Ancillary Justice

[sawyl]

When I read Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice last year failed to write it up, largely because I wasn't sure I would be able to do right by it. But having re-read it immediately after reading the second of Leckie's Imperial Radch novels, I feel in a position to offer a few tentative opinions on a complex and thought-provoking book. One thing I'm not tentative about, however, is the book's success; but having picked up a Golden Tentacle, a Nebula, a BSFA award, a Clarke, a Hugo, and Locus best first novel award, its achievements are well beyond doubt.

The narrative structure of the first part of the book is split into alternating strands separated by many years and by great distances. The first follows Breq, a lone traveller on the arctic backwater planet of Nilt, as she searches for a mysterious item that she believes lies in the hands of an off-world doctor called Arilesperas Strigan. The second, narrated by the troop carrier Justice of Toren, is set in the city of Ors in the aftermath of the annexation of Shis'urna twenty years earlier, with events unfolding both from the omniscient point of view of the warship's AI and from the more person view of One Esk, one of its platoons of ancillary troops — humans whose self-consciousness has been suppressed and replaced with that of the AI via a combination of surgery and communications technology. Commenting on this in various afterwords, Leckie makes the point that the bodies used to provide ancillaries aren't corpses because a functioning nervous system is required, as is painfully apparent when Justice of Toren's medic rather brutally reintegrates a new unit into the ship's force, and this is a large part of what makes the process so morally dubious: that those who struggle against the Radch are forcibly co-opted into become soldiers of the very thing they've been trying to fight.

Towards the start of her quest on Nilt, Breq stumbles across a person lying in a snowdrift. Recognising her as Seivarden Vendaai, an arrogant office she'd served with many years before now fallen into drug addition after a millenium in suspension, Breq decides, against her better judgement, to patch her up, put her through cold turkey, and to bring her along on the search. Breq's relationship with Seivarden is interestingly ambiguous. She freely admits that she didn't like the former Lieutenant when they first worked together and used subtle pressure to encourage her to transfer to a different ship. But alone in a way that she has never been before, she has finally found someone connected with her past experience and is unwilling to cast that aside. There is also something to be said for Seivardan's own transformation from an entitled member of a powerful family through someone with no money and suicidal drug problem, to someone who has, by degrees, become a much better person.

Through Seivarden's presence, Breq is prompted to meditate on the pivotal events that took place during the annexation of Garsedd a thousand years before: with Anaander Mianaai, the Lord of the Radch, prepared to accept the surrender, the Garseddai electors, backed by the alien Presger, had staged a counter attack during which Seivarden's ship, Sword of Nathtas was destroyed. Furious at the turn events and disturbed by the Garseddai ability to strike back against the technologically superior Radch, Anaander Mianaai ordered the complete destruction of Garsedd and its people. This in turn provoked a slow change in central policy, against the use of ancillaries and against continuous expansion as a means of economic growth.

The most obvious reading of annexation is that of European colonialism, with the process of creating ancillaries viewed as a stand-in for slavery. Certainly the European enlightenment economies were heavily fuelled by slave labour and the use of military power to usurp resources and to create colonial administrations, while the idea of military adventurism as a means to improving social standing — which explains why some of the Radchaai houses oppose Anaander Mianaai's change of policy — is a favourite trope of historical fiction. It's also telling that the word radchaai, in its original language, means civilised, immediately marking all other polities as uncivilised by definition.

In contrast to events in Garsedd the annexation of Shis'urna, five years before the start of Justice of Toren's account, has been relatively smooth with little need for object lessons following the initial takeover by the Radchaai. Lieutenant Awn Elming, assigned to the City of Ors, has won the trust of the locals and the friendship of her neighbour — and social superior — Lieutenant Skaaiat Awer. Both are slightly concerned with recent events in the Radch — particularly the disturbing news the corrupt governor in the Ime System has been selling bodies for use as ancillaries and that the military office who discovered this has been execute for disobeying orders despite doing a valuable service to the Radch as a whole — but fail to view it as a concrete problem connected with their current situation.

The events in Ime explain a great deal both about how the Radchaai operate, not least by showing that mutiny is always punishable by death regardless of the consequence, but also because it sheds light on the way the it deals with its neighbours. Having signed a treaty with the dangerous and unpredictable Presger following the events of Garsedd, humanity is now constrained to treat any other alien species the Presger consider Significant with respect and to refrain from attacking them; this allowed the human troops of Mercy of Sarrse to request asylum with the Rrrrrr in the aftermath of their exposure of the governor's corruption, and for One Amaat One, the leader of the mutiny, to negotiate her own return to the Radch in exchange for an amnesty for her fellows.

When Awn is approached by a group of local fisherfolk who have discovered a cache of weapons hidden in the delta, she has Justice of Toren carry out a discreet check on the serial numbers. This confirms that weapons were seized early in the occupation and marked as destroyed, and the fact that they continue to exist indicates collusion high up in the Radch. Coupled with some dark hints from the members of the Tanmind, Shis'urna's former ruling class, that they believe they are being treated unfairly and that the Radchaai aptitude tests have been tweaked to favour the lower classes from Ors, Awn begins to suspect that she two may have uncovered a nasty case of corruption. So she is relieved when an instance of Anaander Mianaai arrives in Ors and attempts to lay her information before the Lord of the Radch, only to be casually rebuffed. Events quickly spiral out of control on Ors and, after a traumatic attack that involves the use of sophisticated technology to disrupt Justice of Toren's communication links with and within its One Esk cohort, Awn is recalled from the planet and the carrier is ordered to depart for Valskaay.

For all that Justice of Toren, Awn, and the local inhabitants of Ors make frequent mention of just how brutal the Radchaai are during annexation and how they favour the use of object lessons — summary executions or the appropriation of bodies for use as ancillaries at some point in the future — the events following Anaander Mianaai's arrival are the first time this becomes explicit. What makes the events at the temple particularly devastating is the way it denies the central Radchaai principle of citizenship: the previous killings had occurred as part of the process of annexation — invasion — and, by definition, involved the deaths of non-citizens; whereas the later deaths occur five years after annexation where the people of Ors and Tanmind, for all the dismissive attitudes of the entitled and aristocratic officers, are full citizens with all the rights, entitlements and protections this entails. This undermines the central concept of Radchaai society, for if the protections of citizenship can be so easily ignored, what protection does anyone have when faced with the disapproval of their ruler — something that can easily be read as a comment on tendency of governments everywhere, sometimes with the best of intentions, to renege on the duties they owe to particular citizens in order to achieve something for the majority or, in the more cynical cases, to achieve a political goal.

The use of the communications disruption technology indicates that for all that the various bodies that make up One Esk share a group consciousness with each other and Justice of Toren, they are still able to act separately and to take concerted action to address threats. This makes sense because Anaander Mianaai, whose self shares a similar structure albeit distributed over thousands of bodies and many disconnected systems, must have to rely on some method of operating partially separated from the more distant aspects of herself. It may also be telling that, having lost a unit in the disorder that follows the loss of communication, the body revived aboard Justice of Toren as a replacement for One Esk Nineteen did not directly participate in events on the planet and this may be why Justice of Toren selects it for its special role — discussing the book with Liz Bourke, Leckie explicitly says that Nineteen was picked despite being the closest to the hold.

Events come to a head aboard the troop carrier during the transit to Valskaay. With the warship is isolated in its own bubble of space and Anaander Mianaai hidden aboard on a mothballed deck, both Justice of Toren and Lieutenant Awn find themselves grilled on their behaviour and political views. Using conversations overhead by One Esk, the Lord of the Radch comes to believe that Awn and Skaaiat are acting against her, despite Awn's repeated assertions that she is both local to her lord and completely apolitical. But it gradually becomes clear from Justice of Toren's memories and behaviours that Anaander Mianaai may be in divided about what constitutes her own interests and who is for her and who is against — and, indeed what it may mean for someone to be for or against her.

This section forms the crux of the book, finally explaining who Breq is — the what is obvious from the earliest stages, but the who takes quite some time time develop — and how she links back to Lieutenant Awn and Shis'urna. It is also where Anaander Mianaai, or a part of her, gets to explain Lieutenant Awn's great mistake in Ors: as a member of the lower orders herself — one of the other officers aboard Justice of Toren casually dismisses Awn as the child of a pair of cooks — she has cultivated the poorer people of Ors at the expense of co-opting the former ruling Tanminds and absorbing them into the Radchaai, as has been done in other annexations from time immemorial; and worse still, she has been seen to make her policy work, further aggravating both the Tanmind on Shis'urna and conservative forces within the Radchaai.

At this point the two stories merge with Breq and Seivarden arriving at the station that makes up Omaugh Palace, where Breq has a vague plan to confront Anaander Mianaai with the evidence of her role in Lieutenant Awn's death. Posing as a rich traveller from the Gerentate, Breq finds herself invited to tea by Captain Vel Osck of Mercy of Kalr, who is really only interested in Breq as a way to talk to Seivarden whom the captain expects will be sympathetic to her conservative viewpoint. But Breq also finds a more sympathetic and familiar contact in the form of Skaaiat Awer, now working as docking inspector supervisor, causing her to worry that her unconscious tells and reactions may reveal her true identity either to Skaaiat or, through the omniscient Station AI, to the watching Anaander Mianaai. When Breq finally reveals herself and confronts the Lord of the Radch, she does so in a way that prevents Anaander Mianaai from denying her own split sense of self, forcing a schism in her personality and leading to an outbreak of civil war within the station.

Much of the delight of the last section is that it's the first time we get to see Breq interacting with others in a fully Radchaai environment. Acutely aware, as almost no-one every truly can be, of the all-knowledge of the Station AI, she constantly tries to guard herself against mistakes that might reveal her true identity whilst also trying to navigate a society she knows intimately but from which she has always been kept slightly separate. This idea of separateness echoes the end of the first chapter, where she claims not to be human, and gets carried forward to the end of the book where she continues to deny, despite the Lord of the Radch's insistance to the contrary in both word and deed, her humanity.

Radchaai society, or at least the more aristocratic parts of it, are subtle and snobbish, where arriving too early for tea can be a faux pas, or an invitation delivered by a proxy can, depending on the status of the proxy, be part of a carefully graded insult. The chattering aristocrats surrounding Vel Osck, a cousin of the last captain of Justice of Toren, are conservative and sneering, complaining that the aptitudes are not truly meritocratic because they allow the lower orders to get above themselves — something that mirrors the Tanmind complaints to perfectly that it leaves no doubt that the same person coached each group in what to say — and that the cessation of the previous process of endless annexations has left them without a way to demonstrate their ambition.