Keira Knightley to star in ANCILLARY JUSTICE adaptation

In an interview with Harper's Bazaar, actress Keira Knightly has confirmed she will be starring in an adaptation of Ann Leckie's 2013 SF novel Ancillary Justice.

The novel focuses on Breq, the AI of a vast starship which has been destroyed. Breq's intelligence survives in one of its crew, an animated human corpse. Breq becomes an important player in the fate of the massive interstellar empire known as the Imperial Radch. The novel was well-received on release, spawning two (somewhat less-accomplished) sequels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, and winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Knightly notes that in preparation for her role she's reading books about dictators and conquest, suggesting she might be playing Anaander Mianaai, the Lord of the Radch, rather than Breq herself, but that remains unconfirmed.

Reportedly, Ancillary Justice will start filming later this year.

(news spotted by Al Kennedy)

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Breq, once a superintelligent AI controlling a vast starship, is now a reluctant agent of Anaander Mianaai, the ruler of the Radch. Mianaai inhabits thousands of different bodies scattered across human space, but is now suffering from disassociation: two distinct factions have arisen in her multiplicity and are now waging war on one another. Aligned with one faction against the other, Breq is ordered to the remote planet Athoek and take steps to secure it against the opposition.

Ancillary Justice was released in 2013 and won the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards the following year. A fine space opera novel which contained thematic musings on identity, consciousness and pre-existing biases, it was a striking debut, if one that was slightly overrated.

Being a success, of course the novel turned out to be the start of a trilogy. This is where things start to go wrong for Ancillary Sword. The Imperial Radch trilogy is what can be called a "fake trilogy", where Part 1 is self-contained (to some extent) to avoid too many unresolved plotlines if sales tank, whilst the remaining two parts form a much more closely-linked duology. The original Star Wars trilogy is a good example of that, and it's a reasonably common set-up in science fiction and fantasy which can work quite well (and arguably is better than "proper" trilogies with a single big story, where often the middle book feels surplus to requirements). However, it doesn't really work with Ancillary Sword.

This is a book which has very bizarre pacing. The entire novel, which is only 340 pages long in paperback, is laid back, chilled out, almost languorous. Breq travels on her starship to Athoek and meets lots of people and is nice to them, whilst carrying out observations of them from her unique perspective (a starship AI living in a single human body). The other characters are a mixture of interesting and bland, but the novel stubbornly refuses to engage in anything really approaching a plot or giving them anything interesting to do. A representative of an overwhelmingly powerful alien race is murdered, but this has no consequence (in this novel anyway). There's a lot of politicking and capital-building, both by Breq and her subordinates, and some of this is addressed in the novel but a lot of it isn't. At one point we learn of a mysterious "ghost gate" leading to an unknown star system where Breq suspects something is going on. She resolutely fails to follow up on this lead.

Ancillary Sword, it soon turns out, is almost nothing but set-up and pipe-laying for Ancillary Mercy, the third and concluding volume in the series. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is an issue when the book denudes itself of its own identity and storyline to benefit the later book in the series.

What the book does do quite well is character development, with Leckie also cleverly inverting the usual cliches of "AI wanting to be human" stories by having an AI become human and resolutely dislike the experience. By the end of the book Breq knows where she stands with regards to the government of Athoek and the administrators of the space station above it. The novel also makes some nods in the direction of themes such as colonialism, but treats the subject simplistically and superficially: no-one on Athoek but Breq has ever had the idea of treating the labourers fairly or even just enforcing the law on treating subject races well, apparently.

This is a slow-burning, SF-lite novel which feels like it is trying very hard to be a Lois McMaster Bujold book (who does this kind of comedy-of-manners, character-rooted story which holds back on violence and explosions with considerably less hype) but is undercut by also lacking the story and thematic elements that Bujold would include in her work effortlessly. If Ancillary Sword is anything, it's certainly not effortless: this is a turgidly-paced novel that took me five weeks to get through despite its modest length.

Still, Ancillary Sword (**½) is a desperately slow and badly-paced novel rescued by some effective characterisation and ends with some plot developments that leave things in an intriguing place for Ancillary Mercy to resolve. How well it does so remains to be seen. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

My Hugo Nominations list

As an attendee of this year's Worldcon, I got to nominate for the Hugo Awards. My nominations were as follows:

Best Novel
The Adjacent - Christopher Priest - Gollancz
Ancillary Justice - Anne Leckie - Orbit
River of Stars - Guy Gavriel Kay - Roc
Shattered Pillars - Elizabeth Bear - Tor
The Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson - Tor*

Best Novella
The Princess and the Queen - George R.R. Martin - Tor
Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Above - Ian Sales - Whippleshield Books

Best Related Work
Adventures with the Wife in Space - Neil Perryman - Faber and Faber

Best Graphic Story
The First Law - Joe Abercrombie, Chuck Dixon, Andie Tong - Blind Ferret Books
Meathouse Man - George R.R. Martin, Raya Golden - Jet City Comics

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
Orphan Black (Season 1) - Graeme Manson, John Fawcett - BBC America, Temple Street Productions
Les Revenants (The Returned) (Season 1) - Fabrice Gobert - Canal+, Haut et Court
Game of Thrones (Season 3) - George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss - HBO
Pacific Rim - Guillermo Del Toro - Legendary Pictures, Warner Brothers
Gravity - Alfonso Cuaron - Warner Brothers**

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
Orphan Black: Natural Selection - Graeme Manson, John Fawcett - BBC America, Temple Street Productions
Game of Thrones: The Rains of Castamere - George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, David Nutter - HBO
An Adventure in Space and Time - Mark Gatiss, Terry McDonough - BBC

Best Editor (Short Form)
Gardner Dozois

Best Edtior (Long Form)
Simon Spanton

Best Professional Artist
Benjamin Carre
Stephen Martiniere
Alan Lee

Best Fanzine
A Dribble of Ink - Aidan Moher
The Speculative Scotsman - Niall Alexander
Pornokitsch - Jared Shurin, Anne C. Perry

Best Fan Writer
Aidan Moher
Niall Alexander
Jared Shurin

The John W. Campbell Award
Leigh Bardugo - First novel published in 2012
Helene Wecker - First novel published in 2013


And for the 1939 Retro Hugos:

Best Novel
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien - George Allen and Unwin***
The Sword in the Stone - T.H. White - Collins
Out of the Silent Planet - C.S. Lewis - John Lane

Best Short Story
How We Went to Mars - Arthur C. Clarke - Amateur Science Stories

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells, Orson Welles - Mercury Theatre on the Air
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Walt Disney, Disney Studios - Disney Studios****

Best Editor (Short Form)
John W. Campbell

* Because no previous Wheel of Time book has ever been nominated, and because the entire series is one extremely large story, the entire series is eligible for nomination in 2014 as well as A Memory of Light by itself. Whether The Wheel of Time as a whole or A Memory of Light by itself makes the final ballot will be determined by which gets the most votes.

** Gravity is 91 minutes long, so falls within the 20% rule for determining length of eligible works, which means it can be put in either the Long-form or Short-form categories. As a movie, I think most people would put it in Long-form.

*** Though first published in Britain in 1937, The Hobbit had its first American publication in 1938, so is eligible for the award.

**** Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was first screened in 1937 in a very limited run, but was not put on American nationwide release (or any kind of international release) until 1938. A final ruling on Snow White's eligibility hasn't been made, but I suspect it will be allowed if enough people nominate it.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Breq is an ancillary, an animated corpse possessed by the controlling intelligence of a vast starship, the Justice of Toren. The Justice was destroyed more than twenty years ago, with Breq as the sole survivor and the only person to hold a secret that could tear the interstellar empire known as the Radch apart. Breq, now driven by grief and vengeance, goes in search of the only weapon that can accomplish her goal.

Ancillary Justice is the debut novel by American author Ann Leckie, who has already established herself as a writer of short stories. It's an interesting SF novel which riffs on a whole load of ideas. The most striking is the one of identity. Breq is a tiny, splintered part of a much vaster, destroyed intelligence and has difficulties in relating to other people and the world around her. She's also effectively possessing a dead body and suffers from a cultural bias. The Radchaai do not believe in gender differentiation and go to some lengths to keep their gender unclear. The culture defaults to describing everyone in the feminine, resulting in odd moments when a character you've spent a dozen pages mentally picturing as female actually turns out to be male. This playing around with gender roles is not new - Ursula Le Guin did it rather more literally in The Left Hand of Darkness more than forty years ago - but it's something that relatively few SF authors have dealt with before and forces the reader to confront their own biases.

Those looking for in-depth worldbuilding and explanations for this SF universe will be left disappointed. There's little information on the amazingly powerful armour that protects the Radchaai, nor much on how their ships work. FTL travel gets relatively short shrift, and the only hint as to the fate of Earth is a single line about how it's a remote backwater. There is a slight inconsistency in that the Radch's tech level, though impressive, appears to be reasonably believable until someone casually throws it out there that they've also built a Dyson sphere, which seems beyond their capabilities. I daresay that the inevitable future books in the series (yes, there will be at least two more) will reveal more, but in this volume the author is focusing more on the immediate story at hand.

Structurally the book adopts a tried-and-tested technique of alternating between flashback chapters showing what happened to the Justice of Toren and why (and doing a good job of showing how massive events can unfold from the tiniest of causes), and events in the present day. Characterisation is reasonably strong, with Leckie showing how citizens of the Radch differ from one another whilst retaining the same cultural and religious traits. Breq herself is well-drawn, as the ship AIs in Leckie's setting are perfectly capable of having emotions and development (and indeed, Breq's actions are catalysed by what happens to one of her favourite crewmembers).

Whilst a lot of reviews are drawing comparisons with Le Guin, I was also reminded of the works of Iain Banks, particularly in the idea of living ships with their own goals and motivations and how they work when placed in humanoid bodies. What Leckie shares with both authors is more of a fascination with the social sciences than the hard ones, and also a belief in storytelling that also challenges the reader.

Ancillary Justice (****) is one of the most striking SF debuts of recent years. It's not perfect - the restrained prose sometimes risks stodginess and the opening chapters risk an almost Eriksonian level of confusion due to a lack of context for what the hell is going on (though this is still well-handled) - but ultimately the novel evolves into an intelligent take on gender roles and identity issues against a fascinating (if only hinted-at) SF backdrop. More please.

The novel is available now in the UK and USA.