Paperback, 384 pages
English language
Published July 28, 2013 by Orbit.
On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.
Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship and an artificial intelligence controlling thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.
An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. But that might just be enough to take revenge against those who destroyed her.
Amazing, with a capital A. It's been a while since a book grabbed me this quickly and this hard.
Really enjoyed this book. In some ways it's a classic space opera but there's enough twists on the formula that it feels super fresh. Fascinating explorations of identity, language, and class. The writing was fun and engaging, I ate this book up.
This is a fun space opera that has all the fun space opera things: giant interstellar empires; worldbuilding on various interstellar cultures, and how they interact with each other, and how they do gender; exploration of how cognition and identity works in entities that are not (or not entirely) human; grand plots and conspiracies.
The overall plot is perhaps a bit simple, and some of the characters lean perhaps too much into one-dimensional archetypes, but it does not matter that much against the lively worldbuilding, and how it ties into the whole story.
