Ancillary Justice

This book was utterly fantastic. It required a lot of me as a reader. Between the shifting timelines, the multi-threading of the narrator's perspective, and the gender gymnastics, I really had to pay close attention. But the story itself, one of vengeance and justice, was totally worth it.

 I think reading Poldark helped me a lot in parsing this book. Graham writes party scenes that require the reader to follow and untangle two or three simultaneous conversations. It was hard in the first book, but now I've gotten used to it and am much better at tracking who's talking to whom. In this book, the main character is an artificial intelligence construct filtering inputs from multiple sensors at once. She's a ship and each individual component of that ship. The author demonstrates this by throwing everything at the reader at once. It takes some work to keep everything straight, but it makes for a really engrossing and unique reading experience. Not to mention that it was a good brain exercise.

The take on gender was interesting, too. The narrator comes from a society that doesn't recognize gender linguistically. Everyone is she. But other societies and languages do recognize gender (and there is obviously a difference between men and women). But making everyone "she" by default creates a fascinating sense of equality in the world. And keeping track of whether a given character is male or female is a fun bonus puzzle. The narrator couldn't care less and so is no help at all. And eventually you realize that you don't care either. It doesn't actually affect the story. Which is both fun and fascinating.