Over the next five months, I’m reading and reviewing ten pioneering works of science fiction written by women. This is my seventh pick. Stay tuned for more.
Ancillary Justice is a space opera set during the tail end of the Radchaai empire’s heyday. The empire is a human civilization driven by ruthlessly colonizing new worlds, a process overseen by a fleet of artificially intelligent warships. These ships are crewed by ancillaries — human bodies whose occupant has been taken over by the ships’ AI, distributing the ship’s intelligence over thousands of bodies. The book begins in the midst of a transformation of the empire to a more egalitarian society, one in which both the use of human bodies as ancillaries and colonial annexation itself have fallen out of favor.
The main character and narrator is a former ancillary disconnected from her destroyed ship, who goes by the pseudonym Breq. Although Breq has memories of being a part of her ship’s interconnected AI, she is now human. Breq witnesses unjust actions perpetrated by the head of Radchaai society — the artificial intelligence Anaander Mianaai — and vows to exact revenge upon the AI. In the course of her quest, Breq discovers that the AI Anaander Mianaai is at war with herself. Anaander Mianaii’s personality and ancillaries have split irrevocably, with one faction promoting a more egalitarian society and one faction advocating for the status quo. Anaander Mianaai hides this fact from herself by editing her own memories, hoping to maintain peace throughout the Radchaai empire by shielding her internal war from her subjects.
In my discussion of Ancillary Justice, I have used female pronouns to refer to the novel’s characters, although they are a mix of genders. Gender exists in Radchaii society and in their colonies, but the designation male/female/other makes no marked difference in the behavior of the characters. Exterior markers indicating gender also exist, and most humans easily recognize them. However, these exterior markers vary so widely that the Breq defaults to the pronoun “she” due to her confusion about and exasperation with the concept of gender as a former AI.
The use of “she” as the default pronoun embeds the reader in a world where gender is no more of a character-defining trait than eye color. Frequently, gender is revealed through Breq’s interactions with others. Even so, I don’t recall the gender of a single character just a few weeks after finishing the novel. In our society, the administration of empire is still a traditionally male task, so if the author had chosen the pronoun “he” or even “they” as default, the narrator’s occasional gender revelations would have felt emphasized in a manner incongruous with the Radchaii ethos. “She” as the default effectively balances our own cultural baggage.
Although it was clear from the start of the novel that “she” was only a stand-in for an unknown gender, as a reader I pictured every character as female throughout the work. This also drove home the fact that any choice of a default pronoun — traditionally “he” in our society — conjures up an image of a person of that gender, even if ostensibly viewed as a gender-neutral default. As a female science fiction reader, this was a unique and delightfully relaxing experience. I’m used to an over-representation of men in the far future and to a bevy of outmoded tropes getting in the way of my enjoyment. In Ancillary Justice, I saw a future full of complicated humans who just happened to be of my gender, at least until proven otherwise. This tactic led me to identify more strongly with the novel’s characters than I would have in yet another “imaginative” future with the same tired gender norms of the present.