Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 422 pages
Published 2013

Acquired December 2016
Previously read May 2017
Reread November 2019

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

I used to say Ancillary Justice was the best sf novel of the last five years... until I realized it was over six years old. Oh well. But as soon as I was assigned an sf creative writing course, I knew this would be the novel I would teach. I really like the way it handles worldbuilding, and the way it makes something new of old sf tropes. For example, in an essay on John Scalzi's Whatever, Leckie points out that the idea of an evil empire reusing corpses of conquered people as soldiers is an sf staple... but the story of Justice of Toren is an interesting twist, because once "liberated," her body doesn't have any desire to go back to who she was, because she doesn't remember being that person. She is Justice of Toren.

I also like the way she handles exposition. We talked about Jo Walton's concept of "incluing" a lot in my class; Leckie argues in an essay of her own that the infodump has its place, and sometime it is better to tell than show. On the one hand, the first few pages of Ancillary Justice throw a lot of stuff at you, to my students' consternation. What's a Radchaai? A segment? How can the narrator be a "piece of equipment"? On the other hand, come chapter 2, we get some clear-cut explanations: "Nineteen years, three months, and one week before [...], I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis'urna" (9). And then the narrator just spells out a lot of stuff for us. What's a troop carrier? What's Shis'urna? How do the ships communicate? All just told, because we need to know.

But she keeps dropping in little details she doesn't entirely explains; at one point, she mention "gates" and I asked my students what this meant. To my surprise none of them knew! Leckie is, of course, banking that you have enough previous knowledge of sf to know that one from context. But it's also not important on p. 9, and when it becomes important (when Justice of Toren enters gate space on p. 217), the narrator just tells us what a gate is and how it works. The notorious gender stuff is largely done through incluing, on the other hand, maybe meant to indicate just how much it's second (or first?) nature to our viewpoint characters. I also really liked the quick switching of viewpoints in ch. 2 to explore how the ancillaries work, though this requires some effort from the reader (as Walton discusses in her examination of incluing); if you don't pay close attention, you'll be more confused, not more elucidated by the time this part is over. Leckie is really good at this kind of thing. (Except when it comes to the structure of the Radchaai military vessels, which confused my students, and confused me when I tried to explain it; I had to pull up a chart from the Internet to get it all straight.)

It's always been interesting to me that the story's play with gender-- which got all of the press when it came out-- is actually sort of irrelevant. Compare The Left Hand of Darkness, which is largely about Genly Ai's discomfort with the unusual form of gender he encounters on Gethen. But you could delete the lack of gender in Radchaai civilization from Ancillary Justice, and in terms of plot and character, I think it would basically be the same novel. The "Big Idea" of the novel is about colonization and the ways other cultures are absorbed and assimilated and disposed of.

We did explore how readers react to the lack of explicit gender information on the characters. Most, like myself, filled in information based on guesswork and, to be honest, stereotypes. I imagined Awn as female (because she seems young and innocent), Skaaiat as male (because she is a bit of a "player" with Awn), Dariet as male (because she's in a position of authority and commanding), Isaaia as female (because she's snobby and reads as "bitchy"). On the other hand, I always perceive Seivarden as female even though we're explicitly told he's male! I think it's because of the snobbishness? I'm not sure. Most of my students did similar categorization; others had different reasons. One said she liked imagining all of Anaander Mianaai's bodies as female just because women evil overlords are so rare in science fiction. Some students didn't categorize at all: one just took all the female pronouns at face value and thought of everyone as a woman. I said I wished I could do the same, but some things were too ingrained and you can't entirely control your imagination.

So why is this aspect of the novel there? This is what I demanded my students tell me, but there are a couple reasons I had in mind. One is that the Radchaai can't be entirely about the Big Idea, because then they become one-note. All the tea stuff, though fun, creates a parallel to the British Empire, reinforcing the imperialist critique running through the novel. The gender system is largely orthogonal to the issues of colonialism and classism in the novel, thus making the Radchaai a more complex, fleshed out society. Utterly evil in some senses, but highly progressive in others.

The second is that it does reinforce the novel's themes. In a large part, this is a novel about judging people not by who they are, but by how they act. Anaander Mianaai misjudges Justice of Toren; Seivarden misjudges Breq; Breq misjudges Seivarden; the Radch misjudges entire civilizations. It's about how you need to take the action that is most good, not the action that is expected. The reader doesn't make these misjudgements because the reader doesn't have Radchaai classism culturally ingrained. But the reader does make a whole different series of misjudgements because they have an entirely different system of gender culturally ingrained. To read Ancillary Justice successfully, you have to learn to overcome your own preconceptions about how the world works-- just as the characters did.

(Oddly, this did expose to me that the character who most learns the central lesson of the novel isn't the protagonist; Breq occasionally misjudges, but usually reserves judgement until she sees people act. Breq already knows all this. It's Seivarden who learns this lesson, and Seivarden who thus changes the most across the course of the novel. Which is probably why Seivarden is my favorite character in the trilogy.)