レビュー要約

• 作品の設定や語り口に関心が向けられている。読みやすさを評価する声がある一方、公開された読者反応は限られるため、評価傾向は控えめに整理した。

レビュー

• SFの代表的な賞を総なめした、知的で読みごたえある作品

  赤道直下でも１０℃以下にしかならない氷に閉ざされた惑星で、Breqと名乗る兵士が探索の旅をしていた。個人的な復讐を遂げるために、ある物を手に入れる必要があったのだ。Breqはその途中で、道に倒れて凍え死にしかけている者を見つける。以前仕事を共にした士官のSeivardenだと気付いたBreqは、自分の目標を達成する邪魔になると知りつつも救助する。だが、SeivardenのほうはBreqに見覚えはない。 なぜなら、BreqはSeivardenが昔搭乗していた宇宙船「Justice of Toren」の「Ancillary」だったからだ。 この銀河系宇宙を支配するRadch帝国では、何千人もの兵士を移動させる大型宇宙船は人間の身体にAIを埋め込んだ改造人間のAncillaryを沢山持っている。ときに何百から何千人もいるAncillaryの個々が宇宙船の目であり手足なのである。Radchの兵士たちは、外からは人間に見えるのに感情がなくて無表情な Ancillaryたちに複雑な思いを抱いている。無理やり人格を奪われて道具にされたAncillaryたちは、命令には速やかに従うし、有能だが、不気味な存在だ。 Breqは、かつて宇宙船「Justice of Toren」そのものであり、多くのAncillaryの一部であり、One Eskと呼ばれる個体のAncillaryだった。感情を持たないはずの宇宙船であり、その付属品でしかないOne Eskが、「個人的な理由」で不可能に近い復讐を決意したのは、１９年前に惑星Shis'urnaで起きた出来事のためだった。 ヒューゴ賞とネビュラ賞のダブル受賞をする作品はけっこうあるが、『Ancillary Justice』は、それに加えて英国SF協会賞、ローカス賞、アーサー C．クラーク賞と代表的な賞を総なめした破格の存在だ。 最初のうちは何が起こっているのかよくわからないが、読み進めるうちに「これはすごい！」と思わず唸り声を出してしまう。「Mind-blowing」という表現がピッタリするほど特別なSFだ。

• 難しい

  SFではありがちですが、英語が文章としては読めても情景としては理解しにくい。 世界観やアイディアとしては面白いのですが、気持ちよく楽しむには相当の英語力や英語SFの読書経験が求められると思いました。

• Un roman de science-fiction de grande qualité

  Pas étonnant que cet ouvrage ait gagné les 3 grands prix littéraires de SF, c'est un chef-d'oeuvre. Très bien écrit, avec des personnages à la fois complexes, réalistes et attachants, et un univers très intéressant. Je l'ai acheté par hasard pour profiter de la promo du mois, et c'est ma meilleure lecture du mois.

• Justice of Toren One Esk

  Se você permitir o livro vai te conquistar. Eu adorei os diálogos nesse livro, as personagens tem muita personalidade. A personagem principal é complexa e você vai entendendo suas motivações ao longo da leitura. Conforme o livro vai intercalando entre linhas temporais você pode acabar se sentindo perdido se encarar a leitura como algo despreocupado, o livro exige atenção, mas recompensa o investimento.

• Very good science-fiction

  This book is challenging, original ideas and even if it tends to be slow-paced it keeps the interest alive because of the uniqueness of just about everything. The ending of this first installment is pretty cool.

• Highly imaginative world, great pacing and engaging story!

  An engaging and interesting saga, I'm no sci-fi fiction junkie, but this book is great, I bought the whole series. A couple caveats, it is a challenging work to read, as there is no context or synopsis to get you started in how the protagonist and world "works". So the jumping between "minds" of the AI main character is disconcerting until you get the hang of it. I suggest -very- minimal distractions while reading this series, as it really rewards uninterrupted effort. Fortunately, the chapters average 15-20 mins each so its easy to get "breaks" if you have a busy life and need a good book to fill those personal spaces. Highly recommended.

• Immersive, layered and compelling: this standout science fiction debut rewards persistence.

  Ancillary Justice, the debut novel from American author Ann Leckie, has been garnering a fair bit of buzz around the speculative fiction community over the past few months and has just been shortlisted for this year’s Philip K Dick Award. I have to admit I was at the point of giving up on it after the first few chapters – but I persevered, and I’m glad I did. The story revolves around the highly stratified Radch civilisation, which is humanoid, spacegoing and expansionary. Earth, if it ever existed, is a long gone memory and for thousands of years the Radch have been annexing worlds in brutal fashion and subsuming resident societies, much like the Roman Empire. By a curious quirk of the Radch language, everyone is referred to as ‘she’, regardless of their actual gender. That’s just one of the surprising things about this book – that it demonstrates how little gender specificity actually matters to the story. As I said, the start of the novel is fairly quiet. There’s a lot of world-building going on through the narrative. But the seemingly small events that occur in those first few chapters resonate through the rest of the book and gain in significance as we understand more about the Radch and, in particular, the quest of the key protagonist, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen who, although she looks human, is actually an ‘ancillary’, a human whose mind has been wiped and infused with the distributed consciousness of the battleship Justice of Toren’s controlling Artificial Intelligence. That consciousness simultaneously resides in the ship, in One Esk Nineteen and in the minds of thousands of other ancillaries deployed during the latest occupation of a conquered world. But the controlling consciousness is not a soulless, electronic zombie animator: ------------------------- Seven Issa frowned, and made a doubtful gesture with her left hand, awkwardly, her gloved fingers still curled around half a dozen counters. ‘Ships have feelings.’ ‘Yes, of course.’ Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It’s just easier to handle those with emotions. ‘But as I said, I took no offense.’ Seven Issa looked down at the board, and dropped the counters she held into one of its depressions. She stared at them a moment, and then looked up. ‘You hear rumors. About ships and people they like. And I swear your face never changes, but …’ I engaged my facial muscles, smiled, an expression I’d seen many times. Seven Issa flinched. ‘Don’t do that!’ she said, indignant, but hushed lest the lieutenants hear us. It wasn’t that I’d gotten the smile wrong – I knew I hadn’t. It was the sudden change from my habitual lack of expression to something more human, that some of the Seven Issas found disturbing. I dropped the smile. ‘Aatr’s tits,’ swore Seven Issa. ‘When you do that it’s like you’re possessed or something.’ --------------------- For all that One Esk Nineteen is a ‘drone’ of the ship, she does exhibit some unique characteristics: an affinity for music and gathering songs of defeated cultures and a habit of humming. So there’s a dichotomy set up about her ‘conscious’ mind and the possibility that some remnant of her original, wiped personality still exists. Among all the action, the novel riffs on the potential causes and effects of this as well as exploring the idea in other contexts, most notably in the character of the Radch leader, Anaander Mianaai, who, while not a distributed single consciousness, is a series of networked clones, hundreds or perhaps thousands of them, that exists across Radch space in order to exert consistent command and control. The potential weakness of such an arrangement is exposed in startling fashion when One Esk Nineteen is forced into a confrontation with three iterations of Mianaai that results in a cataclysmic event. I can’t say too much, but the main section of the book focuses on the fallout of that event 20 years later when One Esk Nineteen, now seemingly a singleton divorced from her ship and fellow ancillaries, meets up with a Radch lieutenant she knew 1000 years earlier: ---------------------- The instant my hand touched her shoulder, the red glass shattered, sharp-edged fragments flying out and away, glittering briefly. Seivarden closed her eyes, ducked her head, face into my neck, held me tight enough that if I hadn’t been armored my breathing would have been impeded. Because of the armor I couldn’t feel her panicked breath on my skin, couldn’t feel the air rushing past, though I could hear it. But she didn’t extend her own armor. If I had been more than just myself, if I had had the numbers I needed, I could have calculated our terminal velocity, and just how long it would take to reach it. Gravity was easy, but the drag of my pack and our heavy coats whipping up around us, affecting our speed, was beyond me. It would have been much easier to calculate in a vacuum, but we weren’t falling in a vacuum. But the difference between fifty metres a second and 150 was, at that moment, only large in the abstract. I couldn’t see the bottom yet, the target I was hoping to hit was small, and I didn’t know how much time we’d have to adjust our attitude, if we even could. For the next twenty or forty seconds we had nothing to do but wait, and fall. ‘Armor!’ I shouted into Seivarden’s ear. ‘Sold it,’ she answered. Her voice shook slightly, straining against the rushing air. Her face was still pressed hard against my neck. ------------------------ The world of Ancillary Justice is immersive, layered and compelling, and as a result we understand so much about the framework in which actions occur, it makes for fascinating contemplation about the ramifications of those actions. I was reminded of Iain M Banks’s Culture novels while reading Ancillary Justice. Leckie doesn’t have Banks’s playfully black sense of humour or overtly political sensibility but she certainly knows how to make you believe in her world. We all love those books we come across once in a while that give us a thrill every time we return to the world of the story. Ancillary Justice is one such book and though it’s early days for 2014, it will take quite a bit to knock it off the top of my list of standout reads this year.

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