Btw: the space opera I'm referring to is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice.. a far future AI story featuring a protagonist whose consciousness is a fragment of a dismantled, millennia-old intergalactic computer — one of many that inhabited the "consciousness" of entire space stations as well as countless humans whose bodies were used as (relatively) disposable soldiers, or ancillaries, by these semi-omnipotent AI leviathans.
Specifically, the protagonist is a fragment of that consciousness that has been cut off from the computer after some cataclysmic tumult that
I haven't read about yet. It's inhabiting the body of a 19 year-old girl, and trying to survive as a genderless, emotionless, female child (and also killing machine) in an unforgiving post-war galactic frontier.
It's pretty out there. And — get this — it won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award AND Locus Award in the same year.
I'm not sure that's ever happened before, and it's only happened a couple of times with the Hugo and Nebula, which are the two biggies.
I can't ignore that kind of praise, and I was looking for something weird enough to take me to some places I'd never been before.
So have you read the Sparrow or fucking what?