It's not all acculturated kittens and ancillaried rainbows though. And, as Rome discovered, once integrated and acculturated, those recent conquests then necessitate a new round of the same to create a buffer for their safety.

Like our Roman Empire, Leckie's Radch has opted for security through the expedient of conquering and integrating those around it. And it's stated more than once that bodies for ancillaries are not in short supply. Your body becomes an appendage of the AI. There's no being un-ancillaried by the way. Think of the ship our protagonist Breq used to be, Justice of Toren, as cloud computing plus the Internet of Things, but the storage and CPUs are brains, and the 'Things' are human beings called ancillaries. In the past this extended to the crew and troops as well. In Leckie's universe, the AIs are the linked minds of conscripted humans. The human Seria gave up her body to be merged into White Cat - something closer to Leckie's ships, which are human-based but with a cloud-computing-based contemporaneity. I want femtosecond level perception, to see quantum phenomena as they happen. And her senses and other abilities are exquisite. Harrison, well, he's a darker author than Banks, but while Seria Mau Genlicher/ White Cat is tragic, she's still heroic. The Minds more or less run things, at least on a day-to-day basis, though, it's anarcho, so no one's really in charge. Anyhow, in the Culture, most people live on ships or stations, all run by Minds (AIs). Not that I'm an anarchist, but post-scarcity would be awfully nice. Banks mixed in quirky names ( No More Mr Nice Guy, So Much For Subtlety, The Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival) and made the ships full citizens of his left-anarcho-post-scarcity Culture, which made the whole thing that much more fun for me. So, with 2001 tucked out of sight under the sofa, Banks's books stand as my first in this subgenre. I'm guessing being a murderously psychopathic, slow spaceship is not attractive to most people. Of course, one might say Clarke did it first in 2001, but I don't count it because of the stately pace of space travel in the story and Hal 9000 being neither fully fleshed-out character nor heroic. Banks's Culture setting are among my favorites. John Harrison's Kefahuchi series and Iain M. How can imagining oneself living amongst the stars unbeholden to any planet not exhilarate? Fast and powerful, heroic, with space as your natural environment. I'm a sucker for good world-building - anyone who knows me can tell you that - but also for people-ships, be the person an AI, an integrated human, or something in between. These things rose to a higher level of annoyance than they might have otherwise, because the author made them a significant part of the story but did not seem to have researched them properly. This was punctuated by some annoyances though. Most of the time, Ancillary Justice delighted me.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie