An ancillary is not considered to be human, but now Breq must find her way through space, hiding and pretending, until she can find a way to discover the truth about how her ship was destroyed, and take revenge on the person she blames - who happens to be the leader of the empire. If that sounds horrifying, it is, but Breq knows no other life - until a terrible event separates her from her mothership, which is destroyed in hyperspace, leaving Breq alone, the last remnant of Justice of Torren. It exists by annexing other star systems and enslaving huge swaths of the native population, putting them in cryogenic storage until those bodies are needed - their old minds wiped away and reprogrammed as part of a ship's AI. Where do ancillaries come from? The Radch is a military empire.

Because of this, Breq can be in a thousand places at once, watching events unfold all across the surface of a planet, wherever her soldiers are stationed, or on the ship orbiting above.

In the empire called the Radch, each spaceship is sentient, crewed by legions of ancillaries who are all connected to the same central mind. This is because the main character Breq is an ancillary - a human body that has been 'slaved' to the artificial intelligence of a giant spaceship, in this case Justice of Torren. It may take you a while to understand what is going on, because many of your assumptions about point-of-view will be stripped away. If you're willing to work a little, this book is absolutely worth your time.Īnn Leckie's series drops us right into a universe both familiar and terrifyingly different. I've already ordered the sequel, so I can see where the next piece of story leads. That's a rare thing in books these days.Īnd I love it. Nope, this is a novel that leave you to make up your own mind about things. It's going to drop you in the middle of the story and let you figure out what the hell is going on by yourself, no long explanations of how the culture developed because of blah blah blah. I love it when I run into something fresh and new. I've read a fair chuck of sci-fi, but I've never run into anything like this before.

But what really makes this book great are the big *cultural* differences in the world. Making me think in different directions than I'm used to. I could feel it stretching my brain in ways it hasn't been stretched in a while. So in some ways, reading this book was like going home again. It's pretty much all I read for several years. When I was younger, I read sci-fi almost exclusively. For the most part, what's where my taste lies these days.īut that wasn't always the case. I don't review much sci-fi these days because I mostly read fantasy. I should mention here, it's Science Fiction. And as soon as I started it, I could see why it was getting such attention. This book caught my eye mostly because it's been winning just about every award ever this year.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie