Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)
by Ann Leckie
6 June 2026
I still think about this book pretty often, but I realized recently it's been a minute (or... nine years???) since I last read it.
Easy stuff first: still a 5-star rating from me, still one of my favorite books of all time.
I had forgotten the intense moral complexity of the book. The characters have participated in truly awful things---killing a single person in self defense as Breq does early on is a bit hard to register next to the extrajudicial execution of dozens of arrested civillian prisoners, slaving the bodies of defeated enemies to a warship AI, colonization and dispossession and the many kinds and degrees of violence needed to implement them, or committing genocide on a solar-system scale.
"'Here's the truth: luxury always comes at someone else's expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn't generally have to see that, if one doesn't wish.'"
(As a warship, Justice of Toren does have to see that. It knows every single ugly detail because it's a piece of equipment, no task too lowly, but also because of its many bodies/viewpoints, superhuman processing power and memory storage, and two thousand years of experiences.)
Breq and Seivarden are both dealing with the fact that their old worlds are dead. They have to choose what to give up on and what they can still cling to. When Strigan offers to undo Breq's sense of self as an ancillary and try to return her to her pre-Justice of Toren self, she rejects it as a death: "'You can kill me, you mean. You can destroy my sense of self and replace it with one you approve of.'" But at the same time, Breq is not giving up on a self that is arguably just as extinguished: she can't be the same person she was as a many-bodied AI. From later in that same long conversation: "'Which me are you talking to? Which life that was denied me do you intend I live?'"
Breq returns over and over to the story of the human One Amaat One soldier who resisted illegal orders. I saw it in a few places that Breq doesn't explicitly reference it either, such as when she jumps off the bridge for Seivarden: "Falling, I still didn't know why I had done it. But at the moment of choice I had found I couldn't walk away."
Small things:
- The Presger probably have Translators because the Radchaai have a Translators Office, they were like "well, guess this is how humans Do Things"
- I had the idea at one point that occupants of the-Radch-the-Dyson-sphere might use universally "he" pronouns, and I can't shake it. I've also wondered if Anaander Miaanai is a self-exile from that part of the Radch due to rules about impurity of technology-augmented human bodies.
- One Esk Nineteen: one and Esk are both beginnings, nineteen out of twenty is almost an ending... but not quite.
7 August 2017
Always Be Rereading. It's telling that almost everyone who dislikes this book also doesn't understand that Breq is an unreliable narrator of her own feelings. Yes, she thinks she's a stone-cold killing machine, but her actions say otherwise.
20 July 2016
Finished my first (of probably many) rereads. still kind of confusing, but always breathtaking.
19 June 2016
Finally bought a copy at Kramerbooks this evening so I can mark it up to my hearts content on the reread and then finally (FINALLY) get to reading the sequel!
November 2014
I think I forgot to review Ancillary Justice because it was so great. When I finished it a few months ago I wanted to write a long, insightful review and mention even half the things I loved about it, and then I had to return it to the library, with dozens of tiny scraps of paper still sticking out of the places where I bookmarked the things I was excited about.
I'm just going to need to get my own copy, so I can underline and annotate to my heart's content.
In short: best feminist gender-fucking hard sci fi about imperialism/colonialism/militarism and artificial intelligences and religion and culture with the best intense political intrigue for a plot and the best characters of 2014. Absolute win.