On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.
Once, she was the Justice of Toren—a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.
Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.
J’ai eu du mal à me mettre dedans, les règles grammaticales sur le genre étant non seulement confusante mais désagréable (j’ai eu l’occasion de lire un livre où tout était genré au féminin « elle pleut », « la bébé », mais ce n’est pas pareil). Après quelques chapitres (et ayant appris que la version originale était aussi « perturbante » et que ce n’était pas une aberration de traduction), j’ai enfin profité du livre. Une histoire complexe et très bien ficelée, originale, que j’ai trouvé très rafraîchissante.
Amazing exploration of transhuman and alien themes
5 étoiles
Leckie's novel explores so many different worlds and how the worlds see each other that it provides interesting insights into what makes something alien. The transhumanist space ship AI as a first-person character also asks questions about what it means to be alive. One of the central themes of a society with a genderless pronoun also forces the reader to consider if gender matters in this future world, while also examining why certain characters are expected to have a specified gender.
2021-07-05: 2nd reading: absolutely loved this book. Maybe because I've already read the series and that made it far less confusing this time, or I was just in the right mood this time. For whatever reason, really enjoyed this book.
What a slow burner this book is. By the time you realize how really really good it is, you're more than halfway done, so it definitely requires patience.
The first-person narrator is Breq, who felt a bit like a prototype for our beloved Murderbot from the Martha Wells series. Breq is an ancillary, a human body controlled by the AI of a ship, in this case the Justice of Toren. Only Breq's ship no longer exists, so instead of having hundreds of bodies and eyes and all that comes with being the body of a ship, there's just her, on her mission to kill the Lord of the Radch, the leader of the Empire of Radch.
Along the way she gets stuck with Seivarden, one of her former officers who's struggling with substance abuse after waking up a 1000 years after her ship was destroyed.
In order to understand this …
What a slow burner this book is. By the time you realize how really really good it is, you're more than halfway done, so it definitely requires patience.
The first-person narrator is Breq, who felt a bit like a prototype for our beloved Murderbot from the Martha Wells series. Breq is an ancillary, a human body controlled by the AI of a ship, in this case the Justice of Toren. Only Breq's ship no longer exists, so instead of having hundreds of bodies and eyes and all that comes with being the body of a ship, there's just her, on her mission to kill the Lord of the Radch, the leader of the Empire of Radch.
Along the way she gets stuck with Seivarden, one of her former officers who's struggling with substance abuse after waking up a 1000 years after her ship was destroyed.
In order to understand this much of the plot, you have to be like 40% into this book because you get tossed right in, with lots of flashbacks to Breq's previous life. Nothing makes sense! And what's with the gender stuff, generic feminine gender in an English language book, what gives? And it takes a while to settle in how brilliant that is. The Radch have no concept of gender and so always use the feminine, and after a while you really stop asking yourself what gender the characters in the book really have. Does it really matter if Seivarden or Anaander Mianaai are male or female? It totally doesn't.
When things get rolling, you're totally glued to this book, or rather, I was. I want to learn more about the Radch, all the backstory, and I definitely want to see how Breq or rather One Esk, will go on when she's back on a ship, but one that's not herself.
The key twist in this fun sci-fi novel is that the narrator is a single AI operating as a person, but also simultaneously a ship and ancillary parts. This allows the author to give us a god-like perspective while also keeping the narrator just relatable enough to empathize with. It's a great way to play with perspective and it's well-played throughout the novel. Recommended.
