It's hard to review these books as the trilogy they were marketed as because the difference in substance, quality and story from one to the next is confusingly drastic.

Ancillary Justice was a winner through and through. Ann Leckie burst onto the sci-fi scene with an intensely engaging, powerful and refreshingly creative space opera that follows the remaining fragment of a warship called Justice of Toren, embodied by its one surviving "ancillary," who is on the run and going by the name of Breq.

In Leckie's bleak vision of the future, the Radch empire considers itself the pinnacle of civilization and makes a habit of spreading its so-called sophistication far and wide by "annexing" (a.k.a. invading, slaughtering, enslaving and assimilating) lesser cultures. A shocking number of their unfortunate victims are converted to ancillaries, which means they're physically killed and implanted with Radchaai technology that links their bodies and minds to the will of warships' artificial intelligence. In essence, they're brutally converted into zombie super soldiers that act as humanoid extensions of the spaceship, and Leckie's description of it all is both intriguing as hell and immensely disturbing.