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.