Review: Provenance, by Ann Leckie

[Russ Allbery]

Provenance
by Ann Leckie

Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: September 2017
ISBN:      0-316-38863-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     448

In a rather desperate attempt to please her mother, Ingray has spent
every resource she has on extracting the son of a political enemy from
Compassionate Removal (think life imprisonment with really good
marketing). The reason: vestiges, a cultural touchstone for Ingray's
native planet of Hwae. These are invitation cards, floor tiles, wall
panels, or just about anything that can be confirmed to have been
physically present at an important or historical moment, or in the
presence of a famous figure. The person Ingray is retrieving supposedly
pulled off the biggest theft of vestiges in history. If she can locate
them, it would be a huge coup for her highly-placed politician mother,
and the one time she would be victorious in her forced rivalry with her
brother.

About the best thing that could be said for this plan is that it's
audacious. The first obstacle is the arrival of the Geck on the station
for a Conclave for renegotiation of the treaty with the Presger,
possibly the most important thing going on in the galaxy at the moment,
which strands here there without money for food. The second is that the
person she has paid so much to extract from Compassionate Retrieval
says they aren't the person she was looking for at all, and are not
particularly interested in going with her to Hwae. Only a bit of
creative thinking in the face of a visit from the local authorities,
and the unexpected kindness of the captain from whom she booked travel,
might get her home with the tatters of her plan intact. But she's
clearly far out of her depth.

Provenance is set in the same universe as Ancillary Justice and its
sequels, but it is not set in the empire of the Radchaai. This is
another human world entirely, one with smaller and more provincial
concerns. The aftermath of Ancillary Mercy is playing out in the
background (so do not, on risk of serious spoilers, read the start of
this book without having read the previous trilogy), but this is in no
way a sequel. Neither the characters nor the plot are involved in that
aftermath. It's a story told at a much smaller scale, about two
political families, cut-throat maneuvering, horrible parenting, the
inexplicable importance of social artifacts, the weirdness of
human/alien relations, and the merits of some very unlikely allies.

Provenance is a very different type of story than Ancillary Justice,
and Ingray is a very different protagonist. The shape of the plot
reminded me of one of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories:
hair-brained ideas, improvisation, and unlikely allies. But Ingray
couldn't be more different than Miles. She starts the book overwhelmed,
despairing, and not at all manic, and one spends the first part of the
story feeling sorry for her and becoming quite certain that everything
will go horribly wrong. The heart of this book is the parallel path
Leckie takes the reader and the characters along as they discover just
what Ingray's true talents and capabilities are. It's a book about
being hopelessly bad at things one was pressured towards being good at,
while being quietly and subtly good at the skills that let one survive
a deeply dysfunctional family.

There are lots of books with very active protagonists, and a depressing
number of books with passive protagonists pushed around by the plot.
There are very few books that pull off the delicate characterization
that Leckie manages here: a protagonist who is rather hopeless at
taking charge of the plot in the way everyone wants (but doesn't
particularly expect) her to, but who charts her own path through the
plot in an entirely unexpected way. It's a story that grows on you. The
plot rhythm never works in quite the way one expects from other books,
but it builds its own logic and its own rhythm, and reached a very
emotionally satisfying conclusion.

The Radchaai, or at least one Radchaai citizen, do show up eventually,
providing a glimmer of outside view at the Ancillary Justice world.
Even better, the Geck play a significant role. I adore Leckie's aliens:
they're strange and confusing, but in a refreshingly blunt way rather
than abusing gnomic utterances and incomprehensible intelligence. And
the foot-stomping of the spider bot made me laugh every time.

The stakes are a lot lower here than in Ancillary Justice, and Ingray
isn't the sort of character who's going to change the world. But that's
okay; indeed, one of the points of this book is why and how that's
okay. I won't lie: I'd love more Breq, and I hope we eventually get an
exploration of the larger consequences of her story. But this is a
delightful story that made me happy and has defter character work than
most SF being written. Recommended, but read the Ancillary trilogy
first.

One minor closing complaint, which didn't change my experience of the
book but which I can't help quibbling about: I'm completely onboard
with the three-gender system that Leckie uses for the Hwae (I wish more
SF authors would play with social as well as technological ideas), and
I think she wove it deftly into the story, but I wish she hadn't used
Spivak pronouns for the third gender. (e/em/eir, for those who aren't
familiar.) Any of the other gender-neutral pronouns look better to me
and cause fewer problems for my involuntary proofreader. I prefer
zie/zir for personal reasons, but sie/hir, zhe/zhim/zher, or even thon
or per would read more smoothly. Eir is fine, but em looks like 'em and
throws my brain into dialect mode and forces a re-parse, and e just
looks like a typo. I know from lots of Usenet discussions of pronouns
that I'm not the only one who has that reaction to Spivak. But it's a
very minor nit.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2017-10-27

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>