Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (series)

Summary: An AI seeks justice.

I have been intentionally trying to read at least some fiction every day this year. I blew through this trilogy and I am going to just write one review for the trilogy as a whole.

The series intentionally starts leaving the reader in the dark about what is really going on. The story slowly unwinds and it is really not until the last third of the book that everything that the reader needs to know is revealed.

The main character is seeking revenge. But very early in the book, she is distracted when she runs across someone she knows dying in the snow. She save them and then feels an obligation along with her desire for revenge.

The world building is well done. This is a classic space opera trilogy. The first book has all the vibes of a western or left for dead spy novel but with a space setting. There is an Asian/British feel to some of the culture that is accented even more in later book. An emotionally reserved culture, lots of tea, colonialism are all very common.  It took a little while to understand, but the culture of the main characters does not distinguish genders, so everyone is “she” in that language, but in other languages, there are gender distinctions.

As with some other sci-fi worlds, there seems to be some lost technology that is being used. AI controlled ships are thousands of years old and new ones are not being built. The AI controlled ships have their own crews that they control. Those crews are human bodies who have been taken over and are controlled by the AI. The crews are made up of people who were colonized or who were being punished. Once enslaved to the AI, their memory and personality is basically lost.

The second book shifts in tone and becomes more about world building and peace seeking instead of revenge as the primary focus. There are some complaints about that tone shift in other reviews, but I think the shift is necessary to the story telling. The main character shifts from being a solo person seeking revenge to having a community around her and feeling the pressure and obligation of that community. By the third, there is real grappling with healing and trauma as well as seeking justice and freedom for all, not just themselves.

Part of what I like about sci-fi space opera is that they often grapple with deeper ideas. Part of what I don’t tend to like about space opera is that there are almost always nearly super humans who are just a bit too perfect. While the super human is built into the system, one of the ongoing themes of the trilogy is the abuse of the many by the powerful few. Leckie is aware of the history of space opera and is playing with the themes and tropes.

I am not giving anything away. Having read a lot of space opera when I was younger, I was predicting much of what was happening before it happened. But I was still engaged and I was pleased by the underlying ideas that were being grappled with. There is a fourth book that isn’t directly in the trilogy but is in the same setting and I will pick that up from the library in the next couple months.

There was a narrator shift from the first book to the second and third books and it is a large shift. Both are fine, but the first was an American narrator and the second and third was a British narrator. Pronunciations changed and that made the shift harder, especially with names and places. But I did think both narrators did well, but it really did accent the tone shift of the books from the first to second book.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook