Infofiche

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is another one of those books about imperialism and language in the same vein as A Memory Called Empire. Told from the perspective of Breq, currently residing in one of the ancillaries - human peripherals - of a spaceship-consciousness called Justice of Toren who is also herself. Breq used to have thousands of bodies, and now she is down to her last. Combine that with deciding to save the life of a lost-in-time drug addict and a revenge mission and you have a brilliant novel. Join me below the fold as I examine Leckie's language project and how she succeeds in using fictional languages for her goal of alienating the reader, and exploring the identity of thousand-bodied being(s).

There are about two fictional languages in Ancillary Justice, Radchaai and Nilter. Interestingly we don't get any samples of either of them in the text itself, except in names and even those are mostly homogenous. The narration of the novel in entirely in English, and fictively translated from Radchaai. The most interesting feature of Radchaai, indeed one of the only grammatical features we know about, is that it doesn't distinguish grammatical gender and as far as we can tell, neither does the whole of Radchaai society. Leckie translates this aspect of Radchaai by referring to every character in the narration with the pronoun she and additionally the narration very rarely reveals what gender a non-Radchaai (like the reader) would perceive a particular character as. The only way we learn a character's gender is when they are referred to in a foreign language like Nilter, though we have to make the somewhat untenable assumption that their genders map to ours.

Whilst this is much less of an involved gender project than, say Terra Ignota, it is one of the main ways Leckie communicates differences between Radchaai culture and others (including the reader's). Breq does not understand gender and the narration and dialogue includes her attempts to guess another's pronouns in a foreign language - she just can't understand the cues. This results in a unique reader experience because I know what gender a character is perceived as because I think I'm reading the cues correctly (I might not be) but Breq can't. This positions me closer to the non-Radchaai characters, in tension with the close Radchaai narration. It's worth pointing out that this narration is not an imperial Radchaai narration, so much as it is from the point of view of a defector. In short, this is a narrator sceptical of the Radch, but nonetheless immersed and a part of Radchaai culture.

One of the less interesting things the novel does with Radchaai language in this vein is have the words for civilised/Radchaai be synonyms and so on. This is something I've seen so many examples of I no longer particularly notice it, but it's something this novel does with fictional language, so it's worth mentioning it here.

In other ways Leckie also tries to position the reader outside of Imperial Radch, most obviously by the fact they are a huge colonial empire which nearly all readers would be opposed to. Another difference is their ethics regarding identity, rejecting the individuals right to their own detriment, so as to protect their community. For example, drug addicts like Seivarden are encouraged to sign up for a transformative re-education, something the non-Radchaai view as monstrous. Another aspect of this are the ancillaries their warships and armies used to be made from which are humans who have had their minds replaced (via implants and re-education) with the artificial consciousnesses that run those starships, what Breq is. From what we see, the process isn't even painless, but Breq advocates for her own humanity even as just one isolated component of this artificial consciousness. The first time she is an individual in the common sense.

This brings us to the other way Ancillary Justice is about pronouns; Breq's identity. The plot of the novel alternates for the most part between chapters set in the present and chapters set in the distant past. In this past, Breq is stil the Justice of Toren a consciousness with thousands of bodies (we stay mostly with some of a unit called "One Esk"), millions of bio-sensors and as many cameras pointing in all directions. In the present however, Breq is a single person with one body, no bio-sensors (disabled to hide her identity) and the normal number of cameras. In both cases she refers to herself with I/me/my rather than the we/us/our a reader might expect expect. Breq is entirely and always one individual, even in moments when her parts are separate, and this is the part of her non-Radchaai find most difficult to understand. Including this reader.

Breq's identity is one of the main themes of the novel. She has found herself separated off from her usual form at the same time as the rest of her died and gave her a sole task of something like revenge. The narration often speaks of her feeling discomfort at only being able to see in one direction at once, or of only being able to sing with one voice (one of the most touching details of the novel). And yet the converse - thousands of bodies, all directions, &c., &c., is just as much a case for I/me/my for Breq as is the former. I'm having trouble writing this because it makes me feel so alienated and confused. I can't (outside this book) imagine what it's like to lose omnipotence, or to imagine both of these being the same identity when they clearly aren't the same way of being in the world and examining this from the perspective of modern queer communities, it seems like just the sort of things multiple pronouns are useful for. Then again, I think of the huge range of identities and individuals that can all use he or she or they or xe and so on and maybe it isn't so strange. Despite all the bodies and (in moments of severance) minds, Breq never feels plural.

This is in contrast to the other main Breq-like character of the novel; Anaander Mianaai who might once have been human? It's ambiguous from book one but she too has thousands of bodies which is how she rules the Radch. Nominally, all those bodies are one but it turns out that some of her has been secretly acting against the rest of her, a civil war waged entirely within the identity of the emperor. This too is bound up in I/me/my, all Anaander Mianaais are referred to in the same singular and knowledge of this partition is what drives the novel's plot.

So Leckie has done two things with language in Ancillary Justice, she has combined it with her gender project in order to alienate the reader from the Radchaai, all whilst reminding the reader that being civilised is synonymous with being Radchaai and she has used it to explore the capacity for complexity that a single pronoun has to contain. In order to do this she invented one of my favourite narrators (number 2 on my list) and I highly recommend this novel to you!

Thanks for reading! A side effect of my posting schedule means the next post is on the first of a month, which coincides with the holiday period. I'm going to use that as an excuse to review the posts of this year, my reading, and formulate a plan for what I'm going to do with this project next year. I hope you'll stick around :)