On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.
Once, she was the Justice of Toren—a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.
Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.
J’ai eu du mal à me mettre dedans, les règles grammaticales sur le genre étant non seulement confusante mais désagréable (j’ai eu l’occasion de lire un livre où tout était genré au féminin « elle pleut », « la bébé », mais ce n’est pas pareil). Après quelques chapitres (et ayant appris que la version originale était aussi « perturbante » et que ce n’était pas une aberration de traduction), j’ai enfin profité du livre. Une histoire complexe et très bien ficelée, originale, que j’ai trouvé très rafraîchissante.
La narratrice est une IA de vaisseau spatial qui se retrouve dans un corps humain. Elle poursuit un but personnel bien précis dans un immense empire implacable, dont le caractère totalitaire atteint des proportions difficilement égalables.
J’étais réticent à lire un space opera de plus, mais réduire La justice de l’ancillaire au fait qu’on y voyage dans l’espace serait comme réduire Les Dépossédés d’Ursula Le Guin au fait qu’on y parle de physique fondaamentale. Le livre est prenant dès les premières pages, bien écrit, et c’est un immense plaisir de voir se développer l’aventure humaine (si on peut dire) que vivent les protagonistes. Il y a également un fond philosophique solide et passionnant sur les IA conscientes (ma petite obsession personnelle), les régimes impérialistes et le sens de l’action individuelle dans une société tyrannique.
Amazing exploration of transhuman and alien themes
5 stars
Leckie's novel explores so many different worlds and how the worlds see each other that it provides interesting insights into what makes something alien. The transhumanist space ship AI as a first-person character also asks questions about what it means to be alive. One of the central themes of a society with a genderless pronoun also forces the reader to consider if gender matters in this future world, while also examining why certain characters are expected to have a specified gender.
2021-07-05: 2nd reading: absolutely loved this book. Maybe because I've already read the series and that made it far less confusing this time, or I was just in the right mood this time. For whatever reason, really enjoyed this book.
What a slow burner this book is. By the time you realize how really really good it is, you're more than halfway done, so it definitely requires patience.
The first-person narrator is Breq, who felt a bit like a prototype for our beloved Murderbot from the Martha Wells series. Breq is an ancillary, a human body controlled by the AI of a ship, in this case the Justice of Toren. Only Breq's ship no longer exists, so instead of having hundreds of bodies and eyes and all that comes with being the body of a ship, there's just her, on her mission to kill the Lord of the Radch, the leader of the Empire of Radch.
Along the way she gets stuck with Seivarden, one of her former officers who's struggling with substance abuse after waking up a 1000 years after her ship was destroyed.
In order to understand this …
What a slow burner this book is. By the time you realize how really really good it is, you're more than halfway done, so it definitely requires patience.
The first-person narrator is Breq, who felt a bit like a prototype for our beloved Murderbot from the Martha Wells series. Breq is an ancillary, a human body controlled by the AI of a ship, in this case the Justice of Toren. Only Breq's ship no longer exists, so instead of having hundreds of bodies and eyes and all that comes with being the body of a ship, there's just her, on her mission to kill the Lord of the Radch, the leader of the Empire of Radch.
Along the way she gets stuck with Seivarden, one of her former officers who's struggling with substance abuse after waking up a 1000 years after her ship was destroyed.
In order to understand this much of the plot, you have to be like 40% into this book because you get tossed right in, with lots of flashbacks to Breq's previous life. Nothing makes sense! And what's with the gender stuff, generic feminine gender in an English language book, what gives? And it takes a while to settle in how brilliant that is. The Radch have no concept of gender and so always use the feminine, and after a while you really stop asking yourself what gender the characters in the book really have. Does it really matter if Seivarden or Anaander Mianaai are male or female? It totally doesn't.
When things get rolling, you're totally glued to this book, or rather, I was. I want to learn more about the Radch, all the backstory, and I definitely want to see how Breq or rather One Esk, will go on when she's back on a ship, but one that's not herself.
Wow. This is the first real world-building scifi I've read in a while that wasn't a continuation of an existing world, so the first few chapters were a bit of a wade as it set the scene. Then the book took off and I couldn't put it down.
A lot's been made of the way Leckie handles gender, and it is an interesting detail. Personally, I also really appreciated a related part of this world: that languages are hard. So much scifi waves away all language problems with some kind of magic translator, but in this book it's repeatedly made clear that characters have to invest time and effort into learning each others' languages, those who haven't put in the effort simply can't communicate, and those who have routinetly find some things easier to say in some languages than others. It's one of those details that helped make a world …
Wow. This is the first real world-building scifi I've read in a while that wasn't a continuation of an existing world, so the first few chapters were a bit of a wade as it set the scene. Then the book took off and I couldn't put it down.
A lot's been made of the way Leckie handles gender, and it is an interesting detail. Personally, I also really appreciated a related part of this world: that languages are hard. So much scifi waves away all language problems with some kind of magic translator, but in this book it's repeatedly made clear that characters have to invest time and effort into learning each others' languages, those who haven't put in the effort simply can't communicate, and those who have routinetly find some things easier to say in some languages than others. It's one of those details that helped make a world in which there's a lot of almost-invincible tech and so on feel that much more real.
