I enjoyed this book very much. The story was good but what interested me most was the deft handling of the concept of self: both the consciousness of a person/ship with multiple bodies and the social awareness (or not) of gender. ( )

Good sci-fi book with an interesting premise. Enjoyed it. ( )

Totally awesome. I kind of can't form coherent thoughts right now so I may come back and write a proper review. It's sufficient to say that this is an ambitious novel that should have felt cluttered but managed to be interesting even when it was flirting with too much.

Some thoughts: the ancillaries are both amazing and scary; that the Radch are basically gender-neutral and have no space in their language to account for gendered pronouns is awesome; I would like a friend who is also a spaceship with a penchant for singing.

ETA: I started reading [b: Ancillary Mercy|23533039|Ancillary Mercy (Imperial Radch #3)|Ann Leckie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1493642929s/23533039.jpg|43134689] and realized I had no idea what was going on anymore, and so decided a reread of this and [b: Ancillary Sword|20706284|Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch, #2)|Ann Leckie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1413464739s/20706284.jpg|40026175] were in order. And this book, as much as I loved it the first time, improves upon further acquaintance.

Even though I struggled fully as much with the single-gender pronouning (seriously, it took ages for me to settle back into "It doesn't matter! No one is described beyond maybe skin color and hair color!! Do I really need to know?), the story is still so engaging. That it manages to be both broad in scope and very personal is pretty impressive. ( )

The plot got unnecesarily complicated towards the end, and the undying lover felt absurdly forced. Also while I understand the explanation for only using one gender of pronouns, it made parts way more confusing when you could not tell who was doing what. That said, the concept for the character is neat even if the backstory on the whole world needed more ( )

Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie

This book requires you to really pay attention if you wish to have any hope of keeping up.

The narrator is basically what remains of a millenium old star ship AI. The ship AI's have soldiers, which are basically stolen humans from annexed cultures commandeered by the ships to use as avatars (or rather, ancillaries). Our narrator is one such ancillary, the only one that remains after the destruction of the ship itself, and the rest of the ship's ancillaries.

The world the story takes place in is a far future space empire ruled by a person who also happens to have around a thousand ancillaries herself. The empire explands by annexing any and all other cultures in it's wake, and it does it by rather brutal means. In recent years the pace of expansion has slowed, but not stopped. The annexed peoples are viewed as lesser (uncivilised) and bigotry is a built in feature for the ruling classes.

As the empire is very vast, it also has a lot of different languages that reflect the different cultures. A large linguistic (as well as cultural) element is gender. Our narrator being an AI in a human body, she doesn't really recognize gender. She knows they exits, but consistently makes mistakes in addressing people correctly (and this is one of the biggest tells she has for being an ancillary). The book uses the feminine default for all gendered words, and her inability to use the proper pronouns/addresses/words when speaking gendered languages is underlined on several occasions. This doesn't have much larger effect plotwise, but it's an interesting thing to note, reading this book in English. (I wonder how confusing this would have been to read translated into Finnish, which also doesn't have gender specific pronouns).

The plot is essentially a slow revenge story, the point of which is to introduce the reader to this vast world and to lay the groundwork for the sequels where the broader story will presumambly take place. The plot in this one is secondary, and mainly used to make the reader understand what the scope of the whole thing is, and I for one am very interested to find out what happens next. ( )