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Ancillary Justice
Ancillary Justice is a science fiction (SF) novel by the American writer Ann Leckie, published in 2013. It is Leckie's debut novel and the first in her Imperial Radch space opera trilogy, followed by Ancillary Sword (2014) and Ancillary Mercy (2015). The novel follows Breq—who is both the sole survivor of a starship destroyed by treachery and the vessel of that ship's artificial consciousness—as she seeks revenge against the ruler of her civilization.
Ancillary Justice received critical praise and won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, BSFA Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Locus Award for Best First Novel. It is the only novel to have won the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards.
Two other novels, Provenance (2017) and Translation State (2023), and two short stories, "Night's Slow Poison" and "She Commands Me and I Obey", are set in the same fictional universe.
Ancillary Justice is a space opera set thousands of years in the future in which the principal power in human space is the expansionist Radch empire. The empire uses spaceships controlled by AIs, who control human bodies ("ancillaries") to use as soldiers. The Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender, which Leckie conveys by using "she" pronouns for everybody, and by having the Radchaai main character guess, frequently incorrectly, when she has to use languages with gender-specific pronouns.
The narrative begins nearly twenty years after the disappearance of a Radch starship, the Justice of Toren, when the sole surviving ancillary, Breq, a fragment of the Justice of Toren's consciousness, encounters an officer, Seivarden, who had been a lieutenant on the Justice of Toren 1,000 years earlier. The two are on an ice planet, and Seivarden is in precarious condition. The plot switches between two strands: Breq's "present-day" quest for justice for the Justice of Toren's destruction and flashbacks from 19 years earlier when the Justice of Toren was in orbit around the planet of Shis'urna, which was then being annexed into the empire.
It eventually becomes clear that the Justice of Toren's destruction was the result of a covert war between two opposed strands of consciousness of the Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai, who uses multiple synchronized bodies to rule her far-flung empire. At the novel's end, Breq associates herself with the more peaceful aspect of Anaander Mianaai while waiting for an opportunity to exact her revenge.
The novel received widespread acclaim and recognition but also some criticism. Russell Letson's Locus review appreciated the ambitious structure of Leckie's novel, which interweaves several past and present strands of action in a manner reminiscent of Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons, and its engagement with the tropes of recent space opera as established by Banks, Ursula K. Le Guin, C. J. Cherryh and others. He concluded that "[t]his is not entry-level SF, and its payoff is correspondingly greater because of that."
According to Genevieve Valentine, writing for NPR, the novel is "assured, gripping, and stylish," succeeding both as a tale of an empire and as a character study. Tor.com's Liz Bourke praised Leckie's worldbuilding and her writing as "clear and muscular, with a strong forward impetus, like the best of thriller writing", concluding that Ancillary Justice was "both an immensely fun novel, and a conceptually ambitious one".
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Ancillary Justice
Ancillary Justice is a science fiction (SF) novel by the American writer Ann Leckie, published in 2013. It is Leckie's debut novel and the first in her Imperial Radch space opera trilogy, followed by Ancillary Sword (2014) and Ancillary Mercy (2015). The novel follows Breq—who is both the sole survivor of a starship destroyed by treachery and the vessel of that ship's artificial consciousness—as she seeks revenge against the ruler of her civilization.
Ancillary Justice received critical praise and won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, BSFA Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Locus Award for Best First Novel. It is the only novel to have won the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards.
Two other novels, Provenance (2017) and Translation State (2023), and two short stories, "Night's Slow Poison" and "She Commands Me and I Obey", are set in the same fictional universe.
Ancillary Justice is a space opera set thousands of years in the future in which the principal power in human space is the expansionist Radch empire. The empire uses spaceships controlled by AIs, who control human bodies ("ancillaries") to use as soldiers. The Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender, which Leckie conveys by using "she" pronouns for everybody, and by having the Radchaai main character guess, frequently incorrectly, when she has to use languages with gender-specific pronouns.
The narrative begins nearly twenty years after the disappearance of a Radch starship, the Justice of Toren, when the sole surviving ancillary, Breq, a fragment of the Justice of Toren's consciousness, encounters an officer, Seivarden, who had been a lieutenant on the Justice of Toren 1,000 years earlier. The two are on an ice planet, and Seivarden is in precarious condition. The plot switches between two strands: Breq's "present-day" quest for justice for the Justice of Toren's destruction and flashbacks from 19 years earlier when the Justice of Toren was in orbit around the planet of Shis'urna, which was then being annexed into the empire.
It eventually becomes clear that the Justice of Toren's destruction was the result of a covert war between two opposed strands of consciousness of the Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai, who uses multiple synchronized bodies to rule her far-flung empire. At the novel's end, Breq associates herself with the more peaceful aspect of Anaander Mianaai while waiting for an opportunity to exact her revenge.
The novel received widespread acclaim and recognition but also some criticism. Russell Letson's Locus review appreciated the ambitious structure of Leckie's novel, which interweaves several past and present strands of action in a manner reminiscent of Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons, and its engagement with the tropes of recent space opera as established by Banks, Ursula K. Le Guin, C. J. Cherryh and others. He concluded that "[t]his is not entry-level SF, and its payoff is correspondingly greater because of that."
According to Genevieve Valentine, writing for NPR, the novel is "assured, gripping, and stylish," succeeding both as a tale of an empire and as a character study. Tor.com's Liz Bourke praised Leckie's worldbuilding and her writing as "clear and muscular, with a strong forward impetus, like the best of thriller writing", concluding that Ancillary Justice was "both an immensely fun novel, and a conceptually ambitious one".