Believe The Hype! _Ancillary Justice_ by Ann Leckie Does In Fact Totally Rule!

I know I'm late to the party, but boy am I glad I came. Ancillary Justice is the party and it's Ann Leckie's debut novel and winner of the 2014 Nebula Award. (Deserved, I feel!) It's also nominated for a Hugo, but crazily enough is competing against the Wheel of Time series, a billion-page fantasy epic that probably shouldn't be in a category labeled "novel." Anyway, how awesome would it be for a novel so progressive on gender politics (AJ) to deny the Hugo to an entire series known for being the opposite (WoT)?

But I digress. Ancillary Justice can be elevator-pitched into the handy phrase "character-driven military sci-fi" but that wouldn't do the book j-- <cough>. Sorry. The novel's awesomeness comes from the way Leckie uses point of view--the pov character is a space ship, literally. The ship's AI resides not just in the body of a ship itself, but in its ancillaries too. Ancillaries are the bodies of the peoples the ship has helped to conquer. And the ship's AI inhabits a number of these bodies simultaneously. Hence one of the wonderful things that Leckie can achieve with the point of view: the ship can talk to a Lieutenant at the temple while her other segment (ancillary body) directs citizens on the street. The pov character can be in several places at once. (Noice!) And Leckie uses that to great effect.

But Leckie's most brilliant pov shenanigan comes from a constraint of having Breq, the ship's consciousness, as our first-person narrator: she can't seem to tell the difference between a man and a woman. (Of course! Why would a ship need gender distinctions?) Her pronouns are totally effed. And the reader soon understands via other characters' pronouns that certain important characters are probably male instead of female. But Leckie never pins it down, and that was a fantastic choice. As the plot unfolds and the characters deepen, the reader is forced to acknowledge that the sexes of the characters don't matter. Breq must judge characters without any preconceived notions of how the sexes behave and so must we. It's everything else that matters and in fact makes them fully-realized, 3D human beings for the reader. I'm not sure any author has so cleverly shown the value of ignoring those preconceived notions of sex and gender.

All that said I haven't begun to scratch the surface of the complicated world Leckie builds or explored the depth of its characters and their choices, or even begun to unpack the implications of what ancillaries are not to mention the ships' consciousnesses that inhabit them. I leave those amazing ideas for you to discover as you read.