Another strong book from the Hugo Awards list.
The concept: In the distant future, AIs run space stations and ships. They also get their grimy little electronic mitts into people by way of implants. The Radch are essentially a human empire, run by the Lord of the Radch. She has many clones, but with the help of AI and great future communications, somehow stays a coherent entity until…well, that’s a spoiler. When the Radch expand their empire through conquest and annexation.
They conquer a system and annex around half the population to serve as ancillaries – meat puppets to the AI. We meet one, One Esk, who is an ancillary to the ship Justice of Toren.
I was surprised to find myself rooting for One Esk. She comes off as relatively emotionless at the start and driven but Leckie does a nice job of getting us on her side. One Esk has plenty of good and bad qualities, just like us.
It’s a space opera without any real space battles, but plenty of dirt-side and ship/station action. I will definitely read the second book in the series, Ancillary Sword. Leckie tells a great story and has enough fresh ideas and spins on things that I had several “oohhh, that’s cool!” moments.
On the Feral Scale, it’s a 9 for the story, and a 6 for the science. Spoilers and nits follow.
You’ve been warned.
The AIs have a hard time with gender. This is essentially a gimmick in the story and could have been more. They refer to everyone as “she/her.” Fine. I’m happy to go along with that as a cultural choice. What threw me off was that the explanation was that they couldn’t tell the difference between male and female, regardless of species. Something smart enough to run hundreds of human bodies simultaneously, all of which have myriad cyber implants, whilst steering a giant ship through interstellar space to be unable to distinguish gender felt like a cop out. I’d have been much happier if Leckie had her AIs decide that gender was a meat-based issue that they didn’t care to deal with and, thus, for simplicity, every biological was “she/her.”
At one point, One Esk, is on a shuttle and decides to shoot an oxygen tank for the tactical benefit of a nice explosion. Great. Lots of logical reasons to have oxygen tanks on interplanetary shuttles. Here’s one that’s not a good reason: The shuttle, being small, could not carry plants to make air. Uhmmm…make air? Convert CO2 to O2 during photosynthesis? Yes. Make air, no.
Tech stagnation. Interstellar travel is likely to take many years, I get that, but Leckie uses gates as an interstellar teleportation plot device. I’m fine with that. However, the ships, stations, and tech in Leckie’s universe seem frozen. Tech from a thousand years earlier is completely compatible and indistinguishable from the tech of later. My current Macbook can’t even run software I paid for ten years ago.