Provenance By Ann Leckie

Provenance 

By Ann Leckie 

Ann Leckie was born March 2, 1966, in Toledo Ohio. She graduated from Washington University with a degree in music in 1989 and since then has worked as a waitress, receptionist, a rodman in a survey crew, and as a sound engineer. She didn't turn her hand to writing until after getting married and having children. She was by her own statement driven to writing out of boredom as she was at the time a stay at home Mother. Her first novel Ancillary Justice was first sketched out in 2002, but she didn't start seriously working on it until 2006. She wouldn't finish it until 2012 when it was picked up by Orbit Publishing. So if you're ever feeling like you're taking to long to work on your own novel, remember that six years of work from Mrs. Leckie translates to a novel that would win the Hugo and Nebula award for best novel, the Arthur C Clarke award for best science fiction and many, many more. So don't be so hard on yourself. Mrs. Leckie would also write two sequels Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, which also in their turns won awards. Provenance is set in the same universe as that trilogy but far far away from the events of those novels, allowing us to examine events going on completely independent of Breq's actions. Let's turn to them, shall we?

Ingray is a young lady in a complicated position. Adopted from a public creche by a popular and powerful politician, she is locked in a struggle with her adopted brother over who will inherit not just her Mother's wealth and position but her very name and career. While Ingray is loved and cared for by her Mother, it's very clear that her brother, Danach is very favored over her and there seems to be little she can do to change that. This leaves her feeling like she's in a trap with the walls closing in as she has worked her whole life to inherit from her adopted Mother. If she does not inherit, she may not just lose a chance at power and influence but what little of both she has managed to build up on her own; as she has been working for her Mother's political office and helping manage her political campaigns. Would her brother want to keep her around once he inherits? Would she even want to stay and spend the rest of her life toiling in his shadow? That said, where would she go if she wanted to leave? These are hard enough questions even when the stakes are low but for Ingray, the stakes are life as she knows it. However, Ingray isn't someone who just sits on her rear and dithers while everything spins apart. When a young man in a similar position to hers is convicted of stealing the artifacts of his adopted family and shipped off to a type of prison called Compassionate Removal, Ingray sees an opportunity to achieve something. Something big, bold, and impossible to ignore. Something that not only proves to her Mother her worth but puts one of her Mother's political opponents in her debt. We can also see that whatever Ingray's faults she does not suffer from a lack of ambition. So she heads off to the neighboring system of Tyr with every scrap of cash she can beg, borrow, or earn with one goal. She's gonna get that thief out of Compassionate Removal, she's gonna find the artifacts and she's gonna become a hero or die trying. Of course, it's never that simple.

Family and the various different ways we build, understand and maintain our families are at the centerpiece of this story. Alongside that theme is the difficulty we can have when presented with an alternate way of understanding what a family is and who is part of it. I can understand this because if there's anything that seems universal and essentially basic, it's family. Families have traditionally provided the bedrock of our societies and are commonly considered to be the bonds that hold even when all other bonds of law, justice, and friendship fail. For the overwhelming majority of us, the role of our families in shaping our early lives, worldviews, and grown-up personalities cannot be overstated (My relatives and family, two distinct and only partially overlapping things, certainly created the creature whose red text you read today). We are all part of at least one family either by emotional or biological bonds, whether we want to be or not (For instance, Frigid is part of the Family I Choose). The idea that there are other types of families out there that have completely different ways of relating to each other and determining who is a member and who isn't can seem incredible to some people. But there are a vast array of ways to organize and maintain a family that is practiced even on our single little blue world. There are family systems that would not count your father as a relative, that would count cousins as siblings, that would say that a person can have three or four mothers and even more fathers (I have two dads and one biological father-who-is-not-dad, for instance. Neither dad is related to me by blood or marriage), these are real systems that developed here on Earth by human beings living in familiar environments. So imagine the incredible variation of family and what it means to people that would happen to a species that has not only lived on thousands of worlds but has done so for thousands of years with no common political or social framework to hold them together.

Leckie introduces us to these family systems and the people in them but leaves us to figure out how these families work and what the rules are through observing the characters and how they interact. Ingray's society is perhaps the easiest to figure out, as there are male and female parents, children, siblings, etc. It's also the system and culture we're exposed to the most as the story is told entirely through Ingray's point of view, so let's touch on this. Ingray is from Hwae, a system settled by humans long ago by other planets, that has functioned as an independent state for a number of generations. Unlike the Radch of the prior books, the people of Hwae have the concept of genders in their society and do make distinctions but the treatment of the genders seems to be fairly egalitarian since we see male and female soldiers, police and politicians at all levels of society. Adoption is common and seems to be expected of the upper class, although it is not just children without parents. Even well-connected families will ask a wealthier, more powerful family to adopt one of their children and this is considered perfectly normal (Not unlike ancient Rome?). In fact, it's considered good parenting, as it gives your child access to a level of education, connection, and power that you could never provide and that child may be able to provide additional favors and access to your other children someday. There is also an obsession with artifacts in Hwae culture that they refer to as vestiges. Vestiges are always physical artifacts of a past event, older, powerful families tend to have collections of them that they present as proof of their history and rightful claim to their social position. People even collect vestiges which can be almost anything; an invitation card to an old party, the guestbook from a hotel, a card that you bought when you visited the zoo. Having an old vestige that belonged to someone important or from a historical event is considered to be a great thing and can bring a lot of prestige to the person who has it and can be politically useful to an ambitious person (sort of how the early Christian church would treat supposed relics from saints or Biblical persons). As you might guess, this has created a market for fraud, forgery, and more. Which Ingray finds out about when the person she's looking to rescue explains to her in detail just what is going on behind the scenes in regards to vestiges.

This is complicated as Ingray finds herself drawn into alien and interstellar affairs. The Ambassador for the Geck, an alien race that allowed some humans to settle on their world but is otherwise isolationist, has taken an interest in the ship Captain that Ingray hired. The Ambassador insists that the Captain is Geck and a thief. The Captain insists that he is from Tyr and never stole a thing. Meanwhile, her Mother has guests from another star system. An archaeologist looking to dig into the past, believing that her own people might have been from Hwae or had lived there for a time before moving on to their current world. Any such discoveries would have political implications, as the nation that the archaeologist is from also has a number of imperial ambitions and is looking for ways to justify them. The archaeologist isn't alone, of course, she brought a distant relative but it's odd that she did so, since by the rules of her culture that relative and her aren’t allowed to speak to each or discuss the other person with other people. I'll be honest, I'm deeply perplexed how that even works within their society but it does make for some entertaining interactions. Imagine having a conversation with two people who are bound by every rule in the book to not only not interact with each other but to refuse to acknowledge anyone else's interactions with the other person while not being rude. When the survey on the dig site goes terribly wrong and accusations of criminal behavior start flying, Ingray has to parse all these relationships, and how they tie into the greater political actions going on in the background.

Ingray herself is a very believable and fun character. While she's smart, capable and often decisive in her decisions and actions, she's also very anxious and prone to feeling overwhelmed by the runaway events that are pulling her along. That said she's at her best when she's dealing with people directly because she's been trained from a young age in politics and politics is the art of dealing with people. While privileged by her upbringing, she is still something of an outsider due to the fact that she is unlikely to inherit from her Mother. That said, she was brought up in what I would refer to as gentle society so violence is very shocking to her when she meets it face to face. She's not an action character and would prefer to sit down with everyone and discuss this rationally over a hot meal. This makes her a very different character from Breq, who as a former soldier and ship of war was no stranger to violence and its consequences. Not to mention that in the first book of her trilogy, Breq was pretty much hellbent on murder So expect a much different main character this time around. That Mrs. Leckie is able to write both characters as convincing people that you can feel sympathy and root for is a testament to her writing abilities.

If you feel a bit intimidated by the Radch trilogy, this book actually makes a good gateway into the universe. Just be aware that there no common characters or events between the books and that Provenance might just spoil a touch of the trilogy for you. That said, it stands up on its own magnificently. You could read this book and none of the other books set in the universe and still walk away with a complete story that contains everything it needs to, to be understandable. I'm giving Provenance by Ann Leckie an A.

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer.

You know while it was great book, there wasn't a lot of action here. I think we need something wilder next.

Next week, Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. Keep reading!