Ancillary Justice

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Ann Leckie’s imaginative, operatic sci-fi saga is much more than the sum of its odd conventions, but those conventions are definitely unique and worth discussing. In Leckie’s novels, the Radch Empire uses artificially intelligent hive minds to control the human “ancillaries,” that house their consciousnesses, but have only ever used female pronouns to refer to themselves and their subjects. As the series progresses, Breq, an artifical intelligence inhabiting one of the Radchaai ancillaries, continually guesses the incorrect gender of characters and refers to everyone she meets as “she.” It’s an element that helps drive home the alienness of the culture and Breq’s lack of a self as a former tool of the Radch Empire, and colors her actions as she works to change it.