Week Fifteen: Future Tense - Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (# 5 points)

This week, I read Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Overall, It was hard to read because there are a lot of characters in a story. The relationships between the characters keep increasing and get complicated, so sometimes it was a bit hard to follow the story. The view of the world and the characters the writer created are very fresh and unfamiliar as well.

The new words like Fleet, Ancillaries, Nilt, and Radch pop up from the first page of this novel.

At first, I needed time to get used to this new world, but at some point, I found myself empathizing with the speaker and experiencing the vast universe.

A first-person narrator of this story is artificial intelligence, Breq, who still thinks that there are a lot of incomprehensible behaviors humans do, although it has been living 19 years with a human body. Breq must follow the command of her creator, the Radch’s monarch,

but by a series of events, now she acts by her own free will. It can be read just as the error of artificial intelligence, but along the story, it feels like Breq has an ego.

The interesting thing about artificial intelligence in this work is, they have feelings like humans. Breq said even making minor decisions could be painful work that has to compare trivial matters without feelings, so it is easier to handle things with emotions. She logically thinks having feelings is just for practical purposes, but at the same time, she is also the character of passionately loving someone in the story.

The world and characters that Ann Leckie created are very delicate, especially when the writer depicts the Radch culture. The Radch people unify the pronoun for gender as ‘she’, and don’t use the word for a specific gender. It blurs the boundaries of gender, and for me, this is a very interesting attempt. As a reader, I usually read novel imagining

However, while I read Ancillary Justice, I was surprised when the characters that I thought were men were actually women. I think this setting extends the imagination of the characters.

The story keeps raising interesting questions about the role and coexistence of humans and artificial intelligence. Until now, I thought ‘Art’ that is far from the technology and requires feelings and thoughts is an area where only human beings could do, but if machines have a sensibility, maybe the moment when machines can really surpass humans is very close.

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Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (# 6 points)

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