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    Ancillary Justice
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    Ancillary Justice
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    Ancillary Justice
    Audiobook13 hours

    Ancillary Justice

    Written by Ann Leckie

    Narrated by Celeste Ciulla

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.
    Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren --a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.
    An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. And only one purpose--to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.
    From debut author Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice is a stunning space opera that asks what it means to be human in a universe guided by artificial intelligence.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781490607825
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Ancillary Justice

    4/5

    1,961 ratings192 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Okay, I need a break from reviewing this year's disappointing Hugo nominees.

      Ancillary Justice is last year's Best Novel Hugo winner, and it's exactly the kind of story, the Sad Puppies say they want. Action, adventure, space ships, strong characters, and fun to read.

      Breq is, when we meet her, the sole surviving segment of the Radch troop carrier Justice of Torren. We don't realize at first that she used to be the AI operating the entire ship and all its ancillaries. She's on a very personal mission. In alternating sections we follow her current quest, and the events nineteen years ago that sent her on it.

      Breq, formerly troop carrier Justice of Torren, seeks revenge for the destruction of the main part of herself, and the murder of a favorite lieutenant, Lieutenant Awn, whose failing was not to be inefficient, unreliable, or disloyal, but to be very capable and completely loyal, in the midst of a hidden power struggle within the ruler she was loyal to.

      Radch culture is fascinating, complex, and has both delightful and horrifying features. They do not consider gender significant at all; their pronouns do not distinguish gender. Breq has problems in other cultures, needing to use correct, gendered pronouns, and being confused and frustrated by the way gender signals vary so much from place to place. In the absence of a need to conform to the customs of foreigners, the default pronouns Breq uses are the feminine ones.

      On the other hand, we have the ancillaries. As the Radch Empire has expanded through human space, large numbers of captured prisoners have gone into suspension tanks, to be taken out as needed to become ancillaries: bodies whose own identities have been suppressed or destroyed, and who become pieces of ship or station AI. As long as the Radch Empire is expanding,ancillaries are cheap, efficient, and utterly disposable. And most of the Radch can't begin to see the screaming horror of it.

      This is a great story, with Breq in pursuit of justice, along with wonderful world-building, and real character development--not limited to Breq, but in her case starting from a state of being intelligent software in multiple constructed and human bodies. It's fun, it's exciting, and it thoroughly deserved its Hugo win.

      Highly recommended.

      I bought this book.
    • 5/5
      enjoyed it more than anything I've read in quite a while - character and plot development hinged on awareness and temporal shifts - all swinging together yet at their own speeds in their own directions in a sort of perpetual motion machine of a story - wow - fun reading
    • 5/5
      Omggggg it was so smart and subtle and exciting and well written and perfectly executed. Absolutely breathtaking overall.
    • 5/5
      this hurt my heart
    • 4/5
      Loved this one! I would describe this as a space opera with a hard-boiled, revenge aspect to it. Leckie does a fantastic job with the alien world-build, especially the Radch Empire, its customs, social norms and its rigid social hierarchy / caste system, but it is Breq – the artificial intelligence narrator – that captured my attention and held it. As much as I enjoyed the One Esk / Shis’urna colonial occupation chapters (useful for slowly explaining events that lead to Breq’s revengeful purpose), I was equally impressed with how Leckie is able to balance Breq’s personality with some human traits (Breq’s love for singing) while maintaining her AI core aspects. While Leckie successfully blurs lines between civilization and barbarism and fades the line between human and non-human, I struggled with the gender construction in this story (the Radch do not abide by the gender norms like other civilizations). Breq’s references to all characters as “she” stands out when Breq interacts with non-Radch characters from alien worlds where gender pronouns are used. Overall, Great world build, love the tension between Breq and Seivarden – a 700 year old dissolute exile rescued early in the book by BreQ – and the whole suicide mission they embark upon. My kind of space opera/ military thriller/ mystery read. Looking forward to reading the next book in the series!
    • 4/5
      I liked that it's a ship.
    • 5/5
      I am at a complete loss for words. Ann Leckie used all the good ones, in all the best ways. I am looking forward to reading this again.
    • 5/5
      Ancillary Justice has been overhyped, but is still very much worth reading. It won't change your life but it makes for a very pleasant afternoon.

      ETA - Despite what I say above, this book has stuck with me since I read it, popping up at odd moments. Really looking forward to the next in the series.
    • 5/5
      This book will not be for everyone. It takes it's time laying out the world and deals heavily with some big philosophical questions.

      Still this is a book that shows what is best about science fiction. Big questions with murky answers. The best part of the book is Breq. One of the most fascinating characters I have read about in years.

      I loved the ending and look forward to the next book.
    • 5/5
      4.5/5 starsI was wowed by this book. The beginning is a little confusing because you aren't given much information, but slowly, the story unfolds. This book is written so well, and I loved the world building and how the author decided to show us this world. It was nice to be challenged for once. The author leaves it up to the reader to figure some things out on their own and interpret what is given to them, I liked using my brain. The intricacies of Breq/One Esk's character was lovely. I loved how gender pronouns are used in this book and how it doesn't really matter if a character is male or female - what they do and how they conduct themselves is what counts. This story was woven beautifully and I can't wait to pick up the next book. Sci fi is quickly becoming one of my favourite genres.
    • 5/5
      First read, May 2016: This book is amazing, I loved it. The pacing, the tone, the viewpoint of the single or many ancillaries - there was very little about this book that wasn't perfect.

      Second read: maybe even better on re-read? I picked up some nice details I missed the first time, like medic choosing the ancillary with the bad voice to annoy One Esk, and Awn happening to be there and trying to comfort her. It sets the basis for One Esk Nineteen's feelings later. Seivarden arc is always satisfying.
    • 3/5
      Ancillary Justice had its moments. I like what the author did making gender ambiguous so the reader doesn't picture certain characters as male or female.But, it took about 200 pages for the story to start clicking.Some interesting concepts, but the book didn't really do it for me.
    • 4/5
      Intelligent space opera, though not in the literary mode of M John Harrison. Given the hype and awards, I expected to be blown away by either the writing or the universe-building, as I was by the first book in Simmon's Hyperion Cantos, or in Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. Instead, for me, this was a very solid first entry in a trilogy. The treatment of gender is above average, the use of "she" by the narrator as the default pronoun is inspired, and integral to the story, the narrator's glaring inability to read human behavior is nicely maintained, and the SFnal concept of enemy corpse soldiers reanimated to be the operational units of a spaceship AI is well done. Otherwise, people are still people. Being 1000 years old or more seems to have no effect on how anyone behaves. Technologically there are no Singularities in sight. Fun and guilt-free. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      Tiptree shortlist 2013A bit unevenly paced but a pretty good space opera.
    • 5/5
      *this review may contain spoilers*I adored this book, from the ways that it explores identity through the plotting and the world building, the story, the everything. Slow moving at the beginning, I wasn't sure that I quite understood what was going on. Things became clearer when I started to understand who the viewpoint character is, and more importantly, what they used to be -- a multiply bodied individual where all awarenesses were intertwined. A sweeping space opera that early on has a focus on the perspective of a coloniser of the way that colonisation happens (ie. there is some amount of self-awareness about what is happening to the people, but at times coloured with how much Good this is doing people). From there, an exploration of who is in charge, who is giving the orders, a narrowing down of the story at times to survival of the protagonist. By halfway through the book I never wanted to put it down, I never wanted it to end, and I wanted to know everything Right Now. Looking forward to having time to read the subsequent books in the series.
    • 4/5
      A sci-fi road trip that reminds me of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun.

      Leckie's approach of writing about a genderless culture using only feminine pronouns (and eventually nouns) is initially disorienting, especially when combined with wrapping one's head around the concept of One Esk's multiplicity. Eventually, it becomes just a part of the story, albeit one that causes the reader to consider their own perceptions of gender in culture and fiction.
    • 5/5
      Both mind bending and wonderfully readable. This is a serious space opera in a far far future with alien aliens and more alien humans.
    • 2/5
      While there were some interesting concepts behind this book, it was incredibly slow moving, impeded by the author documenting every thought, every gesture, every emotion and every reaction. Each character is referred to with title almost every time. Gender is vague, some characters referred to as "she" by the narrator and "he" by another character, and no reason is provided for the ambiguity. And can we really conceive of a society so well developed that considers it risque to be seen without gloves? (By the way, how do people ritually wash their hands before entering the temple?) I find it a sad commentary on the state of science fiction that this book won so many awards.
    • 3/5
      Manages to be innovative and well written without ever being exciting or interesting. This has everything to do with the choice of narrator, a segment of a once distributed AI that just is not terribly compelling. Has some interesting things to say about the perils of expansionism, but this thread also is lacking depth.
    • 5/5
      Ancillary Justice is the story of a ship AI, once controlling the entire carrier ship as well as hundreds of "ancillary" bodies, who has been reduced to a single body and is now seeking some sort of nebulous revenge. The author threads together events from the past and the present in a way that slowly reveals what's going on as the book progresses. Both storylines are intriguing, and it was never jarring to go from one to the other. The background universe of the Radchaai is fascinating in its own way, and it provokes some poignant thoughts about class and social structure in an age of imperialism. However, what I found the most compelling was the personality of the AI herself. Breq is an absolute delight to read, and the combination of her sense of justice with her deadpan logic and utter competency (along with her privileged points of view and her thousands of years of experience) made her the perfect protagonist. I really enjoyed this one.
    • 5/5
      Ancillary Justice, the first novel from Ann Leckie, tackles a difficult problem - how to portray intelligent entities who can exist in multiple places at the same time and make them into a coherent story. Leckie succeeds in a bold and confident manner. Ancillary Justice is about Breq, a soldier who was once a Radchaai starship known as Justice of Toren. These starships are controlled by AIs. The officer corps of their crews are live humans, but the ranks are the reanimated shells of dead inhabitants of planets that have been conquered by the Radchaai. The intelligence embedded in these shells (ancillaries) is that of the starship. Thus, the starship is able to be in multiple places at one time - a fascinating way to write a novel in the first-person omniscient point of view!The Radchaai economy, across many planets and star systems, is driven by the resources it gains when it conquers yet another civilization. However, the incessant drive to conquer has seemingly been delayed, if not stopped, by a change in policy by the Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai, who is also, uniquely among the humans, able to have multiple instances of herself. This change in policy has created consternation among the officer corps.Breq is on a self-imposed mission of revenge. She had been an ancillary known as One Esk Nineteen on the troop carrier Justice of Torin. At least mentally, she was the starship; she had all of its perceptions and all of its memories. However, the starship had been destroyed, along with everybody aboard her, its crew and most of its ancillaries, leaving One Esk Nineteen, now known as Breq, to live her life as a single isolated and driven individual. Given her millennia-long existence as a near-omniscient starship, she now finds it difficult to pretend to be a single, individual human. She also has a couple of interesting quirks. She loves to sing, to the amusement and occasional dismay of the people around her. And she has difficulty grasping the use of gendered grammatical forms, particularly pronouns, most obviously when the gender of the subject is not apparent or when it is different from the subject's appearances. The Radch language does not indicate gender - the only pronouns are she, her, and hers. Any reader who speaks a second language can identify with the difficulties Breq goes through as she struggles to seem like a local native without really being human and without really knowing which gendered construct to use when she speaks the local language.Of course, the story is not just about how Breq deals with the conflicts thrown up by her environment and her own exceptional circumstances. The individuals and materiel that she pursues present their own enormous difficulties. It is only through her extreme persistence and valor that she is able to pursue her revenge while struggling with the moral quandaries imposed by one of her deepest qualities - loyalty. The feeling of tension never lets up and the reader finds herself enthralled by the truly unique, yet disturbingly real, circumstances being portrayed. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      An interesting premise, but I just wasn't that interested in the plot.
    • 1/5
      deadly boring, never finished.
    • 1/5
      Should have like this book but didn't. It was boring and grey. Emotionally empty for me. A feminized society with nothing feminine is a dull place. And not very believable. Cixin Liu's trilogy was a thousand times better in every way. James S.A. Corey and Evan Currie are a hundred times better. It's like reading Banks without the intelligence or humor and self deprecation. I couldn't relate to any of the characters. It just tried way to hard and missed.
    • 1/5
      Pretentious...and forgetable.
    • 5/5
      Reminded me of Susan R Matthews books.
    • 4/5
      I'd call this thoughtful space opera.The set-up is complicated, and also the most interesting part of the book. I love being thrown into the middle of situations, and then have the backstory evolve to explain what's happening! That part was my favorite of this novel.Once that was resolved, though, things got less compelling for me while remaining complicated.It was fascinating to read a book in which gender/sex of the characters almost never was specified... and in which the default pronoun was "she". I do know that one of the main secondary characters was male... but "he" was almost always referred to as "she", and it was hard to keep track of the fact that he was male- and it's not like it was especially important, which was (I think) the point. That might be the only person we actually have a gender for; everyone else is talked about in the universal "she", since our narrator belongs to a culture in which language is even less gendered than it is in English. Fascinating!I'll be interested in the next volume of this, though I fear it might be more purely space opera from the descriptions. I really do love the gender approach, though!Comment
    • 4/5
      I picked up this book because of the buzz around it.And I did enjoy it. The gender issue is confusing at first but about a third in, it stops mattering and you just get pulled into the story. And what more could you want?It doesn't get the full 5 stars because I found the denouement a bit confusing. But an excellent read.
    • 3/5
      This is the book I've heard the most Nebula buzz about this year, so it's one I wanted to be sure to read. Ancillary Justice is pure space opera and a definite homage to golden age science. The world-building is deep here, so deep that it's confusing at times; I confess I never did completely understand the gender differentiation (or lack thereof) in society and could never be sure how to picture people, though I like the default to "she" rather than "he."The main character is a difficult one to relate to because of what she is. She is a reanimated corpse installed with AI, and she was once part of a crew of other ancillaries as part of a hive-mind of a space ship. They could all see through each others' eyes, experience what the others in the connection experienced... while at the same time retaining a few of their own quirks. Breq happens to enjoy singing and humming. I was intrigued by the book. Its pace is slow to start as the conflict is largely psychological, but it speeds up halfway through. It's not my favorite read for the year, but I can see why it's garnered so much attention. There's a lot of cool stuff going on here and it's a solid start for a new series.
    • 5/5
      I'm fond of books that shake things up a bit, especially if they do it without the shaking messing up the view. In Ancillary Justice, several things are shaking. I can't recall another book where not only was I never sure of the gender of any character, but where it didn't matter. In fact, set gender would have interfered. The author defaults to the female pronoun and related nouns regardless, and the whole idea of gender is both dismissed and subtly examined.This is cool. This book also plays heavily with the idea of individual identity, inasmuch as it is written from a first person point of view of several people who are actually all one person. I haven't seen that since +David Brin published Kiln People (which was also a shaker, and I wish he'd continue that story, dammit!). After all, if you are an AI housed in a huge spaceship who controls thousands of separate but connected "segments" -- corpse soldiers, the ancillaries of the title -- you are both a single identity and multiple identities. And then you have more than one of these AIs in existence, and one of these AIs also leads a galaxy conquering race...It gets very interesting.The story swings around in time, gathering the various threads together in the classic narrative pattern, which is a comforting bit of structure to hold onto since other patterns, other accepted narrative "norms" have been disassembled and rejiggered like an Ikea rebuild. So many ideas swing around -- what is it to be "civilized", to be "human", to be a citizen of something? Freewill or predestination? What does it really mean, to be of "two minds"? Is there such a thing as a single, unified identity? If a giant economy is based on expansion, can it be redirected without being destroyed completely? (yes, we get all kinds of thinking in this book.) Most interestingly to me is the idea of the AI as sentient being, as an emotional, thinking, feeling, intuiting intelligence capable of creativity. This idea channels straight back through Commander Data to Mr. Spock to Asimov's robots and spreads in all directions. To think is to judge is to chose is to prefer is to feel.Oh, and it's an exciting sort of mystery thriller, too.In fact, most of that stuff is in between the lines, with an occasional peek here and there. You don't have to think about all that stuff to read and enjoy this book -- but you can.