Yesterday evening I attended a meeting of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club run by Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. The book under discussion was Ann Leckie’s multi-award-winning Ancillary Justice. I had recommended it to the group months ago, but they chose to go with another of my choice’s — Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass — instead. Now, with all of those awards behind it, Ancillary Justice was back on the menu.

I’m delighted to report that everyone at the group was pleased that they had read the book. Some, inevitably, had had difficulty getting into it. The lack of information about characters’ gender is hard to get used to if you have grown up in a society that uses gendered pronouns. Most people who read the book, including me, start out by trying to guess what gender the characters are. Eventually most people relax into the story and stop doing that. The few bad reviews that the book has had appear to be have mostly been written by people who were unable to do that.

One thing that did interest me is that a few of the group, presumably quite subconsciously, constantly referred to the characters as “he”, despite everyone in the book being referred to as “she”. These people were all women. It just goes to show how deeply ingrained the default-to-masculine idea is.

The only major complaint raised was about The Gun (you’ll know what that means if you have read the book, and I’ll try not to give too much spoiler if you haven’t). Basically The Gun is a piece of alien technology so advanced that no one in the Radsch (the human space empire) can understand how it works. Most of us were OK with that, but for one person who likes his SF neatly explained it was an unwelcome intrusion of magical technology.

Ancillary Sword is now available, and I think most of the group are going to buy it and read it. However, before then we have the January meeting coming up, and the chosen book for that is Mythago Wood. I’m really looking forward to reading it again. And we’ll all be buying the brand new 30th anniversary edition, complete with Neil Gaiman’s new introduction.