RaveThe Seattle Review of BooksAnn Leckie has written a believable, genderless narrative voice, confidently and consistently in a novel nearly 400 pages long. She has constructed a society in which gender is irrelevant, even down to a language that lacks gendered words. This is beyond refreshing: it is game-changing, a major technical achievement. I often rage about the older sf novelists’ failure of vision. They spent their creative energies thinking through the technical implications of an invention, yet still assumed that society would continue into the 2300s as if it were the 1950s. By showing that gender isn’t necessary, Leckie has made a fundamental change in how to write about people in a future society ... Leckie is a natural, skilled storyteller, not a wannabe author. This novel is a classic page-turner, for the plot’s excitement, drama, tragedy and diabolical intrigue. It is also profoundly intelligent, because the beautifully imagined sociological framework for the Radch drives the action, and shows us how and why a person must act in this or that way. There is a little bagginess and second-guessing during the action in the second half of the novel, with portentous things being said by one character, and nodded at by another, leaving the reader none the wiser. Not that it matters: everything is explained and we hang on for the pleasure of the ride ... Leckie has found a way to relate the human and familiar to the scale of her epic plot.
