Book Review: Ancillary Justice

Ann Leckie
2013
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Clarke
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
   
I have a knee-jerk reaction against jumping on the reading bandwagon. If everybody is raving about a book, something in me automatically rebels against liking it.

So when I found out that Ancillary Justice won three of the major science fiction awards in 2014—the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Arthur C. Clarke—I have to admit that I was skeptical about it. But I tried to resist my bias and give the book a fair shake.

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Ancillary Justice takes place in a galaxy where the majority of humans, on all their hundreds of disparate home planets, are ruled by a single totalitarian regime called the Radch. The Radch, which Leckie says she based loosely on the Roman Empire, is a military superpower with countless armies, bases, weapons, and machinery at its disposal.

The Radchaai expand their empire by taking over new planets one by one, co-opting existing governors into their political hierarchy when it is possible and killing them when it is not, drafting a good chunk of the able-bodied adult population into their army, and cowing everybody else into subservience with the threat of the same happening to them.

In addition to being militarily powerful, the Radchaai are also highly technologically sophisticated. Each of their spaceships—whether troop carrier, medical vessel, or warship—is actually a sentient being unto itself, with a central artificial intelligence at its core. And when the Radchaai “draft” conquered people into their army, what that actually means is kidnapping them, wiping their consciousnesses, and then linking their brains into the artificial intelligence of the ship that has captured them. These walking corpses, or “ancillaries,” become (almost always) obedient auxiliary segments of the ship, fully interconnected with each other and the central AI at all times.

The advantage to this is that everywhere an ancillary is, whether on board or on the ground, the ship can see and hear everything that is going on around it. The disadvantage is that the conquered populations of the planets the ancillaries come from are somewhat put off by their people being turned into zombie automatons in service to the Radch.

Our main character and narrator, Breq, is one of these zombie automatons: an ancillary of the Radch warship Justice of Toren. Nineteen years ago, we learn, the entire Justice of Toren was somehow destroyed, and Breq is its lone surviving segment. She has lasted, all alone, for almost two decades, driven only by a desire to find and kill those responsible for destroying her ship.

The novel's story is told in two separate narratives simultaneously. One narrative is the story of the present day, in which Breq is searching for a weapon that will allow her to exact her revenge against the mysterious and, as it turns out, extremely powerful forces that destroyed her ship. The present narrative, and the book itself, opens on the wintry planet Nilt, where Breq has run across Seivarden, one of her former human officers, high on opiates, beaten and left for dead in the snow. Out of some lingering sense of Radchaai responsibility, Breq saves Seivarden, warms her up and dries her out, and then saves her life a couple more times, all the while trying to prevent Seivarden from figuring out who she is. Seivarden becomes attached to Breq, insisting on traveling with her where ever she is going, even up to the end, when Seivarden is confronted with upsetting truths about Radch society that she never wanted to see.

The other narrative is the story of the past, which tells how the Justice of Toren was destroyed and Breq became a lone isolated ancillary in the first place. This past narrative (which was the more interesting, if confusing, of the two) also explores one more key aspect of Radch society: its rigidly hierarchical class structure.

In the Radch, people are born into “houses.” The status of your house largely determines your career success and how others will treat you. Even though there are aptitude tests supposedly designed to ensure merit-based job assignments, the upper-class houses are still disproportionately over-represented in the officer corps, and they treat officers from lower-class houses with no little scorn.
   
In addition, interactions between Radchaai citizens, especially those from the upper-class houses, are highly mannered and governed by strict societal conventions. The smallest change in tone of voice or change in wording can result in a horrible slur. It is difficult for those born into lower-class houses to avoid making mistakes and thus exposing their origins.
   
Nineteen years ago, the Justice of Toren was posted at the planet Shis’urna, a recent Radch conquest. The Radch’s representative in charge of the occupation was Lieutenant Awn. Awn was an extremely competent officer, but she had come from one of the lower-class houses, which made her a bit skeptical of the motives of the Radch ruling class. Breq, even though she was then just a segment of the larger Justice of Toren, nevertheless became personally (ancillarially?) devoted to Lieutenant Awn.
   
The occupation’s offices on Shis’urna were in the city of Ors. Ors was experiencing growing tensions between the wealthier residents in the upper city, who were obsequiously aligning themselves with the higher-status houses in the Radch regime, and the poorer residents in the lower city, who were just trying to go about their daily lives. The upper city residents variously tried to frame the lower city residents for murder and treason, but Awn wasn’t fooled by these shenanigans, and refused to arrest the poor for crimes they hadn’t committed.
   
Then, one day, Anaander Mianaai, the head of the Radch, visited a temple in the lower city, which was a slight to the wealthy, and the tension finally boiled over into full-scale rioting. Dozens of residents of the upper city came rampaging down into the temple grounds where Mianaai and Awn were. The resulting actions of Mianaai, Awn, and Breq caused one domino after another to fall, and eventually ended up causing, among other things, the destruction of the Justice of Toren.

The two narratives get alternating chapters and they intertwine and draw closer through the course of the book, until eventually they join to become the same story and Breq’s revenge is imminent.

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All in all, the book turned out to be fine. The main character is appealing, even if a bit (understandably) stiff; Leckie’s writing style is clear and unpretentious; and the societal and governmental structures she has created are complex enough to be believable on a galactic scale. The double plot line is a nice device; it reveals detail and background in a non-traditional order and yet still makes the tension escalate well towards the end.
My only major issue with the book is that the story spends far too much time on political discussions and its characters’ internal psychological struggles for my taste, and not enough on actual physical events. In the rigidly mannered society of the Radch, most interactions require subtle language and careful political maneuvering, which means the characters are almost always repressing their true emotions. This results in a lot of internal distress and agony which we are made aware of in detail, but which they almost never get to actually do anything about.

Certainly some authors have been able to create a riveting story that consists mostly of its characters just thinking or talking to each other. But in this book I found it made me lose interest from time to time in what was happening, and I would put it aside for days at a time between chapters without feeling any great desire to pick it up again.

The complexities of the politics in this story were also very convoluted and I am afraid I found myself having occasional flashbacks to the excruciatingly intricate political maneuverings in C.J. Cherryh’s book Cyteen.

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One plot device in Ancillary Justice that Leckie got both raves and rants for is that the Radchaai do not make any gender distinctions, either in their language or in their perception of individuals. To the Radchaai, every person is female. When Radchaai citizens go to a planet that does have gender distinctions, they have to study hard to figure out what those local distinctions are—whether clothing or language or physical attributes—and, out of politeness, try to correctly identify the genders of the people they are interacting with. But the whole idea is confusing to them, and internally they still end up thinking of gender-identified foreigners as “male she” or “female she.”

Since the book is told from the point of view of a Radchaai ancillary, every character in the book is therefore referred to as “she,” whether that person is female in her own culture or not. With few exceptions, you never find out if any specific person is actually male or female. And it turns out that the gender of any particular character makes zero difference to the plot—which is probably Leckie’s point.

The idea of characters that identify as neither (or both) male or female is not unique to Leckie; Ursula LeGuin used a similar idea back in 1969 in The Left Hand of Darkness. But what is great about it in Ancillary Justice is that you have to assume all characters are female until proven otherwise—a satisfying reversal of the usual state of affairs.