Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie)

Okay, a confession: I'm hopelessly focused on gender. I learned this in reading this book,in which the narrator's (fictional) native language has no gender-marking and the character himself (herself?) is oblivious to gender. In this English translation, the default pronouns are all feminine, so we read that she drove the shuttle and her voice was loud, but some of these individuals are probably male. Which ones, though? I can't tell, and it drives me crazy! Aside from this personal foible of mine, though, there's a lot here to like. There's an interstellar empire run by an immortal tyrant who has her (his?) mind loaded into armies of clones, supported by an army including vast ships run by AIs and manned by ancillaries, former people whose minds have been subsumed into the ship's mind. The narrator is one of these ancillaries, and the story shifts back and forth between the past in which the ship was part of the takeover of a new world, and the present in which the ancillary is separated from the ship and working toward a goal of vital personal importance. We don't learn what the goal is, why it is important, or what happened to the rest of she ship for much of the book. I can't say that all became clear, but enough did to be satisfying, and the mystery was intriguing.

Pandemonium (Daryl Gregory)

I love how Gregory captures a sense of insanity framed by mundane reality. In the two books of his I read (this and Afterparty) the main character experiences what, in the real world, we would call hallucinations and delusions, but within their own warped world they make a slantwise kind of sense. Here, the narrator, Del, was one of thousands who have been at some point possessed by what people call demons: recognizable personalities who take over someone and cause them to act out the demon's archetypal story. At age 5, Del was possessed by one they call the Hellion, a force that chooses young tow-headed boys and sends them swinging from rafters and throwing spitballs, and has been dealing with the aftermath of that possession ever since. He winds up working with others to try to learn what the demons actually are and to rid himself, and the world, of their presence. It is a fascinating world peopled with intriguing characters, and the ending is poignant and difficult and real.