Steven C. (SteveTheDM) - , reviewed on 4/6/2014 + 204 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 4

I'm familiar with Ann Leckie due to her work on the Podcast "Escape Pod", where she's been an editor for quite a long while. So I was excited when this book popped up on numerous "looks good" lists, and strove to pick up a copy.

This was a fascinating book. It's got new ideas in abundance (at any rate, new ideas *to me*), and is extremely well written. The protagonist here is (one of) a large number of AI-in-a-human-body workhorses that are all part of larger AI that runs a starship. Oh, and they all share the same consciousness. It's a brainship, sort of, it's emotional computers, sort of, and it's got oodles of answers to the question, "How do you write a first-person story when your narrator is everywhere?"

It's also got an evil society at war with itself, sort of. It's got gender non-obviousness, sort of. It's got all this juxtaposed, subtly, with other cultures which we might consider more "normal".

This is a fantastic piece of work. And this is a debut novel.

Why did I not give it five stars? I think it's because I tend to give 5 stars to books with strong characterization where I think I could be (or at least wish to be) the narrator. And that's not true here, so I didn't react as strongly as I would to other five star books.

4.5 of 5 stars.

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