Ancillary Justice

Breq is one body walking across an ice planet with a weapon and a grudge. She used to be the Justice of Toren, a troop carrier with a distributed artificial mind occupying thousands of bodies at once, ancillaries made from the corpses of conquered people and kept in storage until needed. The ship was destroyed. This fragment survived, and has spent twenty years working toward killing the ruler of the empire.

That ruler is Anaander Mianaai, who occupies thousands of cloned bodies herself and who has, it emerges, begun to disagree with herself about whether annexing civilisations at gunpoint should continue. A civil war conducted entirely inside one person's mind is the engine of the plot.

The famous feature is the language. Radchaai does not mark gender, so Breq refers to everyone as she and is visibly anxious about getting it wrong when speaking other languages. It takes about thirty pages to stop noticing, at which point the reader realises how much work they normally do assigning people to categories.

The other pleasure is Breq's memory of being a ship: singing to herself in twenty bodies, watching one officer through several sets of eyes at once, loving a lieutenant she also outranked and owned.

Seivarden, the aristocratic officer Breq scrapes off the ice in the first chapter, is the other half of the book: a thousand year old snob thawed into a century that has no use for her, addicted and appalling, and slowly becoming someone worth the trouble.

The structure alternates between the present journey and the events twenty years earlier that destroyed the ship, so you learn what Breq is avenging at the same rate she can bear to think about it.

Around four hundred pages, cool and controlled, and less action driven than its premise suggests. The middle section, largely tea, etiquette and a colonial temple town, is where the argument about annexation actually happens.

Best for readers who want space opera about empire, identity and complicity rather than about fleets.