You'd probably have to be living in a cave, or be paying absolutely no attention at all to the world of Science Fiction, to be unaware of Ann Leckie and her record-shattering Ancillary Justice.
Ancillary Justice won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the British Science Fiction Authors award, and heaven knows how many other awards.
There's no disputing that Ancillary Justice deserved all this acclaim. If the point of Science Fiction is to warp your world-view, to push you a bit outside of your comfort zone, to make you imagine different worlds, different ways of being, different notions of existence, then Leckie has it all.
In spades.
And she manages to make it not only mind-bending, but also very entertaining.
But somehow, it is all ... a bit ... odd?
The oddness comes at you from all directions.
Why is every character referred to as "she", even though some are male, and some are female. Or something.
Why do they all wear gloves?
What is the whole sub-plot about singing/chanting/humming?
And don't even get me started on the whole topic of whether a hive-mind artificially intelligent machine can somehow rebel against itself and spontaneously bifurcate into multiple independent consciousnesses.
Ancillary Justice is certainly interesting, but I guess I was hoping for a bit more derring-do and a bit less introspection.
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