My non-spoilery thoughts on Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie: This was certainly one of the more inventive novels I've read in awhile. It's a space opera involving a general humanity, taking place sometime in the distance future, but with no real connection to Earth or our timeline, kind of in the same way the Asimov's Foundation series does. The main character is a 2000 year old spaceship/AI that also exists in hundreds or thousands of ancillary bodies, which aren't androids, but are reanimated corpses. The other distinctive feature is that the primary society does not consider "gender" a distinctive trait. Their language uses gender neutral pronouns, although since we're reading in English, for our benefit, all pronouns are female (she, her) regardless of the actual gender of the characters involved.
I liked this book a lot and think it certainly deserved the nomination, though I don't think I am as enamored with it as much as others seem to be. Despite it being human, the author creates a really alien society that takes some time to understand as a reader. There's no real narrative description of how the society functions, you really have to pick it up through context as the story goes along, which can be a challenge. In the first 50 pages or so I found myself having to go back to reread entire paragraphs or pages to understand what was happening. While this seems like a pain initially, the depth and uniqueness of the world is ultimately one of the book's strong points. I thought the plot was engaging, and the action, though sparse, was well done.
One complaint I have is that at the end of the day, I couldn't tell you what any of the characters actually look like. I could not form any kind of picture in my head because of the gender thing. The characters have gender, but as an AI living in a society that doesn't distinguish gender, the main character has a hard time telling gender apart and just always uses the gender neutral "she" and "her" for all characters. Sometimes through context clues or interaction with characters from other societies that do have gender distinctions you'll learn what gender one of the main characters is, but even then, it's hard to keep a picture of those characters in your head when the main character just continues referring to them as "she" regardless.
