Ancillary Justice and trilogy. Many sci-fi writers are good storytellers, others are good worldbuilders. Ann Leckie is one of the very few who are excellent at both.
@morganastra It's also one of the few 1st person narratives I can tolerate, probably because it's a machine narrating.
@OldandConfused well, I think one of the really key lessons of the book is that it's a mistake to think of her as a different category of characters than the humans, just because her intelligence is artificial!
@OldandConfused Leckie's narrative style is just *really good*, it flows well and is very natural and presents the right amount of detail, I think that's probably the reason so many people who often don't like first-person narrations nevertheless like that trilogy
@morganastra I agree that the writing is excellent. It just reads more like 3rd person to me, because of the artificial and cold narrator.
I should say I haven't finished the series yet. I just got through the first book and have the other two queued up on my Kindle.
@morganastra That said, the harshness of her universe bothers me a lot. It's a horrible place really.
@morganastra @OldandConfused
Speaking of AI narrators, Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (i think) is the story of a colony ship to another solar system as told by an AI that's simultaneously lessening how to tell a story. The development of the narration throughout the book really sells it, and the audiobook version makes it even better.