Provenance

I quite enjoy it when authors take you into there previously established worlds from another angle. Ann Leckie is doing exactly that in Provenance. Here we enter the universe that was established in the original Imperial Radch trilogy, but we have new characters, new worlds, new politics. The events told previously are obliquely referenced and seem to be occurring somewhat concurrently, but we follow the goings on in a minor backwater system with its own petty squabbles on a different scale.

Here we follow Ingray, minor scion of an important family trying to secure her status and inheritance by rescuing a con artist from prison. But when she does so she ends up engaging the services of a captain running from a reclusive species and dragged into a conflict between her home world and one of its neighbours. Full of the same clever political machinations that typified the earlier Imperial Radch stories this is an intriguing companion novel. Separate but interlinked, sharing all the same DNA and telling a pretty enjoyable tale in the process

Ann Leckie is definitely one of my favorite modern authors. She writes with such a great sense of humor and has such incredible world-building skills. While I didn't like Provenance quite as much as the Ancillary series (it doesn't make quite the same social commentary), I did find it a very enjoyable adventure. I love the idea of “vestiges” and a culture that is built around collecting artifacts whose value changes with each moment. Maybe it's because I own a ton of relatively worthless things that i value so highly...

While this book doesn't deal with gender issues as directly as the Imperial Radch books do, Leckie does make a point of including gender neutral pronouns for certain characters, and being non-binary is a subject treated as ordinarily as being cis-gender. She even has characters who determine gender with their assumption of adulthood, a pretty great concept. On her book tour, Leckie spoke at length about stealing from archaeology, and I'd really be interested to read her annotations on which cultures she pulled from to write this and her other books.

Set in the same world as the Radch trilogy, but not in the Radch, this book is also full of Easter eggs for readers of the previous trilogy while not necessitating reading in order. When Radch characters show up, I had a whole different view of them than I did in the first series, which is a pretty cool trick to pull off.

Provenance is engaging, twisty, emotional, and altogether a great read. Highly recommended to people who like their space opera with biomechanical spiders and a diverse, non-binary cast.

There isn't any good tea in this book. Apart from that, there's very little to complain. The main character is lovable, and somewhat naive, but you just have to wish her well from the start. The cast of side characters are great, too, my favorite being Tic, who is sometimes almost Zeiat levels of funny.

There are hardly any Radchaai in this, but we learn a lot about the Geck, who are an impossibly weird alien race, and the treaty with the Presger, hinted at in the Ancillary books, is front and center.

My second Ann Leckie (after [b:Ancillary Justice 17333324 Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) Ann Leckie https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397215917l/17333324.SY75.jpg 24064628]) and I really enjoyed the first half of this - getting to know the new world with its cultural conventions, and following along the adventure and mystery of our heroine retrieving a stranger from prison - but then it all fizzled out into the mechanics of diplomacy and left me a bit unsatisfied. And what was up with the narration being so enamoured with the Geck mech transformation abilities, making it a plot device several times in a way that dumbed down the reader. Too bad, considering this started so strong.

Set in the same world as her universally praised, award-winning debut Ancillary Justice, I admit I was a bit leery going in. I just didn't get the first book of the trilogy and thought that it was more sci-fi for sci-fi purists. A tourist like myself inevitably felt lost. I imagine it akin to watching Avengers: Infinity War and wondering what all the fuss is about, when the last codpiece and cape movie you saw was Adam West's Batman.

It's a bit of a whodunnit, meets caper, with a sprinkling of intergalactic tension, spiralling around our protagonist Ingray Aughskold. You don't need to have completed the Imperial Radch trilogy to enjoy this and thankfully it's a more approachable stand-alone story. More Ant-man than Avengers.

Read as Luis as played by Michael Pena in Ant-ManSo it starts with a prison break right? It's supposed to be Pahlad Budrakin, who's totally going to be the lynchpin to a larger plot that's like a swing for the fences plan that's going to get Ingray's hoity-toity foster mother to take notice. Can't fail right? But it turns out e's not Pahlad. Hold up - see Pahlad is a neman who identifies as neither male or female so e's pronouns are different. So Ingray is in over her head. And then, get this, an intergalactic dignitary is killed and then representatives from remote worlds begin to pop up on Hwae. Things are blowing up down there. end scene

And then a wonderfully intermixed exploration of provenance. On whether where you come from matters as much as where you are now and who you claim to be. How malleable that notion is when it comes to identity vs artifacts.