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2014 BSFA Award Winner!
The 2014 BSFA Award winners were announced at the 66th Eastercon Dysprosium at the Park Inn Hotel, Heathrow on Sunday 5th April 2015.
In the Best Novel category the winner is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword, the sequel to last year’s co-winner Ancillary Justice. To see the full results in all categories check out the official announcement on the BSFA website.
Our congrats to Ms. Leckie for the win.
What do you think of this result? Ancillary Sword is making a splash, though not yet as big as Justice. It may be time for a new mantlepiece in the Leckie household to hold all these new awards.
2014 Hugo Award Winner!
WorldCon in London wrapped up this past weekend and the 2014 Hugo Award winners were announced.
In the novel category the oft awarded Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie took home the top honor.
You may note an expression of relief around the internet for the outcome in the novel category especially after so many well documented… shall we say “oddities” surrounding this year’s ballot?
This is the fourth win for Ancillary Justice out of 6 nominations. Ms. Leckie also took home the 2013 BSFA, 2013 Nebula and 2014 Clarke awards. Quite an impressive haul!
You can see the full list of winners in all categories on The Hugo Awards website.
What do you think of this result?
2014 Arthur C. Clarke Award Winner!
The 2014 Arthur C. Clarke Award winner was announced last night in an exclusive award ceremony hosted by the Royal Society, London, as part of the SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival. The judging panel, nominated by the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and SCI-FI-LONDON, selected: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit) as this year’s winner.Ann Leckie received a check for £2014.00 and a commemorative engraved bookend trophy. Congratulations to Mz. Leckie for the win and to all the other nominees:
- God’s War by Kameron Hurley (Del Rey)
- The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann (Gollancz)
- Nexus by Ramez Naam (Angry Robot)
- The Adjacent by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
- The Machine by James Smythe (Blue Door)
So what do you think of the result?
RYO Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Ancillary Justice is a complex novel. There are a lot of good ideas and fun plots strewn around it. There’s the twist to the AI computer has a nervous breakdown plot, there’s the evil empire, there’s the noir-ish assassin, there are the subjugated people assimilated into the AI’s human network, and finally there’s the part that everyone’s already reviewed the heck out of: the language without gender. It has all the makings of a terrific novel, but to me, it just fell flat.
There is so much to this novel that it’s hard to give a synopsis. I’ve already listed most of the plot lines, but I’ll try to wrap it together in a few sentences. Breq is an AI, inhabiting a single body. She used to be a ship with hundreds of human bodies acting as tentacles, or ancillaries, all part of her collective (yes, a little like the Borg from STNG). She is on a mission to assassinate the Lord of the Radche. The Lord of the Radche has ancillaries too, but some have been infiltrated by an alien race. On her way, she encounters and helps a former captain who has OD’ed on a frozen planet. Together, they try to find the LOTR (heh) and destroy her before she destroys the empire.
RYO Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Hype is an untrustworthy thing, which has led me astray before. It either ratchets my hopes so high that they’re bound to be disappointed (see: A Song of Ice and Fire) or it leaves me snarking condescendingly about popular opinion and the “masses” and how no one really understands empire (see: The Hunger Games). But sometimes, hype operates like giant flashing arrows pointing me towards a book that I never would have otherwise discovered, and my entire faith in popular opinion and my fellow genre-readers is restored. That was my experience with Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie’s 2013 debut novel. From the back-cover blurb, I would never have bought it: On a remote, icy planet (oh look, Hoth) the soldier known as Breq (oh look, an ex-military alias) is drawing closer to completing her quest (gee, tell me more). But it was a riveting, smart, and brilliantly composed novel, which has convinced me that the space epic is still alive and well.
WoGF Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Nadine Gemeinböck (Linguana) has been reading fantasy for as long as she can remember. She started blogging about books on SFF Book Review in 2012, hoping to keep track of what she read and how she liked it. The book blogging community has since helped her open her literary horizons and thanks to WWEnd, she is currently working her way through NPR’s Top 100. Her blogging resolution is to review more foreign language books and finally take the plunge into a big, swooping space opera.
This debut novel is making waves on the internet like none I’ve ever seen before. It’s difficult to find a single negative review of this title, and – if you ask me – Ann Leckie is doing that whole promotion thing rather well. I came across her on many of my favorite online hangouts, doing interviews, guest blogs, tweeting and giving away signed books. But she always has interesting things to say, so buying the book was a no-brainer.
Boring as it may seem, I join the legions of new Ann Leckie fans. What a remarkable, memorable, thought-provoking novel.
ANCILLARY JUSTICE
by Ann LeckiePublished by: Orbit, October 2013
ISBN: 0356502406
Paperback: 432 pages
Series: Imperial Radch #1
My rating: 9/10First sentence: The body lay naked and face down, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.
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 with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse 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. And only one purpose–to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.
Ancillary Justice is a fantastic book for many reasons, and these reasons change throughout the reading experience. I can only tell you how it was for me, although what I’ve seen on the internet so far, other people are intrigued by the same ideas.
WoGF Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Nathan Barnhart (Skynjay) is one of three reviewers for Fantasy Review Barn. Though he read Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books as a kid, he didn’t really get into the genre until a few years ago, at which point he started reading any speculative fiction he could get his hands on. If not reading or playing with his kid, you can find him at the rec getting beat in basketball.
A book picked up purely on the hype, I would have skipped it otherwise. The cover blurb sounds ridiculous, the main character used to be a ship? What could that even mean? But in came the early reviews. They talked about many different things but seemed pretty unanimous in one aspect; the book was praised everywhere I looked.
But hype is a funny thing, and while it has often been enough to get me interested it just as often disappoints. Was this going to be one of those books in which everyone fell in love with the uniqueness and ignored obvious flaws? Perhaps some fell in love with the gender bending society and overlooked a lack of plot? In short, is the book going to be more idea than execution? Let me put minds to rest, oh hell no.
Excuse the language here, but Ancillary Justice is one glorious mind fuck. Every preconceived notion a reader has going in has to be reset. Get used to she as the default pronoun, understand how little it matters in Radch space. Then try to re-figure it all out when in a society that does; suddenly the right gender pronoun matters to avoid insults and we have no more knowledge on how to recognize the clues than Breq.
Guest Post by Ann Leckie: Personhood and Song
Ann Leckie has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, a lunch lady, and a recording engineer. The author of many published short stories, and secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband, children, and cats.
What does it mean to be human? It’s a really difficult question to answer, and one that science fiction and fantasy are particularly well-suited to tackling. Not that there’s ever been any sort of simple answer even (especially?) through fiction, but SF&F can present us with a range of characters that test the boundaries of what it means to be a person, and what that might imply about what it means to be human.
Androids and artificial intelligences are a favorite vehicle for this sort of exploration. If you build a machine that looks or acts just like a person, what’s the difference? Is there one? Is that difference important? Why? It was a question I was going to have to consider, a question that was, in some ways, going to be crucial to my novel, Ancillary Justice.
The narrator of Ancillary Justice is the troop carrier Justice of Toren. And also a unit of twenty bodies slaved to Justice of Toren, the ancillary unit Justice of Toren One Esk. My narrator is an artificial intelligence that’s also made up of human bodies. What sort of being is this?
Book Giveaway: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
It’s been awhile since we last had a contest and the folks at Orbit have given us the chance top rectify that by providing us with an autographed copy of Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice to give away to one lucky winner. You’ve likely already heard about this one. It was just released yesterday in the US and UK and has been making the rounds all over the blogosphere with much fanfare. This one looks a winner, folks, and I was sorely tempted to keep it for myself. This is another re-tweet this tweet, share on Facebook or post in the comments below contest so you know what to do. We’ll run this ’till next Wednesday when we’ll announce our winner.
In addition to the contest we’ll be featuring an author interview and a guest post from Ann Leckie herself later this week so stay tuned for those.
Ancillary Justice
by Ann Leckie
JUSTICE WILL COME TO THE EMPIRE
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 with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse 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. And only one purpose–to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.
