Ancillary Justice
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| Author | Ann Leckie |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | John Harris |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Orbit Books |
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Publication date
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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 (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 seeks revenge against 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]
Contents
Setting and synopsis
Ancillary Justice is a space opera set thousands of years in the future, where the primary galactic power of human-occupied planets is the expansionist Radch empire. The empire uses AIs to control human bodies ("ancillaries") that are used as soldiers, though regular humans also are soldiers. The Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender, and Leckie conveys this by using female personal pronouns for everybody, and by having the Radchaai main character guess wrongly when she has to use languages with gender-specific pronouns.
The narrative begins several 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 an officer, Seivarden, whom she had known 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 being 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 exact 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:
- Hugo Award for Best Novel from the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS), 2014[8]
- Nebula Award for Best Novel from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 2013[9]
- Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year, 2014[10]
- British Science Fiction Association BSFA Award for Best Novel[11]
- Locus Award for Best First Novel, 2014[12]
- Kitschies Golden Tentacle for best debut novel, 2013.[13]
The novel was also nominated for the following awards:
- Shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished original science fiction paperback.[14]
- Named to the James Tiptree, Jr. Award Honor List, for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.[15]
- Finalist for the Compton Crook Award for best first science fiction/fantasy/horror novel from the Baltimore Science Fiction Society.[16]
Television 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.[17]
References
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