I'm going to try to talk about some things I liked about the first book of Imperial Radch without giving spoilers. It's easily one of the best books I've ever read.
Ancillary Justice is a book about how we justify not taking action because we think societal factors outside of our control make our individual choices meaningless. It does this on a massive, artificial scale of power we could never touch: sentient planet sized warships, people with hundreds or thousands of separate bodies. We watch beings with this level of power still fail to resist orders they know will rip them apart and never leave them whole again. In the Radch empire, polytheism reigns and each individual favors different gods; but everyone believes deeply in fate, in the binding results of the dice they cast, and coincidence is considered a fiction.
It's political intrigue totally unconcerned with political succession in an empire that has had the same leader for thousands of years. Instead we get to dig into the minor concerns of individuals, breathe in deeply how the cultures in that empire adapted to their lands' environment, and watch the people in those cultures negotiate with the empire's culture, joining its sick melting pot.
Language and identity are played with similarly to A Memory Called Empire. The language of empire refuses to name anything else as civilization, requiring switches between languages to say otherwise. Other voices are explicitly and implicitly silenced. But Ancillary Justice does it better, and with less confusion. The author refuses to fall into Memory's trap of romanticizing the upper class of its empire as sophisticated and meritocratically intelligent.
Ancillary Justice also doesn't wave away gender like Memory does. One of the most interesting things about it, in fact the reason I read it, was the Radch use of the pronoun she for everyone regardless of gender. Radch empire citizens don't attach any significance to gender and reproduction is mechanized for much of the universe. But that isn't how any other culture sees gender. This creates a barrier between the protagonist and others on her travels, as she fails to distinguish the genders that must be stated in their languages. There are simply too many contradicting signifiers of gender between the cultures for her to automatically know.
With gender removed, the harsh and transparently unfair hierarchy of noble rich families and provincial poor ones comes into stark relief. So does the complex, often familial relationship between human and sentient machine. Both of these dichotomies create deep barriers of misunderstanding between the two main characters, and it's all the more satisfying then when they start to overcome them.
I'm excited even more for the spin-offs set in this universe than the direct sequels. I can't wait to see what other intrigues Ann Leckie comes up.
