Where the Ideas Are Better Than the Story

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is filled with some amazing ideas. Tons of clever ways of looking at a possible, strange future. Some of the science stuff was fun to contemplate. But the story was almost uniformly uneventful and slow. Add to that all the impediments to comprehension that one encounters in the novel and it just wasn't all that fun to read--even though I really thought it was going to be, and I was psyched for it.

I don't mind when SF and F novels are filled with invented science, strange names, and made up nouns, like we find here. I like it, in fact. But I need more helping filling in the meanings than we tended to get. Patience isn't always rewarded, as we're meant to infer a great deal, and piece together so many hints of how things work. I still don't know, at the end, the differences or relative sizes of the "swords" as opposed to the ships called "mercies." I don't know whether the ancillaries of a ship all look different or the same. If different, how are they recognized? Same with the versions of Anaander Mianaai. Were the ships ever humans, or are they entirely artificial? I don't understand what happened with the Presger or Garseddai very well. I can't picture a lot of the settings, or how the parts of the empire fit together.

And the central idea, the long-running secret conflict with the emperor (avoiding the spoiler), is still vague to me, and that's what all the action in the last third is really about. I have a sort-of idea, and I kept waiting for the author to make it plain, but she never does. I don't understand the ramifications of the Anaander Mianaai succeeding in quashing that one bit of information.

What we get a lot of is a whole bunch of time in a small town on Ors, where nothing happens for too long. Then there's a bit of local violence that seems utterly trivial to an interstellar empire, but somehow has implications I couldn't make sense of. Then we spend way too long on a snowy planet where Breq runs into Seivarden and wastes a bunch of pages sitting in a house.

I kept believing that something exciting and important and revelatory was about to happen, but it's just a long slow buildup to a confusing fight at the end with stakes I still don't really understand. It's like an exciting-looking firework with a long fuse that just goes "pop" at the end.

Anyway, the creative bits are interesting, and I bet one could set some really exciting stories in this universe. I bet I'd get a bunch of my questions answered in such stories. I'm just not sure I trust this author enough with doing any of that to read the sequels.

As for a recommendation, I dunno. Hugo and Nebula say the book is amazing, and I don't. I'm probably outgunned.

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