Additionally, Leckie doesn’t often deign to describe her characters in a way that makes their sex or gender clear. This is an artifact of the Rad’chaai language that Breq speaks, for it has eliminated the idea of gendered pronouns, and Breq in fact has trouble telling the difference between sexes during her travels. Regardless of actual sex or gender, everyone is "her" and "she". Breq uses the feminine third-person gender pronouns exclusively when referring to other people.
Almost immediately, however, there are some unique qualities that make it more interesting. Slowly, it becomes possible to form at least an inkling of what it must be like to have access to so many different perspectives of the same event, all at once.īreq’s adventure is easier to follow, because on the surface it feels like a traditional narrative. But it’s about as close to simultaneity as one can get in a linear medium like a novel. At first, this can be confusing, even overwhelming. She switches between these viewpoints without any overt markers to signal the changes.
In the latter events, Leckie undertakes the task of presenting the multiple, simultaneous viewpoints available to Justice of Toren. Its target: no other than the most powerful person in the entire Radch, an interstellar empire Justice of Toren was once sworn to protect and expand.įor the majority of the book, Leckie alternates between Breq’s present-day adventure and a re-telling of the events leading up to the Justice of Toren’s destruction. Reduced, through grave misfortune, to a single ancillary-a no-longer-human body, one of thousands, used an avatar for the ship’s AI-it takes on the name of Breq and sets off on a quest for revenge. But it’s exactly what Ann Leckie asks of us in Ancillary Justice, a book about a person who was once and is still but isn’t any more a ship, Justice of Toren. Now try imagining being two people in two places at once. Can you imagine being in two places at once? It’s a common image to conjure, but actually imagine it.
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