Imagine your world has been invaded by a spacefaring human civilization – highly advanced, rapacious and unspeakably cruel. They want your world’s resources and they’re going to take what they want, and in the process of invading – which they unironically refer to as annexation – they kill massive numbers of people, seemingly indiscriminately. They take thousands more prisoner, and turn them into slave soldiers known as ancillaries, their minds wiped and replaced by a link to the AI mind of their massive interstellar troop carrier, or slaved to a human officer. So if you survived annexation, those of your friends and loved ones who weren’t killed may now be walking your streets as armed pacification zombie soldiers, eavesdropping on every public interaction and killing quickly and mercilessly when so ordered by the Radch authorities. Radch is the name of this ancient, corrupt and mighty galactic dictatorship.
This is the setting for Ann Leckie’s multiple award-winning Ancillary Justice. But it’s not the story of brave resistance fighters on the latest annexed planet, Shis’urna. In a creative twist, Leckie gives us the story from the point of view of the ship Justice of Toren, as told by the portion of its mind that inhabits one particular “ancillary” body, One Esk, the one that serves Lieutenant Awn. Awn is the Radch officer charged with the next phase of the annexation, in which local political, business and religious leaders are co-opted so their planet can hopefully be brought into the Radch Empire.
From the beginning, though, we know all has not gone well on Shis’urna. The story is told, as so many are these days, in two parts: One in the “present” and one in flashback to the past. In the present, One Esk, the ship’s once powerful, distributed artificial intelligence, resides in one female human body who goes by the name of Breq. And Breq is on an icy, semi-civilized planet in search of a particular artifact that will help in her plan of vengeance against whoever did this to her. Talk about an anti-hero!
Ancillary Justice is the first of Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy. Published in 2013, it won the 2014 Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, and British Science Fiction Association awards. And deservedly so. Leckie has created one of the most interesting galactic civilizations since Frank Herbert’s Dune, and set within it a twisted tale of political corruption and intrigue in which the characters have to watch every step and every thought, and the reader also must tread carefully lest they be caught off balance.
Nothing can be taken for granted, even gender. In Radch space and therefore the book, “she” and “her” are the default pronouns, and Breq admits she isn’t very good at gendering people, so she generally refers to everyone as “she,” and we don’t know for sure if they’re male or female until some other character refers to them. The military and political systems are semi-opaque, especially the stratification of rank and duties on the troop carrier ships like Justice of Toren, which have multiple levels packed with potential ancillaries in cryogenic storage. And not only does the ship inhabit multiple bodies, so does the Lord of the Radch, the empire’s supreme leader.
One Esk and Lt. Awn seem to have stumbled onto a plot of some kind, but in this civilization everything is murky. We hear hints of rebellions that happened on other planets, criminal enterprises that were allowed to flourish, and tales of powerful aliens that may threaten Radch space. On top of that, Radch seems to be at war with itself.
Breq is a difficult character to like; deliberately so, I’m sure. Part of her is a cold, emotionless killer, but another part rescues a former ship’s captain she finds dying on the freezing planet, and even Breq is not sure why. The near constant state of tension and impending doom made the book slow going for me, at times. It wasn’t as much of a page turner as some space operas are. But the climax when it comes is satisfying and clarifying, and the denouement obviously sets us up for the next installment. Leckie has created a unique and fascinating civilization nearing a state of collapse, and Breq is a mysteriously compelling character who seems to be one of the catalysts of the impending apocalypse.
(Orbit/Hachette, 2013)
