“Except for those hours when communications had been cut off, I had never really lost the sense of being part of Justice of Toren. One of the tensions of the story then is not only understanding the past society of the Radch, but how the narrator changed circumstance so drastically.

The reader gradually understands that the narrator is a ship artificial intelligence who has multiple bodies in the past timeline and only one single humanoid body, ‘Breq,’ in the current. Leckie uses a classic sci-fi approach and drops the reader into it with the past timeline which takes place on the last assimilated world of the Imperial Radch, and shepherds the reader a little more with the second timeline on a snowy, more isolated planet.

There’s a dual narrative, a prior timeline and a current timeline. And while I get parts of the love–it’s far more readable than I expected–it feels very much like a first book, with the accompanying challenges in world-building and plotting. Everyone, it seemed was raving, from the Hugo/Locus/Nebula Awards to the Incomparable Podcast to the friends who are responsible for 4.11 average rating. It get’s 5/5 for being one of the best books I’ve read in years.I bought Ancillary Justice awhile ago, knowing I needed to read it. It has completely put in perspective (even more) how you don’t need 500 flipping pages to make a story rich and engaging (this was 300). Though, it will be tough to beat that book. I know there will be a sequel and I WILL BE ON THAT. The hierachy, the religion/not-religion, the military, the politics, the sheer-bat-shit-craziness of it all. I haven’t been so fascinated by a new…universe like that for awhile.

Who is good, who is bad? WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING? OH MY GOD THIS AMAZING. There’s a hierarchy of ‘Houses’ which I guess is sort of like space-empire-y but not intrusive enough to annoy the crap out of me. There’s death and betrayal and a leader/spiritual leader who has thousands of bodies. There’s a really cool, fascinating mission which I don’t want to give away because READ THE DAMN BOOK ALREADY. Her individual ‘segments’ are corpse-soldiers and we mainly fallow one named One-Esk. She, the human culture that is the Radch don’t distinguish between gender so everyone in the book is she, is also a battle ship. The main character is a ‘corpse soldier’ or ancillary. It’s at some very far distant future so that human culture isn’t something we can remotely recognise. The story takes plase across 2 time periods, about 25 years apart. I don’t even know how to explain it properly and for once I don’t want to give spoilers because you should go buy this book, read it, give it to your friends for presents, badger everyone else to buy it. At least I think it was her! I may be misremembering. Some point last year, said that she had read this book and it was good.

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