Ancillary Justice

 
 
Ancillary Justice

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2013 

 

 

 Ancillary Justice is a space opera about someone who once served an empire seeking revenge against it for the war crimes she was ordered to commit. It's a book that's very clearly responding to some earlier works, and that was obviously influential enough that several more recent books are responding to it. Crimes of military conquest and revenge for them drive the plot of Justice; the worldbuilding focuses on the many sources of status inequality related to ancestry, on the cultural power of empire, and on what it might look like to truly do without gender and gender-based sexuality in a context that is otherwise still very unequal.

 

Ancillary Justice is narrated in the first-person by Breq. In the novel's present day, Breq is a lone woman on a mission of revenge, but in the past, in the flashbacks that take up at least a third of the book, Breq was both the giant troop carrier ship Justice of Torren, and more specifically, the twenty-troop unit One Esk. Even more more specifically, Breq's body was One Esk Nineteen, though that doesn't matter, because the twenty-troop unit is the smallest subdivision of the spaceship's mind that has any degree of individuality whatsoever. 

 

Breq is a former ancillary soldier, one of the shock troops of the Radchaai empire. Ancillaries are AI minds in human bodies. The ship and all its ancillaries function as a single mind; Breq is separated now because the ship Justice of Torren was destroyed, and all the other bodies dead. Breq retains absolutely none of her memories or personality from before she was made an ancillary. Her mission of revenge is about the incident that destroyed her ship-body and her other ancillary soldier-bodies. Her mind and personality now are the same as the ship's were, just with less processing power.

 

Ancillaries are a bit like Borg drones from Star Trek, the troop carriers a bit like Borg cubes. They're not quite the same, Breq is no Seven of Nine, but for sure, the Borg are one of the earlier ideas Ann Leckie is engaging with. 

 

The two other most prominent touchpoints, I think, are Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and the Battlestar Galactica remake tv series, both of which attempt to explore war and empire in a context without gender inequality. LeGuin wrote Darkness about people who are genderless - and who indeed have no biological sex at all except when they're reproducing, and the same person can father one child and mother another. LeGuin used he/him pronouns to refer to all the characters in that book, and I suspect that some less-careful readers may have missed that they're not really supposed to be men. 

 

The Radchaai have the same range of biological sex characteristics that we do, but they have no concept for gender and make no gendered distinctions among themselves. Reversing LeGuin's choice, Leckie has Breq refer to everyone as she/her. It's a choice that makes Radchaai gender unmissable. It also dates the book, already, because I'm fairly sure that if Leckie were writing it for the first time today, she'd refer to the Radchaai using they/them. (Fairly sure, but not completely certain, because it's certainly a provocative and attention-getting artistic decision.) It's a reminder of both how recently and how successfully the current ideas of nonbinary gender and singular-they pronouns have gained mainstream recognition to describe ways of being that, even ten years ago, were harder to talk about. Not because no language for it existed, but because the words were less widely known, more specialized. For decades, some people called themselves genderqueer or used ze/hir or e/eir pronouns - some people still do! - but not as many as now call themselves nonbinary or use they. The new language is more accessible, maybe, or resonates with more people's sense of self, perhaps.

 

Anyway, Leckie writes the Radchaai not as lacking characteristics that we would think of as gender-markers, but as mixing and matching them according personal preference rather than societal norm, so that most of them would look queer to us, and to non-Radchaai people. Breq starts the present day portion of the book on a non-imperial winter planet, where the locals have binary gender, and she struggles to use that part of their language correctly. The flashbacks, to before Justice of Torren died, when Breq was still a starship and an army, take place on a recently annexed swamp world, where the locals are still reluctant to give up their own culture to become Radchaai, and are divided by a racial caste system.

 

I'm pretty sure that Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire is responding to Ancillary Justice. The Teixcalaanli empire seems to build on some ideas from the Radchaai empire, though Martine focuses even more on language than Leckie does. But a few times, Leckie comments on the way that in the Radchaai language, the same word means 'a citizen of the Radch' and 'a civilized person', that they have no way, in their native tongue, to conceptualize people who are civilized, but not part of their civilization. Martine builds on that, and shows us the empire from the perspective of an about-to-be-conquered person, not a regretful former-conqueror. Martha Wells's popular Murderbot novellas also strike me as possibly being about a character who's like Breq, but who is truly portrayed as genderless because Wells doesn't use 'she' instead of 'they' or 'it'.

 

In the present-day, on the winter planet, Breq finds a recently-revived participant in a planet-wide civilian massacre from a thousand years earlier. Breq drags her along on the errand that brought her to the planet - trying to find an alien weapon, a gun that can penetrate Radchaai forcefields. 

 

In the flashbacks that alternate every-other chapter, we watch as the ancillary bodies of One Esk serve a Radchaai lieutenant who is trying to prevent a local leader from fomenting a racist lynch mob of upper caste conquered peoples to attack members of the lower caste. The lieutenant succeeds, but then she and One Esk are ordered to massacre a hundred members of the upper caste, and later, just before Justice of Torren is destroyed, One Esk is ordered to execute the lieutenant.

 

In Leckie's telling, war crimes, the execution of innocents and civilians, are catalysts of social and political change. They are moments that shock of the conscience, even of experienced soldiers, moments that force them to decide if they are most loyal to their empire or to the ideals they think their empire represents, when the two suddenly come in conflict. Leckie's soldiers almost always follow their orders, but then regret it, and try to make amends, and make things different afterward. We learn of countless reforms to the Radch in the thousand years since the planetary genocide, and Breq is set on her path of revenge because she regrets and resents the final killings she committed before almost all of her was destroyed.

 

Once Breq has her alien gun, and we've fully learned why she wants to use it, the final third of the book takes us to a Radchaai space station, to confront the person who gave the orders, the Radchaai emperor, Anander Minanaai. Like the spaceships and ancillary soldiers, Minanaai is one mind in many bodies. Except that, just like Justice of Torren both is and is not quite the same as One Esk, Minanaai is not quite one unified mind. Parts of her support reform, parts oppose it, and every part with a secret agenda wants to keep her whole self from consciously acknowledging the split. She's even willing to kill an entire starship, or an entire space station, to keep that acknowledgment from spreading from one part of her to the rest. Guys will literally blow up a planet rather than go to therapy, amiright? Anander Minanaai has the same problem as King Gnuff, her mind is simply too physically large, the distances her thoughts have to travel too great, for her to maintain a fully unified, singular self.

 

Ancillary Justice is the first book of a trilogy. I read it when it first came out and loved it then, but at the time I never followed up with the two sequels, I think because of how busy my life was at the time. On my first read, I also think I failed to fully understand some things about Breq and Anander Minanaai that are more clear to me now. Back then, I didn't get that the whole of One Esk was a single mind, without any more granular individuality attached to any of the ancillary bodies. Also, the most conservative, revanchist part of Minanaai's mind accuses the most liberal, reformist part of being sabotaged by aliens. On my first read I thought this was true, but this time I think it's a lie, a self-delusion, and an excuse that justifies the killings she orders in her attempts to roll back the reforms. In the next book, I think that all of Minanaai will have learned the truth about the split within herself, and her internal conflict will probably erupt into a civil war across the Radch.