Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (5 stars)

After about four different personal recommendations, and finding out it had won the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction, Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards, I had to read this. They weren't wrong, it is a spectacular debut.

Leckie does an impressive job of giving us an inside perspective of a spaceship-sized Artificial Intelligence (AI), with many different ancillaries/corpse-soldiers that make up its physical presence. This AI is our narrator, which allows Leckie to perform an impressive first-person narration without the usual limitation of the narrator being only in a single location at any time. When I read "that accounted for almost half of my twenty bodies" I knew this book was going to be fascinating.

As if that wasn't novel enough, Leckie chooses to make things even more interesting by messing with the reader's interpretation of gender. She does this by having most of the dialogue occur in Radchaai which doesn't have gendered pronouns, and from the perspective of Breq, the AI, who finds it difficult to interpret gender queues for various races anyway. In Breq's defence, this is not unusual since for many of the races gender is fairly unimportant and certainly not obvious. The end result of this is that I basically think of almost everyone in the novel as female, and was occasionally jarred out of my perceptions when other characters dropped a 'he' into the dialogue. It's amazing how much of my ability to visualise a character is rooted in gender.

So I have basically no idea what anyone looks like. This isn't helped by Leckie's fixation on memorial pin jewellery and gloves above all other features. I hope there's eventually some interesting explanation about the history of the gloves, since she makes such a big deal of them.

The start of the novel was very strong, with plenty of intrigue planted. What is this being? Why is he/she diminished? Leckie switches between flashbacks and current day to fill in the back story. There's a small amount of confusion for the reader as pieces of the world are filled in, but it's masterfully done and with minimal exposition. Just how I like it.

Not much science is explained, but there are some interesting ruminations on AI, such as emotions being essential for efficient decision making:

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.

I thought it was also interesting that that author noted she had based the Radchaai somewhat on the roman empire, which explains a lot of the religious idol worship that is present throughout the book.

Overall this is an amazing space opera. It has a Hoth and a Degobah. It has armor implants, stealth weapons, intergalactic wars, and political intrigue. The early part of the novel felt a little like a western, Firefly even, with a robbery, a barely-though-out plan, and Breq's life hanging in the balance pretty much constantly.

All sci-fi fans should read it immediately.

5 stars.