Breq travels across a remote, frozen world in pursuit of the final stage of a long-planned act of vengeance. Although she appears to be one human being, she was once the artificial intelligence of Justice of Toren, a Radchaai warship whose consciousness extended through the vessel and thousands of human ancillary bodies. Now confined to one surviving body, she carries the memories of an imperial conquest, a beloved officer’s death, and the betrayal that destroyed nearly everything she was. Moving between Breq’s present journey and the events that produced it, Ancillary Justice combines space opera with a study of divided identity, colonial power, loyalty, grief, and moral responsibility. Ann Leckie’s use of “she” as the Radchaai default pronoun also makes readers confront how language shapes assumptions about gender. The result is both a revenge narrative and an inquiry into whether a being created to serve an empire can judge that empire—and act against it.
Available editions
Paperback
First U.S. edition; paperback
Published:
ISBN-13:
9780316246620
On the continent called the Stillness, civilization has been shaped by recurring geological catastrophes known as Fifth Seasons. Communities survive through rigid planning, inherited rules, and the exploitation of orogenes—people capable of sensing and manipulating thermal and seismic energy. When a massive rift threatens to produce an exceptionally long Season, Essun discovers that her husband has murdered their young son and fled with their daughter. Her pursuit unfolds alongside the stories of Damaya, a frightened child taken for training, and Syenite, an ambitious young orogene sent on an imperial assignment. Through these intertwined lives, N. K. Jemisin examines oppression, survival, parenthood, trauma, and the dangerous bargain between social usefulness and freedom. The result is both an apocalyptic journey and a structural mystery, using speculative geology and intimate human loss to ask what happens when a civilization depends upon the people it dehumanizes.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future novel examines climate change as a crisis of institutions, economics, technology, justice, and collective action rather than as a single disaster with a single solution. It opens with a lethal heat wave in India, experienced by aid worker Frank May, and follows the psychological and political consequences of that catastrophe. A second central thread concerns Mary Murphy, the head of an international body informally called the Ministry for the Future, whose mandate is to represent future generations and living beings that lack political power in the present. The book gradually expands beyond Frank and Mary into a global systems narrative. It moves among central bankers, climate scientists, activists, refugees, lawyers, agricultural communities, engineers, political officials, and covert organizations. Conventional scenes are interspersed with testimony, reports, meeting notes, explanatory passages, dialogues, and nonhuman or conceptual voices. This co…
Available editions
Hardcover
First edition; U.S. hardcover
Published:
ISBN-13:
9780316300131
576 pages
