Ancillary Justice

Ancillary Justice
Author Ann Leckie
Cover artist John Harris
Country United States
Language English
Genre Science fiction
Publisher Orbit Books
Publication date
 1 October 2013
Media type Print (paperback)
Ebook
Audiobook (read by Adjoa Andoh)
Pages 409
ISBN 978-0-316-24662-0
Followed by Ancillary Sword

Ancillary Justice is a science fiction 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 (forthcoming 2015). The novel follows Breq, the sole survivor of a starship destroyed by treachery and the vessel of that ship's artificial consciousness, as she attempts to revenge herself on the ruler of her civilization.

Ancillary Justice received critical praise, won the Hugo Award,[1] Nebula Award, BSFA Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award and Locus Award, and was nominated for several other science fiction awards. The cover art is by John Harris.

Two short stories by Leckie, "Night's Slow Poison" and "She Commands Me and I Obey", are set in the same fictional universe.[2][3]

Plot summary

Ancillary Justice is a space opera set thousands of years in the future, where the primary galactic power is the expansionist Radch empire, which uses AIs to control human bodies ("ancillaries") that are used as soldiers. The Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender, and Leckie conveys this by using female personal pronouns for everybody, or by having the Radchaai main character guess wrongly when she has to use languages with gender-specific pronouns.

The narrative begins some years after the disappearance of a Radch starship, the Justice of Toren, when the sole surviving ancillary (and fragment of the Justice of Toren‍ '​s consciousness), Breq, encounters a former comrade, Seivarden, on an ice planet. The plot switches between two strands: Breq's "present day" quest for justice for the Justice of Toren‍ '​s destruction and several flashback sequences set nineteen years earlier with the Justice of Toren in orbit around the planet of Shis'urna, which is about to be formally brought into the Radchaai empire. The reader eventually finds out 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 end of the novel, Breq associates herself with the more pacific aspect of Anaander Mianaai while waiting for an opportunity to enact her revenge.

Critical reception

The novel received widespread acclaim and recognition. 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."[4]

In the opinion of Genevieve Valentine, writing for NPR, the "assured, gripping and stylish" novel succeeded both on the large and on the small scale, as the tale of an empire and as a character study.[5] 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".[6]

Nina Allan's review in Arc was more critical: while she found "nothing lazy, cynical or even particularly commercial-minded" in the novel, she criticized its characterization and considered that its uncritical adoption of space opera tropes and the "disappointingly simple" ideas it conveyed (such as that empires are evil) made Ancillary Justice "an SF novel of the old school: tireless in its recapitulation of genre norms and more or less impenetrable to outsiders".[7]

Awards

Ancillary Justice won the following awards:

The novel was also nominated for the following awards:

TV adaptation

The novel was optioned for television in October 2014 by the production company Fabrik and Fox Television Studios. Leckie wrote that the producers responded positively to her concerns about how the ungendered, dark-skinned Radchaai characters could be presented in a visual medium.[19]

References

  1. ↑ "2014 Hugo Award Winners". The Hugo Awards. Retrieved 17 August 2014.
  2. ↑ Leckie, Ann. "Night’s Slow Poison". Tor.com. Retrieved 11 June 2014.
  3. ↑ Leckie, Ann. "She Commands Me and I Obey". Strangehorizons.com. Retrieved 17 March 2015.
  4. ↑ Letson, Russell (27 October 2013). "Russell Letson reviews Ann Leckie". Locus. Archived from the original on 10 November 2013. Retrieved 27 December 2013.
  5. ↑ Valentine, Genevieve (8 October 2013). "A Skillfully Composed Space Opera In 'Ancillary Justice'". NPR. Archived from the original on 13 November 2013. Retrieved 27 December 2013.
  6. ↑ Bourke, Liz (6 September 2013). ""Nothing quite clarifies your thoughts like thinking you’re about to die." Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice". Tor.com. Archived from the original on 4 March 2014. Retrieved 27 December 2013.
  7. ↑ Allan, Nina (January 2014). "We’re reading ANCILLARY JUSTICE by Ann Leckie". Archived from the original on 10 February 2014. Retrieved 28 January 2014.
  8. ↑ "2014 Hugo Awards". The Hugo Awards. Retrieved 17 August 2014.
  9. ↑ "Hugo Award Nominees 2013". Archived from the original on 28 May 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  10. ↑ "2013 Nebula Awards Winners Announced". Archived from the original on 18 May 2014. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  11. ↑ "Arthur C. Clarke Winner 2013". Archived from the original on 2 May 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  12. ↑ "BSFA Shortlist 2013". Archived from the original on 4 April 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  13. ↑ "BSFA Winners 2013". Archived from the original on 22 April 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  14. ↑ Gallo, Irene. "Announcing the 2014 Locus Award Winners". Tor.com. Retrieved 29 June 2014.
  15. ↑ "Golden Tentacle Winner 2013". Archived from the original on 1 March 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  16. ↑ "Phillip K. Dick Shortlist 2013". Archived from the original on 16 January 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  17. ↑ "Tiptree Winners and Honorees 2013". Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  18. ↑ "Compton Crook Nominees 2013 (.pdf)" (PDF). Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  19. ↑ "Ann Leckie’s Hugo-Winning Ancillary Justice Optioned for Television". Tor.com. 22 October 2014. Retrieved 23 October 2014.

External links