I am counting this book for the Citizen category in the CBR17 Bingo Reading Challenge. The central antagonist of this novel is an empire known as the Radch. The inhabitants of the Radch are known as Radchaii, which translates to either “civilized” or “citizen.” The Radch is benevolent and giving to its citizens, but brutal and violent to outsiders. One of the central themes of the books centers on how people justify atrocities by dehumanizing those they hurt, and how the concept of “citizens” or “civilized people” creates an outgroup of “non-citizens” or “non-civilized people” who can be disposed of without remorse. Also, a turning point for one character occurs when she is granted citizenship in the Radch.
The viewpoint character of this book is Breq, formerly Justice of Toren. Breq is an ancillary: a human body whose consciousness has been erased and who is now one of many vessels for the distributed consciousness of a spaceship’s artificial intelligence. Breq’s ship, Justice of Toren, has been destroyed, along with all of its other ancillaries. Breq struggles with the limitation of having a human body, or rather, having only one human body rather than hundreds, but she won’t let that deter her from her ultimate goal: to assassinate the one responsible for destroying her ship.
This book took me a couple tries to get into. The writing is sometimes dense and hard to folloow. Because the Radchaii have no cultural or linguistic concept of gender roles, Breq refers to everybody with female pronouns, which felt gimmicky and confusing at first. The first time I picked up the book, I gave up after one chapter. On my second reading though, I found that as I pushed through the first few chapters, I got used to Leckie’s writing style and started to really enjoy the story. I love a good meditation on what makes someone a person, and Breq’s character, as a spaceship-turned-army-turned-human, provides plenty of food for thought in that direction. There’s also some great action sequences and quippy dialogue, if you’re into that. I’m looking forward to reading more from Leckie.