Ancillary Justice

The American writer Ann Leckie published the science fiction novel Ancillary Justice in 2013. It was her debut novel and the first book of the Imperial Radch trilogy, followed by Ancillary Sword in 2014 and Ancillary Mercy in 2015. It won the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus awards, and it is the only novel to have taken the Hugo, the Nebula and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Breq was a ship: one mind running a starship and walking around in dozens of human bodies at once, until the day her ship was destroyed and she was left in a single body with a grievance and no rank. Nineteen years later she is in the snow of a distant system, looking for the one person she believes can help her reach the ruler of a self-declared empire that is quietly tearing itself apart. The Radch absorbed the planets it conquered, and its language does not mark gender, so the book's English pronouns work differently from those of most novels.

The revenge Breq wants turns out to take longer and to cost more than she planned, and the book moves between her present journey and the events aboard the ship that explain what she lost. Leckie writes the Radch as a bureaucracy with an ideology, in which the annexations are described in the language of civilisation and protection. The trilogy continues with the two later volumes and is set in a wider universe that other novels also visit.

Other novels and stories take place in the same fictional universe at different points in its history, though they follow different characters. The first book establishes Breq, the Radch, its language and the annexations that the series is about.