Ancillary Justice is a stately deconstruction of milSF tropes, a novel that ponders questions of identity, justice, power, and legitimacy, a thrilling tale of revenge, an investigation of profoundly alien minds and political systems. The linguistic cleverness, of a society that does not mark gender at all and refers to everyone as "her", conceals an excellent work of science fiction.

The story follows parallel tracks separated by nineteen years. In one, the Radch starship Justice of Toren orbits a recently annexed planet, keeping the peace in the city of Ors with a squad of ancillaries commanded by her favored Lieutenant Awn. Ancillaries are human bodies, brainwashed and linked into the ship's AI, armored with impenetrable silver forcefields. Awn and Toren navigate local tensions over the annexation, which of the local elites will come out on top, where Awn is to go in life, and a mysterious plot to foment some kind of armed uprising, hopeless as it is.

In the later story, a lone ancillary once part of Toren and now going by the name Breq searches the icy planet Nilt for a weapon. Breq drags along Seivarden, a thousand years ago an officer on Toren, who lost her ship and and was stranded in time by the cryogenic suspension of a lifepod. Now a drug addicted derelict, Seivarden is one frail tie to Breq's true identity as she seeks her revenge.

The mystery which links the two stories is how Toren became Breq, and why she needs that weapon. As it's revealed about halfway through, the plot to create an armed uprising in Ors was started by Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch. The emperor of human space is a millennia old clan of clones, linked by the same technologies that bind ancillaries into squads, and she has been of two minds for quite some time. Different factions of Anaander Mianaai vying for supremacy set secret accesses through the fleet, and one of her orders a massacre in Ors, murders Lieutenant Awn, and destroys all of Toren but for one ancillary. Breq seeks revenge, for her dead lieutenant, for the rest of her mind, for the endless crimes of annexation and turning humans into ancillaries. The action explodes when Breq confronts Anaander Mianaai with the truth, forcing the civil war out into the open.

I really enjoyed the exploration of the psychology of Toren, a ship with a thousand pairs of hands and a fondness for choral music, and the diminished singularity of Breq. The comparisons between the ship, made of humans but very non-human, and the Lord of the Radch, are delightful.

However, I couldn't say the same thing for the society of the Radch. They're a subtle and ritualistic culture, a grounding of universal human rights balanced against their aristocratic houses and policy of expansion. I enjoyed the gods and concerns with clientage, which seemed rich and original in a way that space opera rarely is, but beyond that little made sense. The Radch seems to have been technologically stagnant for centuries, the dominant human power, yet utterly helpless in the face of the alien Presgar, who disassemble Radch ships like toys. The Radch citizens make offerings at their temples, drink tea, and snub each other with elaborate displays of discourtesy and suppressed emotion, yet I kept wondering what all these people actually do.

And of course, the linguistics. Leckie attracted quite a bit of attention for her choice of female pronouns throughout. (Though careful attention notes that Seivarden is biologically male). I'm not sure that this changes anything in the story, although it's interesting to try and envision the characters (they are, by the way, mostly dark skinned). This choice, more than anything else, cements the Radch as thoroughly alien. Every extant human society marks gender in some way.

The second, and more interesting linguistic quirk, is that the word referring to the empire, to citizen members of the empire, and to the concept of civilization itself, are all Radch, so nearly indistinguishable that saying "people from outside the Radch are civilized" requires dipping into second languages. This massive linguistic blindspot, more than lacking gender or being ruled by a post-human clone, characterizes the Radch, and the way that expansion and assimilation is central to their very nature. Leckie never lets us forget that empires are built on violence, that the foundations of the State are ultimately a crime against someone who was later buried as a "savage", "traitor", or "barbarian".

****
(Original from April 7, 2015)

Ancillary Justice is one of those postmodern deconstructions of milSF that have become popular recently. Our narrator is an ancillary, a human body linked into the collective mind of a military starship, agent of the semi-feudal Radch Empire. In the past, she was part of a unit pacifying a minor world. Now, she's the last one of her shipmind, tracking down an alien gun that is the only weapon that can harm Anaander Mianaai, ruler of human space. But she's weighed down by Sievarden, and old (human) Lieutenant woken up from deep cryosleep, and confusion about the basic identity of her target, for Anaander Mianaai is not all that she seems.

There's some fun world-building her, the formalistic shape of the Radch rendered in sumi-e strokes. Ancillaries are both less than and more than human, the currents of politics are still but run deep, gender unmarked in civilization and constantly misunderstood by the narrator. The plot builds to dizzying byzantine confusion. I'm not sure that Ancillary Justice is as brilliant as everybody says it is, but you should probably read it, if only to know what everybody else it talking about.