Ancillary Justice
Ann Leckie · 2013
Leckie's 2013 debut swept the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. A spaceship AI, reduced to a single soldier's body, seeks revenge against the ruler who destroyed her. The default-female pronoun system forced readers to confront their own assumptions about gender.
The case against
Breq's flat ancillary affect keeps you at a distance for the length of a novel, and the present-day plotline (fetch a gun, cross an ice planet) crawls while the flashbacks do the real work. Worldbuilding arrives in lecture-sized blocks. The pronoun experiment is genuinely interesting; it is also doing a lot of work the functional prose cannot.
Science Fiction & Fantasy · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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