There are cruelties and power differentials between colonizers and colonized that make easy resolution impossible. Then there are disconnects of culture when she returns to the heart of the Empire and contends with loaded expectations of dress and behavior. Most obvious are the linguistic disconnects: Breq's home tongue uses only "she," reinforcing her otherness as she constantly guesses at genders in other languages. The universe of Ancillary Justice is complex, murky and difficult to navigate - no bad thing, as Leckie's deft sketches hint at worlds beyond, none of them neat. The story moves in and out of perspectives and time periods, from the millennia-long view of Justice of Toren to the solitary Breq, looping this space opera from long history back to the immediately personal and highlighting Breq's double motives: Toren wants to disrupt a cycle of corruption One Esk is out to revenge a friend. (Several chapters take place during negotiations over a single gun.) Each character adds texture to the picture that slowly emerges: Skaaiat, cynical noble caught in political wheels many-bodied dictator Anaander Minaai, Lord of the Radch Awn, One Esk's last commander and Seivarden, the dissolute exile she rescues, who joins her suicide mission.Īncillary Justice is Ann Leckie's first novel. Though framed like '70s grindhouse - there was a setup, and someone's out to clean the slate - things unfold studiously, reminiscent of the deliberation underscoring Ursula Le Guin's T he Left Hand of Darkness. It's an advantage: She's out to kill the Lord of the Radch, and her only hope is that no one remembers her. It's a condition so rare no one suspects what she is.
But now, separated in a moment of trauma, she's autonomous. Breq was once the ancillary One Esk and the ship Justice of Toren. Those troops are ancillaries - sometimes called corpse soldiers - reanimated bodies that now share a single consciousness and act as one. Justice of Toren is a living ship far beyond AI, spending millennia carrying officers and troops for the Radchaai Empire's endless planetary annexations. The assured, gripping and stylish Ancillary Justice is, in its broadest strokes, the tale of an empire, and in its smallest a character study, and part of debut novelist Anne Leckie's achievement is how she handles her protagonists in both of those contexts. "My heart is a fish, hiding in the water-grass."īreq has found someone in the snow: a stranger to everyone on this planet, a thousand years old, a relic out of time - but despite all that, Breq remembers.īreq used to be the ship that carried them both. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Ancillary Justice Author Ann Leckie
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