Provenance

"Provenance" is a delightfully deft piece of genre-twisting science fiction that pivots around the idea that our identity is the product of the story that we tell ourselves about who we are and where came from. It examines how the things that give that story a provenance, a history of ownership, become as important to us as the identity itself.

"Provenance" is a stand-alone novel, set in the same universe as the "Imperial Radch" triology, but focusing on humans living outside the Radch. The main character is a young woman, who has been adopted from a public creche by a noble family and given the opportunity to compete with her adopted brother to become the heir to the family name.

The story unfolds in an unhurried way, allowing time for show more building worlds and revealing characters. The actions starts off as a sort of heist/forgery idea, then morphs into a murder investigation and morphs again into a military thriller. The tone throughout is civilized, introspective and self-deprecating. If Jane Austen has written science fiction, this is the kind of humane comedy of manners she might have produced.

What I enjoyed most was that the main character kept making choices that, while fair, honourable and even quietly courageous, were unexpected in the circumstances she found herself in. The choices she makes create a chain of provenance that slowly shapes her definition of who she is and who she wants to become.

Ann Leckie has a gift for world building and for making us look with a fresh eye at things we might think we already understand. She creates aliens who really are alien to our way of thinking and our way of living but with whom we can be empathetic and from whom we can learn more about ourselves. It turns out that she also has a talent for humour that the Imperial Radch trilogy gave her almost no opportunity to demonstrate.

I listened to the audiobook version which is delivered flawlessly by the talented Adjoa Andoh, who also narrated the Imperial Radch trilogy. show less

This is the story of Ingray Aughskold, daughter of a planetary official, who has concocted an expensive, convoluted scheme to get her mother's approval and discredit her brother - by paying someone to help a convict escape. A large part of the plot revolves around how humans on the planet of Hwae obsess about souvenirs, mementos and artifacts, calling them collectively 'vestiges' and assigning far too much value to them. This all leads to Ingray getting stuck in the middle of a multi-planetary conspiracy that escalates. Ingray has to resolve events with the help of a few friends and her own wits.
The entire story is told from Ingray's point of view, and as an 'unreliable narrator', we only get her view of events - and she often does not show more know what is going on. While this is set on a far off planet and partially takes place on a space elevator, that's just the setting, it is otherwise almost completely lacking in science fiction elements, making this an interesting fiction story, but not science fiction. I thought the plot, which never really resolves and the science aspects needed a lot of work, otherwise this would have been better. show less

This stand-alone novel is set in the same universe as Leckie's 'Imperial Radch' novels, but has very little congruency with those books; at one point, someone comments on the political moves to give AIs full civil rights, and there's a Radchaai ambassador, but that's about all. But the world-building is just as inventive, and the society as interestingly different as Radchaai space. Political power here is achieved through inheritance, but there's a lot of strings attached to that; and the society of the planet Hwae is heavily invested in "vestiges" (taking the place of the tea services in Leckie's earlier novels), artefacts somewhere between souvenirs and an autograph collection. The provenance of these vestiges is important, and show more indeed plot developments in this novel hinge on just how solid those provenances are.

Other world-building hints at all sorts of puzzles; what is "ruin glass", and why does it seem to exist in almost geological quantities? And why does Hwae have such a restricted diet of noodles and nutrient blocks?

The plot concerns Ingray, adopted daughter of a powerful politician, but the way things are looking, not one who stands to inherit prestige and advantage. She devises a plot to make her brother - who is more likely to succeed - look bad; but her plot unravels in various ways. Meanwhile, other unravellings are taking place around her.

Some critics have said that Ingray (whose name I kept reading as though it were pig Latin) seems a whiny and flimsy protagonist. She is certainly an insecure character at the start of the novel, and it is partly her inexperience and lack of worldly wisdom that gets her into problems. I rather suspect that to have been Leckie's point; just as Breq in the earlier novels has to negotiate their way round what seems to them a strange and puzzling society, so Ingray has to do the same as part of the process of growing up, and growing into a complex and high-profile role.

On the dustjacket of my copy, Elizabeth Bear declares Leckie to be an heir to Iain M. Banks. Well, Leckie may lack Banks' political sensibilities that informed his idea of The Culture, and I certainly don't think that Radchaai space is necessarily well-developed enough for anyone to imagine that they might like to actually live there; but on the strength of this novel, she is well along the road to having created an intriguing and rich universe to set her stories in. show less

Torn between 4 and 5 stars---5 for the setting, 4 for the plot.

Sam asked me to describe this, and I said something like "casually queer/trans coming of age murder mystery political intrigue comedy of errors with dysfunctional family dynamics, Really Alien Human Cultures, and Really Alien Aliens."

Normally in political intrigue stories (or even stuff like the Vorkosigan books) I enjoy reading about but can't relate at all to people who Really Grok Political Strategy and are always thinking twelve steps ahead and always have an ulterior motive. (I'd say that's a fair description of Breq and many other characters from [book:Ancillary Justice|17333324], except that Breq thinks she's more of a ruthless logical fiend than she actually is.) show more Ingray... oh god, do I ever relate to Ingray. (discussion of general thrust of the plot) She tries so hard to be calculating and political, and she's not bad at it because she's had extensive training, but she's never comfortable and sometimes she does things because she cares/sympathizes for people, which she then feels guilty for! Much of the coming-of-age is Ingray discovering that not everyone is as calculating as she was raised and that she doesn't have to live that way either.

Leckie is a genius at worldbuilding, especially coming up with incredibly alien human cultures of the far future, and then showing us that the people inside them are still very relatable human beings. This is my absolute favorite thing in science fiction, and Provenance is a perfect serving. At first I was missing the comfortable familiarity of Radchaai culture (!), but by the end I was feeling comfortably familiar with Hwaeans too. there is a character who is genderqueer even in relation to her own culture that doesn't have a cis male/cis female sex/gender binary!!!!! This is something I have wanted to see since literally forever.

If that wasn't enough, everyone is queer! EVERYONE. IS. QUEER. A bunch of main characters are nemen (Hwaean adult gender along with men and women), and it's like, not a thing at all. Much is left to the imagination about Hwaean family structure, but biological parents aren't an important part of it, and I'm not sure we ever see exactly two people collaborating to raise a child? Lots of parents who are mentioned singly, and one mention of biological parents in the plural.

Just read this fucking book, y'all.

***

On reread, the plot stuff annoyed me more, though I think I was able to puzzle out more of the implications that Leckie doesn't quite put into text. The feeling of struggling to grasp all the possibilities and the politics does make it feel genuine that this is not Ingray's greatest strength or passion, unlike (say) Miles Vorkosigan. show less

I appear to like Provenance a lot more than most readers, and it's mostly in the tension between Ingray's self-conception and how others see her. Ingray is a potential heir to political power, in vicious competition for her mother's favor back home over her brother. Her ambition has brought her to the station of Tyr, where anything is for sale, to bargain everything she owns on the exiled and imprisoned child of her mother's main political rival, who she believes knows a dark secret that could give her family immense political ambition.

Ingray sees herself as dancing along the edge of chaos, a social and emotional wreck desperately improvising to keep from falling into the abyss. The book spends a lot of time in her head, so glimpses of show more the outer Ingray, a possessed young woman who is scarily good at spotting weakness and jumping at it, is a delight.

The plot has a lot of moving pieces, which ultimately come to a kind of sleight of hand trick, but in a series that tends slow-to-glacial, alien ambassadors, murder mysteries, surprising romances, and a hostage situation on a space station as prelude to invasion, all offer a lot of interesting bits to chew on as the sociological design of Ingray's Hwae culture, focused on veneration of artifacts linked to famous events and people, unfolds. show less

Ingray has a brilliant plan, kind of, to secure her mother's favor, for which she and her brother Danach have been competing since childhood. If she can break Pahlad Budrakim out of Compassionate Removal (a.k.a. prison) and bring him back to her home planet Hwae, he can tell her where he hid the missing historical items that he was sent away for stealing, and she can present those to her mother. Of course, things don't go as planned -- especially when a murder is committed shortly after their return to Hwae, and Pahlad is one of the primary suspects...

This story is set in the same world as Leckie's other Imperial Radch books, but with completely different characters, in a different locale. It felt almost young adult to me, as Ingray show more undergoes a coming-of-age journey and makes a lot of the impetuous decisions one might expect from a YA heroine. Still, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I have been listening to the audiobooks, which is nice because the narrator solves the problem of how to pronounce some of the trickier names! show less

4.5 stars. I was a bit nervous to pick this up - how do you follow up the Radch Trilogy? - but after a few chapters, I was quite sucked in. Same universe as the trilogy, but different planets/culture/people. The story moved quickly, the setting was both familiar and new, the characters were interesting and I cared about what happened to them.

Two things I especially loved in the cultures as written: recognition of more than two genders, and that people of all genders have all roles in life. I'm so tired of speculative fiction that casts women as mothers, hookers, princesses and not much more. This is not that book and that is part of why I really enjoyed it.