimensional.
Anaander
Mianaai is an awesome character. That’s
all I have to say about that.
Actually, I
think I have just about drained myself of what I wanted to say. I can always add on whatever I miss when I
review Ancillary Sword, because having read this wonderful book, you can’t
expect me not to read the entire trilogy.
