Ancillary Justice

I found Ancillary Justice on the awards lists and owned it for a few years before making several half-hearted attempts at a full read. I was able to push through when my book club picked it up a couple months ago.

This is the first time I've read anything pitched to me as Space Opera, a newly legitimate sub-genre of Science Fiction -- interplanetary battles and melodramatic adventure emphasizing social, political and religious story-lines. It's interesting to me how a somewhat arbitrary marketing and critical category can re-frame expectations for the reading experience. Hyperion, Ender's Game, Dune and lot of other SF classics have been shuffled into the Space Opera category now apparently and I'm tempted to go back and re-read some of that stuff to see how these old books play in their new sandbox.

And as St. Borges has taught us with Pierre Menard and elsewhere, the most creative half of writing happens while reading. New readers are making new books from the old books all the time!

For this new Space Opera Leckie book the conceit was interesting enough to carry me through almost 400 pages. What's not to like about a universe where star-ship AIs use human bodies -- dead enemy captives? -- as an extension of themselves, like a hive-minded super crew management team. And if a ship gets destroyed in battle, what happens if one of those AIs is off-ship on an errand and survives without its counterparts? That's where the book starts. Cool, right? There's so much you can do with these ideas of losing shared memory and rebuilding from a major fall.

In building characters the book pays close attention to social nuance. Characters early on feel genuine and layered -- a reluctant colonial overlord, a ship's AI segment with its own agenda, a proud captive religious leader. The book plays throughout with gender norms and other more nuanced social cues -- when was the last time you read science fiction that fussed about which set of dinnerware was aboard the ship? Details matter, and a lot of dimension gets generated from some of those details.

What's a bit frustrating is that its details that disappoint as well, especially the expression of time. The plot requires framing out a giant arc of time and there is reference to an event that happened a 1000 years ago.. and that 1000 years turns out not to be a figure of speech but a literal 1000 elapsed years of time. And there's no attempt to inflect that stretch with some bridging events, or even address the problem of what the hell is a year in a system that doesn't have an Earth? Klonk. 1000 years. Klonk.

And there there are these arbitrary pauses that are first-person narrated as "<some words> I said after four seconds of silence." Sometimes its three seconds, sometimes six seconds, or on a second. After a few times I'm rolling my eyes. Where is the editor here? 

The crude blocks of time and the hamfisted pausing are something of a shorthand for some of the plot development later in the book where the nuance collapses into pure action -- there's a Neil Stephenson amount of rushed coincidence in the closing chapters. Ultimately it felt like Leckie wanted out of this book and I did too.

So nope, I didn't pick up the second book but know some people who did. Maybe I'll hear something that will pull me back into the series but life is short and I'll sit this one out for now.