Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is one of the best presentations of difference in character and difference in language of any book I know of. It’s not for nothing that it won all those awards. It provides a lot of those delicious moments when you’ve been inside the protagonist’s head and language for a while and you’re used to it, and then another character appears and reacts to them, and you can suddenly see them from the outside, and know them for a minute as they don’t even know themselves.
Also worthy of mention is the extraordinary crisis at the center of the political events of the novel, which I won’t spoil — but it’s fantastic, and it’s exactly the thing I love about sci-fi, the way this technology we don’t have yet and haven’t thought through yet can have problems that are just as totally outlandish and impossible as the technology itself; and yet they’re the same human problems we’ve always had. It’s, at the same time, a meditation on impossible, bizarre things and on those things that are closest to our own humanity.
I almost feel like this is a retelling of some era of Roman history. It feels very, very Roman, right down to the inclusion of a strange, newly-popular monotheistic cult, the sharp divide between slaves and citizens and the mysterious barbarians who somehow can destroy you even though you know you’re better, you just know it.
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