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Ancillary Justice is a story about a starship which turns into a human being and decides to start a quest to put an end to a dictator. The story unfolds in multiple levels, during different times, and each chapter gives us a bit better picture of the reasoning and evolution of an artificial intelligence running a troop carrier.

I knew just about nothing about this book before I started reading about it - the only thing I knew was that it won multiple prizes last year and manages to piss some people off with its depiction of genders. I'm happy to tell this book is grand scale space opera. From the beginning it reminded me of Iain M. Banks, even though Banks' Culture is a much larger construct and Leckie definitely has her own voice.

The world of Raadch is interesting, the writing is beautiful, the protagonist of the story has plenty of shades. There are suitable doses of futurism, humane an inhuman features to make it a delightfully wonderful read. As any good book, it's more than just the story, though: it also deals with ethical questions and can be read as having commentary on global politics.

On gender: it's not just a gimmick but it's also not something the story specifically focuses on. It does raise an interesting point about the defaults in culture and assumptions of the reader. It also got me thinking how it gets translated into Finnish or some other language that has no gendered pronouns; the assumptions will still be there, even if the language may seem more neutral.

Dark Between the Stars is large scale space opera, a beginning for The Saga of Shadows, following a previous saga of seven novels, The Saga of Seven Suns. After a devastating war, the whole Spiral Arm has had time to recover and return to normalcy; the humans have spread throughout the whole Arm, and coexist more or less peacefully with other alien races, some more alien than others. There is, however, something dark and old rising.

The beginning of the novel didn't promise much; it starts with a space version of domestic dispute, where the husband, Garrison Reeves, is depicted as a caring father and a smart and observant employee. The mother, Elisa Reeves, is at least as smart but she is painted as career-focused, selfish and petty. The son, Seth gets caught in between. Unfortunately, in this particular case it continues throughout the book; Garrison is a very sympathetic figure while Elisa becomes more and more black compared to Garrison's white.

Luckily, though, they are not the only main characters. After the initial scene, the story picks up by following various people around the universe - and there are plenty of them. Dozens of people get introduced and later followed in short chapters. Typically each chapter is only a few pages, so the scene changes often. That has the unfortunate side effect that you end up not caring about the characters too much - I found I formed any kind of connection with only a few of the characters and only at the end of the book.

Having said all of that, it's really not bad. The story itself picks up speed, and once you get to know the characters, even if you don't care about them too much, you get familiar to them so that the rapid-fire scene changes serve to keep you focused. Although the enemy seems to be painted with extremely dark brush - there really are no redeeming qualities and nothing to sympathize for - it really made me want to read the next book in the series.

Perhaps even better, it also made me want to find out more about Anderson's universe. I haven't read The Saga of Seven Suns, and even if that might have added some depth into my understanding of this book, I didn't find it necessary. After reading the book, though, I definitely want to read the first saga as well.

... oh, also: even though the story flowed well, it really started to pick up the pace only in the last third of the book. The length might be positive when it comes to character and world building (although there's already the first saga, and the character building could be better...). Particularly considering this is only the first book of a series, it probably would've benefited from being 250 pages shorter.

Three Body Problem follows two main character; one starting from the Culture Revolution era China, another in current day. The story was originally written in Chinese, and there are quite obvious cultural differences, but luckily translator is up to the task and gives a Western reader enough extra information to help us decipher at least most of the references to Chinese history.
For me, the book splits into two parts. For the first two thirds, it's a murder mystery with some elements that you might call even supernatural, some interesting virtual reality scenes and very little in the way of science fiction. The language is a bit blocky at times, the characters are fairly thin, but all in all it's still enjoyable read.
Then we come to the final third of the book. That's where the science fiction kicks in... and that's where the enjoyment ends. When in the first two thirds there's talk about relatively mundane science, here it turns into unbelievable fiction, and the writer seems to know it. There's, for example, a pre-emptive "aha, but we just borrow energy" paragraph in case someone notices the law of conservation of energy doesn't seem to hold. The viewpoint moves from first person to third person to... fourth person?, but no matter who's talking, there's too much description and too little action. The sections of alien civilization are mostly dialogue where the content seems to be aimed for the benefit of the reader, not the parties of the conversation.
And the aliens? They seem pretty human to me. Even though they strive to be emotionless, they are regularly described to have and to talk about emotions (love, terror, ecstacy...). Their culture seems to have similar "Ages" as humans have, but whereas humans move from one age to another at accelerating speed, the aliens' velocity through ages is constant.Describing this difference using Ages draws parallel to two cultures which aren't supposed to be similar. Why would the aliens go through Hunter-Gatherer/Agricultural/Industrial/Atomic/Information age? Why would they recognize them as distinct ages? And why would the speed they go through them be constant, considering achieving tehcnical prowess of one age is mandatory but also makes it easier to achieve the next step faster?
And yes, the unfolding of n dimensions of a proton into 2D (and missing it by one, twice) and then re-folding it back into a proton - and, as a sideshow, meeting another civilization and destroying it - just bends the reality too much. The idea is nice but the execution doesn't work.

All in all, I find this book hard to judge. The first part is promising, but the second part falls flat and does it spectacularly. There's still enough good points to make me mildly interested in the second part of the trilogy, but I can't really say I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for it.

Big Boys Don't Cry tells the story of Maggie, a Ratha - an AI battle machine - as she reminisces her past missions. She forms emotional bonds with her crew, but as the crew dies, injures and finally retires, human contact gets more and more inhuman and Maggie finds herself manned by dumb drones. She ends up being a magnificent harbinger of doom for all her enemies as she moves from battlefield to battlefield to further mankind's greedy quest for power.
The world of the novella is very black and white. Maggie is the only one with a conscience, whereas all the humans are greedy, petty, sadistic, corrupt beings. Since it's a relatively short story and it's built of multiple episodes, there's no room for subtlety: people are reduced to caricatures, battle depictions get more and more violent and pretty obviously try to appeal to basic emotions.
At least for me, that just doesn't work. The story is too one-sided, people are too obviously "bad", and at the same time some crucial features of the story are left unexplained.
The proto-Maggie slowly gaining consciousness is all kinds of cumbersome. Searching for words - sometimes while using idioms a newly born battle machine from future has no reason to recognize - just isn't a very good way of verbalising awakening of consciousness. At least not the way it's done here.
Why did the Rathas have sense of pain? Even if the brains "needed" to be susceptible to torture, intense pain sensation doesn't seem a useful feature - particularly since at least most people don't seem to be aware it exists.

A slow-moving fantasy about an ostracized son of an emperor who suddenly finds himself an emperor. The story focuses on court politics, tensions between the emperor - who is clearly above everyone else in the society - and the rest of the society.

... and I mean above. Emperor Maia is kind, decent, thoughtful, listening ruler who tries to make friends everywhere and, in the end, probably succeeds. His background as a half-blood (the former emperor being an elf and Maia's mother a goblin) makes him a bit uncertain, his lack of education a bit socially awkward, but those things also allow him to break through conventions on how the ruling class should behave.

I thoroughly enjoyed the slow moving court politics, Maia's awakening into power and others' awakening into their emperor. Somewhere there's a nagging feeling that Maia is too good - the biggest mistakes he makes are on the level of apologizing from his subjects. One thing I didn't enjoy is the barrage of invented words - even though you get an idea of them as you read (and there's a description of some of those at the end of the book - nice to notice after you've read the book - they seem to be there just to give an idea of a foreign world without any real meaning.

Even though the book leaves an opening for sequels, I almost hope that doesn't happen; it would either be too much of a good emperor parade, or it would require changing the character of Maia. There are aspects to the story that practically shouts for more thorough handling, though, so maybe something set into the same world - say, in the neighboring goblin empire - would be nice.


That is actually something that is, in my opinion, missing from the book. Even though Maia's goblin heritage is mentioned, repeatedly, the structure of the society is left kind of unclear. Goblins seem to be very much in the working class - but on the other hand, neighboring Avar empire is goblin-led and the former emperor had a goblin as a wife. The situation spells both internal and external conflict, but the best we get is the fact that Maia considers himself ugly because of his goblin-like features.

Another thing that annoys me is the heavy-handed reference to socialist movement in the flyer factory. Maybe it's just me, but depicting the workers as atheist heathens who want to bring down the ruling class by means of conspiratorial murders doesn't really fit the tone of the rest of the book.