Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's been strange to see all the positive reviews for this book, and just today I learned it won the Arthur C Clarke award. I'm beginning to wonder if maybe I read a different book, or maybe my library's copy was missing the parts where there's a story. And missing it is. The premise is an interesting one: a ship that controls hundreds of ancillaries, which are human bodies implanted with some technological doo-dads and controlled by the ship's AI. Then the main character gets separated and has to deal with things on her own. If you've read those couple sentences, you've read the book and can save yourself some time. Characterization is non-existent: the main character never changes or learns, and the author only pays lip service to the AI going from hundreds of individuals under its control to one. That could be enough for its own story right there, but it's wasted. Instead, we have the main character taking on two different big goals or quests. Her reasons for the first are totally unexplained, and she even asks herself every so often why she's doing it. But there's never an answer or even any exploration of this. She just asks herself a few times and that's it. It has no effect on the story whatsoever. The second is literally pointless. We know this because she tells us that completion will make zero difference. So why do we care? I suppose it's just as well since there's no real universe to speak of. The culture of her society is vague and bland, and doesn't really do anything new. Oh, their language doesn't have gender-specific pronouns, meaning the main character uses "he" and "she" interchangeably. It's not done as a way to demonstrate how her own language works, either, as she admits that she can't tell people's genders a lot of the time. We're supposed to believe that an AI that is thousands of years old and capable of carrying on hundreds of conversations simultaneously can't figure out whether a person is male or female? Meanwhile a space station's AI at one point is so sensitive she's afraid it will figure out her motivations just from observing her. All-in-all the book is one interesting idea that is never fleshed out or made into any remotely interesting story. I kept waiting for the payoff that never came. There were so many interesting ideas that could've come from this but never did. Ultimately the book's a waste: a waste of good underlying ideas and a waste of the reader's time.