Book review: Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (2013)

This quiet fantasy novel is full of truly heartrending poetry like a lament for the death of a warrior of renown sung by a troubadour in the court of the scion of a long-defunct royal family, but I only got about 37 percent of the way through it before giving up. It contains a classical revanchist story that takes place in an imagined universe that is controlled by the Radchaai, a powerful people with a civilisation that has a political settlement based roughly on our own feudal system from an historical age long past.

At the apex sits the Lord of the Radch, the ruthless Anaander Mianaai, who controls the ruling families that supply the state with its leaders through a system of “clientage”, dolling out plum jobs to those who help her govern. On the planet Shis’urna the powerful Tanmind minority look down on the plebeian Orsian majority, who have their own religion with its own rites and ceremonies. The local Radch administrator is Lieutenant Awm and she is assisted in her tasks by the “ancillary” One Esk, a collection of adapted humans that have been bionically modified to enable them to function as soldiers and communicate through a number of the same consciousness instances (somewhat like avatars in the 2009 James Cameron movie of that name) via contact with the Radchaai mother ship assigned to control the colonised planet.

The second strand of the story has one instance of One Esk, 1000 years after the events that take place on Shis’urna, calling herself Breq from the Gerentate, visiting the planet Nilt in search of a gun that she wants to use to assassinate Anaander Mianaai. There, she rescues a former Radch officer named Seivarden Vendaai and goes off in search of a doctor named Strigan (who calls ancillaries “corpse soldiers”) who she thinks possesses the gun she needs to fulfil her destiny, now that she has been relinquished from Radch control. The two strands of the story alternate as Leckie builds the drama up to a level adequate to convey the importance of the matters that she wants to communicate about her imagined future, where robots and AI are intrinsically linked to Radch military pre-eminence.

But the substructure supporting the story couldn’t hold it in place for me long enough to deliver the punchline. I couldn’t see how a civilisation that relies on an old-fashioned and discredited form of political and economic settlement (we haven’t had such systems in place in the west for hundreds of years) could have enabled the development of a uniquely powerful and influential civilisation. The way that knowledge is controlled in such systems militates against the kinds of innovation required in order to achieve the kinds of technological breakthroughs you need to overcome enemies. The story of the west is a perfect example of what I’m talking about, and I wrote about exactly this a few days ago on this blog.

Without reward for individuals based on their innate talents and on the products of their imaginations, there simply would be no technological advancement. A civilisation that puts both religious and political control (and, by extension, economic control) in the hands of one person, such as Leckie’s Radch (or, in the case of Earth, China), is unlikely to advance beyond subsistence level, and would certainly not reach the level of sophistication required to defeat neighbouring civilisations in military contests. Therefore the book’s referential underpinnings fail the credibility test that I ran internally to work out whether it would be worth finishing.