Ann Leckie: Ancillary justice (AudiobookFormat, 2014, Recorded Books)
[sound recording] /, 45 pages
English language
Published Oct. 30, 2014 by Recorded Books.
Now isolated in a single frail human body, Breq, an artificial intelligence that used to control of a massive starship and its crew of soldiers, tries to adjust to her new humanity while seeking vengeance and answers to her questions.
Really enjoyed this book. In some ways it's a classic space opera but there's enough twists on the formula that it feels super fresh. Fascinating explorations of identity, language, and class. The writing was fun and engaging, I ate this book up.
This is a fun space opera that has all the fun space opera things: giant interstellar empires; worldbuilding on various interstellar cultures, and how they interact with each other, and how they do gender; exploration of how cognition and identity works in entities that are not (or not entirely) human; grand plots and conspiracies.
The overall plot is perhaps a bit simple, and some of the characters lean perhaps too much into one-dimensional archetypes, but it does not matter that much against the lively worldbuilding, and how it ties into the whole story.
It just didn't capture my interest fast enough. Maybe I'll try again later.
I completely enjoyed Ancillary Justice and am looking forward to more from Ann Leckie.
For anyone who studies gender in science fiction, I’d consider it a must-read.
I found it also to be an engaging story and I liked her thoughts on how artificial and distributed intelligence might work.
I want to know what will happen in the next book, but this was a self-contained novel. It’s not like we’re going to be waiting years to find out if someone is actually dead or not.
