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Notes -
All this is reminding me of older SF, so Leckie is re-working tropes (deliberately or not? hard to tell). The "AI starship in human body" notion is along the lines of a brainship, a concept I first encountered with Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, but which is even older than that in SF. Flipping it so that it's "AI intelligence in human body" is a variation, sure, but I bet someone has also done it before.
So reading the differing interpretations in the comments, the question seems to be: is Leckie writing the dark side of The Culture, how that society would really be in practice, or does she mean to put forward the progressive elements as separate and admirable and desirable?
It's definitely intentional. Insofar as the book was intended as award bait, yeah, it's winking-and-nudging the LeGuin fans, and probably a dozen other authors besides. That sort of dialogue with existing ideas is...I don't want to say it's the mark of good sci-fi, because there's excellent stuff out there which firmly abstains from referencing what came before. It would be more accurate to say that deployed properly, a conversation with other sci-fi is an efficient worldbuilding tool, and may make the overall premise more engaging to boot.
Personally, I think Leckie started from an interesting premise rather than from a mandatory message. Rumors of its wokeness have been greatly exaggerated. The Radch isn't the Culture any more than it's Dune's Imperium or Endless Space's Horatio. It's a related concept, developed on familiar lines and richly illustrated.
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