Ann Leckie‘s Ancillary Trilogy is among the most imaginative science fiction debuts you will find. They are very much of the genre, so if spaceships and alien cultures aren’t your thing, you should probably pass on this one.
But, if they are, it’s well worth the ride. The ingenuity centers around her conception of a spaceship as a hive mind spread across many, many bodies: our hero, Breq, (it is possible that all of the characters in Ancillary Justice are female; at a minimum, the overwhelming majority of them are–warning, here be subtext) used to be a spaceship called The Justice of Toren. When she was a spaceship, she was both the ship itself (with massive computing power at her disposal) and several dozen of its crew, whose bodies could be anywhere on or off the ship.
Leckie does a fantastic job communicating the range of perception and intentionality this requires: there are chapters where you are reading several scenes simultaneously, all being combined into the overall perspective the ship itself.
I did say used to above: the plot of the book hinges on Breq having been dislocated from being a ship, her consciousness stuffed into a single, vulnerable and all-too-easily damaged, human body.
The trilogy unfolds somewhere in a triangle formed from space opera, political thriller, and social commentary, and Leckie balances them all quite well. If that sounds interesting, these are strongly recommended.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Two things: first, the creativity in the simultaneous perception scenes is really fantastic, and struck me as solving (not in the only way, but in one reasonable way) an age-old problem in the genre. Second, Leckie is fearless in her culture creation. I could never name a race the Rrrrrrrrrr, as she does, without forcing myself into contortions to explain the linguistics behind it, which she most definitely does not. I think her way is more courageous and even, perhaps, better.
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