B 🌻 A B reviewed Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch, #1)
Amazing
5 stars
Amazing, with a capital A. It's been a while since a book grabbed me this quickly and this hard.
[sound recording] /, 45 pages
English language
Published Oct. 30, 2014 by Recorded Books.
Now isolated in a single frail human body, Breq, an artificial intelligence that used to control of a massive starship and its crew of soldiers, tries to adjust to her new humanity while seeking vengeance and answers to her questions.
Amazing, with a capital A. It's been a while since a book grabbed me this quickly and this hard.
Really enjoyed this book. In some ways it's a classic space opera but there's enough twists on the formula that it feels super fresh. Fascinating explorations of identity, language, and class. The writing was fun and engaging, I ate this book up.
This is a fun space opera that has all the fun space opera things: giant interstellar empires; worldbuilding on various interstellar cultures, and how they interact with each other, and how they do gender; exploration of how cognition and identity works in entities that are not (or not entirely) human; grand plots and conspiracies.
The overall plot is perhaps a bit simple, and some of the characters lean perhaps too much into one-dimensional archetypes, but it does not matter that much against the lively worldbuilding, and how it ties into the whole story.