Ancillary Justice

Somebody described this book in one tweet as a vengeful AI in a human body stalking the ruler of the galaxy who also gets sort of confused about gender, life, and self, and also she sings a lot, and that’s genuinely close to the whole pitch. What that logline undersells is how slow and deliberate the actual reading experience is. It took me a real stretch of pages to figure out what was even happening, ships that are also people, an empire held together by artificial minds that used to command dozens of bodies at once, none of it explained the easy way.

I’ll admit I wanted a glossary more than once, a big cast with long unfamiliar names and no character list to check against, which used to be a standard feature of genre fiction and I missed it here. That’s a minor complaint against a book that’s doing something genuinely hard, a far future where gender has stopped meaning what it means to us, rendered through a narrator who genuinely can’t always tell and defaults to she for everyone as a result, which sounds like a gimmick on paper and reads as completely natural about forty pages in.

The line I keep coming back to is about thoughts being ephemeral, meaningless unless they push you toward some action, however small, and that idea threads through everything the ship-turned-person protagonist does across the book, a mind built to serve now acting entirely on its own judgment for the first time. It’s not an action movie the way some space opera promises to be, it’s slower and stranger than that, and I mean that as praise even though it took patience to get there.

This is the first of a trilogy and it stands on its own well enough that I’d recommend it even to someone unsure they’ll continue, though I’m already circling back for the second one myself.