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| Trade paperback, 422 pages Published 2013 Acquired December 2016 Read May 2017 |
I really enjoyed this. Basically the perfect sort of space opera (if you're me): cool concepts like dispersed intelligence and living spaceships, effective world-building down to the littlest details, nuanced take on the details of how colonialism functions, well-written characters, effective plot structure, strong prose, and gripping action-- I read through the last one hundred or so pages in one go because I had to find out what was happening.
It struck me how this book was in some ways a response to Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, though not an anti-Left Hand. Maybe more a development of it. The setting puts me in mind of it: a lone visitor from an interstellar alien* alliance comes to an iced-over world where the gender rules are different to what they're used to. In both books, there ends up being a long cross-tundra journey on a sledge, with the life of someone the visitor knows hanging in the balance. Only in Left Hand, the representative is an actual emissary; in Ancillary Justice, they're a fugitive from an underclass. In Left Hand, the other person on the sledge is a close friend; in Ancillary Justice, the visitor doesn't even know why they're saving them. In Left Hand, the visitor comes from a world with our concepts of gender; in Ancillary Justice, the visitor goes to a world with our concepts of gender. In Left Hand, the book defaults to male pronouns for characters who are hermaphroditic; in Ancillary Justice, the book defaults to female pronouns for every character no matter their gender/sex. In Left Hand, the interplantary space alliance is largely benevolent; in Ancillary Justice, it's decidedly not. There are enough parallels-with-divergence to make me feel like it was intentional, or at least that Left Hand of Darkness was bubbling somewhere in Leckie's subconscious as she wrote Ancillary Justice. Though if this is all so, I'd have to think more before advancing what Leckie might actually be trying to say in her reworking.
* Alien in the sense of cultural, not biological. In both books, the visitor and the visited are (essentially) biologically human.
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