Yet There Are Statues

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

If you’re at all plugged into the online genre community, you’ve probably heard of, if not already read, Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice. By the time it was published in October of last year, advance copies had already netted rapturous reviews from book bloggers and other authors. For those who need a little background, it’s a space opera set in an interstellar empire whose military starships are piloted by powerful artificial intelligences. Beginning years after one of these ships, the Justice of Toren, was lost under mysterious circumstances, the novel is narrated by Breq, a tiny fragment of the Toren‘s AI, as it attempts to get revenge on the person responsible for the loss of the ship. The narrator is an “ancillary”, a human corpse implanted with mechanisms that allow the AI to control it like a robot. Ancillaries are operated by remote, but a small piece of the overall AI is stored locally, allowing Breq to survive, albeit in much diminished form, even though its ship did not.

I almost always arrive late to trendy books like this and some sort of contrarian impulse tends to lower my expectations, but the combination of enthusiastic acclaim and an interesting premise meant I couldn’t stay away forever. Once I started reading, I’m happy to say it didn’t take long for the book to win me over.

The narrator was simultaneously a little disappointing and a pleasant surprise. As an AI in a human body, Breq turns out to be a relatively familiar sort of character, and one not nearly as inhibited by getting cut off from the main unit as I would have preferred. But in flashbacks we spend a lot of time with “Justice of Toren One Esk”, a subunit within the overall Justice of Toren AI, and all of that material is handled quite well. As someone with a computer science background, it’s rare to read a treatment of computers in general and AI in particular that doesn’t require a lot of eye-rolling, and I was pleased to find that, within its speculative parameters, One Esk was quite believable.

What really impressed me, though, was the Radchaii empire. Space empires passed from trope to cliché long before most of us were even born, but it’s rare to see one that feels as if the author actually spent more than a few minutes thinking about how empires function. The Radchaii and its emperor are oppressive, but many of those in its ranks are good people, and even the emperor’s theoretically absolute power turns out to be limited in certain ways. Most importantly, although the empire has survived for countless centuries, it hasn’t done so unchanged. Over the years, demography and economics have taken their toll, and a society that was implacable in its youth is starting to come apart. Just like historical Rome, ever the model for space empires everywhere, there are factions clamoring for a return to the old virtues and others who want to change the empire to adapt to its new circumstances. The novel illustrates this for us in the character of Seivarden, an officer who served on the Justice of Toren a thousand years before the start of the narrative and then ended up in stasis, emerging to find the same empire led by the same emperor is nevertheless a very different world. Leckie clearly put a lot of time into working out her setting, sprinkling in a variety of intriguing details without feeling obligated to explain everything.

So if much of the hype is justified, does that mean someone has finally written the perfect science fiction novel? Well, no. There are some rough edges here. As already mentioned, Breq is surprisingly bland. For much of the novel, the narrative alternates between Breq’s present-day quest and a set of linked flashbacks to the events leading up to the Justice of Toren‘s demise. This structure positions the revelation of the Justice of Toren‘s fate it an appropriate place and allows us to contrast the cut-off Breq from the days when all the ancillaries were functioning normally, but as is common with split narratives frequently one thread is much more interesting than the other. In this case, it’s usually the flashback, because although far more interesting in theory, the quest for revenge involves a lot of sitting around and waiting as Breq slowly pursues a macguffin that ultimately doesn’t feel very essential to the story. I really like the way the climax of the novel is really a conversation and doesn’t hinge on which character is a better shot, so the fact that Breq spends most of the novel acquiring a particularly shiny gun is, in retrospect, just a little unfortunate.

There’s also a bit too much reliance on coincidence. I could, just barely, accept Breq stumbling upon its old comrade Seivarden at the beginning, or else accept Breq and Seivarden just happening to meet another of Breq’s old comrades when they cross the border back into the empire. But both in the same story?

Finally, while in most respects the details about artificial intelligence were handled unusually well, and this isn’t a hard science fiction novel and probably shouldn’t be judged on those terms, the concept of ancillaries seems absurd. This is a technological civilization that can make massive AI-driven starships, but they can’t make conventional robots for their AIs to drive around? And when ancillaries become politically untenable, they have to use human foot soldiers? Sorry, I’m not buying that, no matter how nifty the moral and political questions ancillaries as described introduce into the story.

But those are relatively small quibbles. Just in terms of its story, Ancillary Justice is a fun space opera, and there’s a lot more to it than just that story. Much has been made, and deservedly so, of the narrator’s inability to distinguish gender and the consequent use of the female pronoun as a default for both men and women. Unfortunately, I think knowing about it ahead of time defused much of the effect for me. Also, the book is a little fuzzy on exactly where this ambiguity comes from: is it because One Esk is an AI? Is it a Sapir-Whorf consequence of the Radchaii language’s lack of gendered pronouns? Is it cultural? One suspects that even today, we have surveillance systems that are probably better at distinguishing biological gender than humans, so it’s odd that One Esk can’t do it.

Beyond that interrogation of gender, there’s not a lot new in Ancillary Justice, but its real value is in its smooth synthesis of concepts from throughout the genre. A lot of comparisons have been made to Iain M. Banks, but the Radchaai empire is no utopian Culture even if it does use large AIs in its warships. The better comparison, I think, is to Glen Cook’s still tragically underread novel The Dragon Never Sleeps. Both novels are about a crisis in a powerful empire whose military power is based on AI starships. Both novels examine how over centuries even the most durable of political systems will drift and change. Both novels question whether the security that an empire provides its citizens is worth the brutality required to police it, and if it’s ethical to destroy such an empire when countless millions will suffer in the subsequent anarchy.

The Dragon Never Sleeps provides a fascinating answer to the ethical questions central to both novels, and for me Kez Maefele is a much more interesting character than Breq. For its part, while Ancillary Justice doesn’t really provide answers to the ethical and political questions it poses, it’s better written and much better edited. It’s also less weird, which is a bit of a knock against it for me, but certainly makes it more accessible. It’s also not over, for while it ends on a reasonably conclusive moment, the setup for the sequel Ann Leckie is said to be writing is obvious and there’s reason to hope that future books will build on this excellent foundation.