Reviews with content warning for Violence - Het recht van de Radch

I absolutely adored this story. Truly gripping in how it navigates the politics of the military industrial complex through both the characters within and the literal instrument of that complex: the ancillaries. One Esk is a fascinating character to follow and I love how we split between these two storylines, One Esk’s current mission with Seiverdan and One Esk’s past on Ors. The way the memory weaves together with the present day, highlighting the themes and dynamics in both, really made the story feel in conversation with itself. I do think the ending is a bit anticlimactic, but I often find that books I really love have disappointing endings. Definitely give this a read still though! I’m super excited to start the sequels.

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crufts's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

On the first reading: Well, this is a cool idea, but I'm having a little trouble following. What is the main character, really? A ship, a robot, a person—? Huh? And there are so many named characters with weird sci-fi names that are hard to remember and tell apart, who are all these people?? And wait, did that happen in the present or in the past, and was that past 20 years ago or 500 years ago or 1000 years ago??? And what's with the ending?

On the second reading: Ohhhh, now I get it! Okay, this is really neat!

In a science-fiction world of stars and planets, the expansionist Radch empire grows ever stronger. The most powerful tools of their military are the ancillaries: the living bodies of prisoners of war, now controlled by the AIs of Radch warships, and whom their enemies refer to as "corpse soldiers".

The title of Ancillary Justice is a play on words: it's the military title of the protagonist (Breq), who is an ancillary of the military spaceship Justice of Toren; but it's also the plot of the novel, as Breq pursues justice against the Lord of the Radch.

As noted above, my first reading of the novel left me rather confused. Information such as Breq's true nature, her origin, her backstory, her motivation and goals, and her connection with Captain Seivarden (the deuteragonist) are doled out in dribs and drabs through a narrative that switches between the present and the past on every second chapter. These switches of time are not explicitly marked in the text and are only identifiable from context clues. This was very confusing until I got into the swing of it on the re-read.

The plot of the "present day" story is actually quite simple, without a huge number of plot points; instead, it's the mystery and buildup of this past backstory (with all those characters with wacky sci-fi names) that provides the bulk of the novel. Again, this is something I was able to appreciate more on the second reading, when I was better able to tell all the lieutenants and captains apart.

Breq tells the story via her first-person point of view. However, something else that made the story harder to follow is that Breq refers to all characters as "she", reflecting her native Radch language that doesn't distinguish social genders. For the Radch, one's gender (and sex) is as socially irrelevant as the colour of one's eyes, and everyone gets the same personal pronoun (which happens to be "she").

Note that this is not the same as in Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, where the Gethenians are actually physically unisex. The Radch do have visible sex/gender differences, they just don't mark them socially.

This was an interesting bit of sci-fi worldbuilding for the Radch. However, it was also rather confusing as roughly half the characters in the story are male, but Breq still calls them "she". For example, Seivarden is male, and this is apparent to non-Radch characters through her appearance/voice/etc, but the narration refers to Seivarden as "she" (as would Seivarden, if she were referring to herself in the Radch language).
With Breq's unisex pronoun use, I automatically pictured a lot of characters as having female-typical appearances, in conflict with occasional notes of description that they had beards, broad shoulders, deep voices and so on. This made it more difficult to tell characters apart, since this common distinguishing feature (i.e. social gender) was absent from the narration. But even though it made the characters harder to follow, I still think it was a cool worldbuilding idea.

Another interesting choice for the novel was for the protagonist to be a faithful servant of an "evil empire" (i.e., the Radch). This worked out well as it made for a fascinating conflict between Breq's loyalty and her burgeoning identity as a separate person.

Despite my confusion and the need for a re-read, I did enjoy the novel, with my favourite part being the gradual Breq/Seivarden relationship arc from "I can barely stand you" to

dear friends who stand by eachother no matter what

. It is fairly light as sci-fi goes - maybe just a little heavier sci-fi than Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers - and would be accessible to people who don't read a lot of sc-fi.

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booksthatburn's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated

5.0

ANCILLARY JUSTICE is a story of slow burn revenge by a segment of a colonial empire against its leader. It deals with personhood, gendered language, and sliding scales of ethics in colonial forces. It doesn't propose to have obvious or easy answers to any of these questions, but it excels in coming at them sideways. One of the most obvious elements of this is the way the protagonist engages with gendered language. Her first language doesn't use gendered pronouns, so she defaults to "she" (or that language's equivalent) for everyone, unless she is specifically told another gender reference. At minimum, for someone like myself reading in English it creates the impression of a world filled with women, even if they're not. Her constant misgendering marks her as an outsider even to those who don't know she's an Ancillary. As a physical extension of a spaceship's AI, put into human bodies for seamless operation, the nature of her existence is the subject of many discussions about slavery, autonomy, and personhood. Each of her bodies had a history before they became part of her, and she is uninterested in anyone's attempts to kill her in order to get that person back. This seems like the kind of thing later books might explore more, but the foundations are laid for now with various debates and conversations as to exactly what kind of colonial forces are to be preferred: one where bodies are replaced with ancillaries of a ship (effectively killing them), or one where individual humans are left their own personalities and might engage in assault of various kinds against the people in their charge. Is the soldier who has already been killed better than the one who will randomly rape the populace? The answer of stopping colonization altogether has already occurred to someone, to be sure, but this is a story where changes take time, and the last body of a several-thousand-year-old ship is content to set up the pieces of her revenge slowly.

I enjoyed this and I'm very interested in where things go from here. I like the questions raised nearly as much as I appreciate not being given trite answers.

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