Ancillary Justice

The narrator used to be a warship. In Leckie’s empire, ship intelligences run many human bodies at once as “ancillaries,” one mind distributed across them — and the book opens with a single body left of what used to be a troop carrier, working out who destroyed the rest. It won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the distributed-mind premise is the whole engine: what survives when a system loses most of its instances but keeps its state.

Context: B tier, “also worth reading,” volume one of the Imperial Radch trilogy. a16z compare it to Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels — local stories folded into a sweeping saga — and note Leckie’s choice to call every character “she” regardless of gender.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Ann Leckie — the author.
• Ancillary Sword · Ancillary Mercy — volumes two and three.
• Identity — what the ancillary premise is actually about.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.