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I recently finished reading Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. It is very good. In fact I probably read it too quickly because I struggled to put it down :-)
It's far-future space opera based around an aggressive colonial empire, but follows just one character: an artificial intelligence of one of the empire's military starships. The style reminds me of Iain M. Banks' Culture series, what with the conscious spaceships, multiple threads and some quite dark themes.
It's one of those books where you don't really know what's going on at the start. As you might expect, the few different threads (one separated by about 1000 years) seem disconnected at first and actively avoid giving any hints of what the story turns out to be, but they are drawn together very nicely.
Going back to that single character thing, Leckie writes in first person which is quite unusual now that I think about it. It really does work though, in fact I'd say the voice of the main character is one of the great strengths of the book.
I'm trying to read more SF by authors who aren't white men, but so far I'm not doing too well - apart from Ancillary Justice I've only read a few of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Cycle and Beckie Chambers' Wayfarer series. Anyway, I definitely recommend Ancillary Justice and will be reading the rest of the trilogy at some point. If you want a bit more info check:
Ancillary Justice on Wikipedia
Check these out for more thoughts on the book and some good reccommendations.
Josip's gemlog - A new kind of space opera
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Callum Brown, 2020-12-17
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