Whew, made it! All entries in the first four categories of the 2018 Hugo nominees read and reviewed before the award ceremony on August 19. Short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels, including the novel Provenance by Ann Leckie. And in a list of stories that include murder mysteries, con artist capers, incomprehensible alien etiquette, races with a third gender, and some truly difficult family dynamics, it’s fitting that this novel has all of that.
Ingray Aughskold and her brother Danach have been raised knowing that they were competing to be their mother Netano’s heir. It’s pretty clear that Danach is Netano’s favorite, and a foster child like Ingray might not have a home anymore if she loses.
Ingray has one last chance, a desperate scheme to prove herself. She’s spent her entire savings to buy the notorious thief Pahlad Budrakim out of prison so she can find out where the priceless Budrakim Vestiges were hidden after they were stolen.
The group she’s paid to do this is the best in the business, so it’s kind of a shock when the person they provide tells her that they aren’t Pahlad Budrakim, and they have no idea about any stolen Vestiges. This is only the start of things going wrong.
Leckie has already written an entire trilogy in this universe, but it’s set on a different world featuring a different alien race, so this book starts out from a completely new perspective. There’s still quite a bit of explaining that has to be done about the races, politics, history, gender (more on that later), technology, and a host of other items, so people (like me) who didn’t get all that in the previous books have some catching up to do.
In fact I was a little worried that I was going to get left completely behind by the plot. The pace also felt kind of slow at the start, and I was starting to wonder how long Ingray was going to be left flailing at the door to her transport, and there were quite a few information dumps, and I wasn’t sure which alien race was involved in an upcoming treaty-amendment, and whether I would have learned who this Netano person was in the previous books…
…and then I looked up and an hour had gone by, I was more than fifty pages into the story, and Ingray had already ditched her previous plan for one where she and the person-who-isn’t-Pahlad run a con on her arrogant brother Danach, hopefully humiliating him and possibly Netano in the process. Because if you have to burn your bridges then you might as well nuke them from orbit.
Basically, this book pulls you in. The plot is pretty convoluted though, and it’s hard to figure out what everyone’s motivations are, since they change depending on whether you’re talking about their public plans or their private ones, and whether someone else is trying to thwart the former or the latter. I couldn’t always keep up, but the author usually has the characters provide a summary so you can get at least an idea of why something that just happened is catastrophically bad news.
Having a foreign diplomat found murdered in your own home while you’re harboring a known criminal would be one of those things that doesn’t need any explanation.
I should probably mention the element of gender in this book, since I don’t think I’ve seen the element of a third gender integrated so completely in a novel before. Like the characters in J.Y. Yang’s Tensorate series, children on Ingray’s home planet of Hwae choose their gender when they become adults. Here though, there are three choices: man, woman, or neman.
Leckie uses the Spivak pronouns rather than the Singular They (and yes, I did a Google search to find out what those are called). All the “e”, “em”, and “eir” takes a little getting used to, since sometimes it feels more like dialect rather than referencing a different gender. Not-Pahlad falls into the third category, and what it forces you to do is constantly rethink your assumptions about the character. You can’t fall back onto the usual adjectives like “manly”, “delicate”, “bitchy”, or “thug”, when you don’t know if any of these fit someone who isn’t male or female. You just have to judge the person solely on what they do rather than what they are, and this ends up affecting your assumptions about all of the other characters as well.
The concept of Vestiges needs a little explanation too. A huge part of the Hwae culture revolves around these; they’re sort of artifacts, souvenirs, remembrances, pretty much any tangible item that can be linked to an important event in history. Your standing in society is based at least partly on the quality of your vestiges; do you have the actual cup that was used to make a toast at the signing of the treaty of so-and-so, or are you from a family that only has a few framed autographs from an event where several hundred copies were handed out at the door?
It seems like an odd thing for a civilization to focus on, except that if you think about it there’s so much that people are graded on by society that sometimes doesn’t have a thing to do with anything they’ve actually done. Their money (that their family made), their clothing/house/cars (made by someone else and bought with money their family made), who their ancestors were and what their race is (which they have literally no control over). People can wrap themselves in all of it and convince them that it makes them better. So if some evidence crops up that maybe makes some of those things meaningless, or out-and-out-lies, then there’s this huge incentive to attack the messenger.
Every bit of this universe, from the spider-mechs to the ships to the mysterious blocks of multi-colored Ruin Glass that’s dug from the ground in Hwae and made into buildings, right down to the alien dietary restrictions, it’s all fascinating. But my favorite part has to be the character of Ingray. From the very first page Ingray is completely, totally, and whole-heartedly…out of her depth. She’s not beautiful and poised like her adoptive mother Netano, she doesn’t have buckets of ambition like her foster brother Danach. Every scheme Ingray gets into is just a few moments away from total disaster, and she constantly feels like she’s just a few steps away from the edge of a cliff.
A sensible person would back off, throw in the towel, cry uncle, pick your metaphor. And every time she has the chance to do just that, Ingray doesn’t. She could be stranded on another planet without even the money for a bowl of noodles, or facing down a mother and a brother who have never given her any encouragement, or about to make a terrifying walk across the outside of a space station, Ingray’s first reaction is “I can’t do this”. And then she does it anyway.
Sometimes her plans are about as well thought out as literally turning around and running, but she always manages to do something other than quit. Whether she’s dealing with planetary politics, family members who want what’s best for you (or themselves) without ever bothering to understand who you actually are, or several alien races who are all trying to outdo each other while being held hostage by a treaty with a really nasty enemy, there’s something massively appealing about a very unsure-of-herself heroine who manages to take them all on, wishing for a cup of tea and randomly scattering hairpins as she goes.