That's not The Dark Forest/Death's End senpai.

No, and some of the themes don't really make sense without a broad view alongside Iain Banks and LeGuin.

Ann Leckie is a forced meme.

>>7738959
Liu Cixin says lol.

inb4 not this decade, published 8 years ago in China doesnt count.

>>7738959
It might be, if she'd drop the fucking genderless pronoun shit.

>>7738959
SJW trash.

>>7738959
I just finished this book and I'll post a review I wrote. Spoilers.

This was a space opera without much in the way of spectacular settings, immense space battles, giant objects, bizarre aliens, artifacts, or even much hard cosmological science. Despite that, I enjoyed it a lot, my favorite part was probably how Breq is constantly being smart, effective and badass and yet it's usually not enough to keep her out of trouble, the opposite in fact. Similarly, her enemy near the end, the tyrant and the AI of the Station, are also incredibly perceptive and watchful, so it's credible that Breq is never safe from observation and every moment is potentially fraught with peril. This is a setting where tiny mistakes have big consequences and I loved that.

The formal device of the shipmind present in multiple places at once was an ingenious technical gimmick, sometimes a little hard to read, but approaching the level of genius, I thought, in the scene where Justice of Toren has to decide whether to kill Lieutenant Awn, and the scene cuts through events occurring nearly simultaneously on multiple decks to build suspense, a lot like how a movie editor will cut in and out of an action scene to make it even more suspenseful...

I was like... 80% of the way to buying the agendered society thing. To me, a society where you can't express your gender would be a dealbreaker, but hell this is SF, everything is mediated by technology, and the Radch is sort of an extremist, ideological society anyway, so why the hell not... However, I couldn't shake the question "Wouldn't it be simpler if these people just lived with the same genders we've been living with for millions of years...? Did gender really need to be changed this drastically...?" And even in this genderless society, there are still sex roles - for instance, there is an offhand reference to a character being "no doubt good in bed" and I have to then wonder... So then what do these characters DO in bed, play chess??? (Actually, the bare fact that someone is rated as "good in bed" already implies something about the gender of the speaker as in our world, guys don't fantasize about banging people who are "good in bed", they fantasize about banging people who are HOT...) -- The one thing I found utterly impossible to believe was how Justice of Toren was afraid of misgendering people in other societies... I'm sorry, you are an AI, you could figure out a way to do it, it would not be THAT hard...

(continued)

I appreciate that the Radch ( = British Raj = Deutsches Reich?) is a well-worked out imperialist society, modeled on Romans in certain respects. However it seemed like the novel only presented the downside of living in a reactionary aristocracy. Besides the fact that the area is an absolute monarchy that ruthlessly subjugates other societies, the cultural atmosphere of the Radch characters seemed stifling and snobby, its art seemed limited (the songs the protag likes all come from other planets, never the Radch itself... doesn't anyone there sing?) everyone is caught up in these snotty status games about whose house is oldest and how new blood is corrupting the empire, and there is even a line about how their whole economy is built around colonial expansion and appropriation.

I think this is kind of a straw-man, negative, uncomplicated, and therefore artistically unsatisfactory picture of what imperial societies are actually like. Leckie's main point seems to be that Empires Are Bad, but surely living in such society has benefits too, like development of culture and the arts, honor, arms, courtesy, social stability, bravery, and an ethic of personal perfection... it makes me long to meet characters like Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan, who also live in an absolute monarchy, yet are 100 times cooler than anyone from the Radch...

Incidentally, although there is tons of lip service to religion in this book, like omens and stuff, nobody ever seems to take it that seriously. It's more like a vehicle for refined philosophical contemplation rather than a practice for how characters should live their lives day to day. How is this really the religion that binds together an empire? Maybe one problem is that I don't understand what it would take to disobey this religion, other than use wrong temple etiquette.

One thing this book did really well was the Big Idea Escalation of "if you'll believe ancillaries each have slight individuality, and a ship can be schizophrenic as divided across different people, now I'm asking you to believe that the ruler of the whole Radch is having similar problems." It's so ingenious how she develops it, and how the development ties to Breq's development as a character... Stuff she notices in herself, being as smart as she is, then become the setup for the main conflict of the novel. And as you're carried along by the story, it works...

(continued)

>>7739485

...Until I actually start thinking about it and it all falls apart. Although Breq is smart, and I won't ever get tired of saying it, the political system she lives in was somewhat stupid and IMO destined to fail. To me this is the book's big weakness. And the more I think about it the more I notice it. Remember the Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin duplicates himself in with the cardboard box and is astonished to find out that his doubles (also being Calvin) refuse to do his bidding? Calvin can't coordinate for a minute with the duplicate Calvins; I'm sure if you made copies of me and gave us different experiences it would go the same way (probably as soon as we had to decide on pizza toppings) and yet nobody in the Radch seems to have DREAMED that this could potentially happen to Anaander Minaai, the person who wields absolute power. And when it finally does happen, this knowledge is so dangerous and catastrophic that it will create a civil war wherever it spreads.... Like, nobody saw this coming? Your system had ONE failure point, the psychological integrity of its dictator (who is duplicated across multiple instances), and historically, even dictators in a single body don't have a great record of staying sane...

Anyway I would rate this novel a solid 8/10, it held my interest and developed some interesting ideas, but I think it was ultimately shallower than it looked...

And that's what I have to say about Ancillary Justice