Tuesday, October 10, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Provenance by Ann Leckie


Provenance is the newest book by Ann Leckie, author of the Imperial Radch (Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy) trilogy, which won the Hugo for best novel and was nominated two other times.  The book is stand alone, featuring none of the characters from that trilogy, but takes place in the same universe.

In this universe, the story takes place in a world where humanity has spread to varying worlds with various cultures.  Humanity has encountered various alien cultures, the most scary of which are the Presger, whose technology is leaps and bounds beyond humanity's.  However, the Presger have created a treaty between humanity and the various alien races, whereby each race agrees not to harm the other.  Violations of the treaty are scary to contemplate, because no one can stand up to Presger technology.

Despite sharing the space opera setup with the Radch trilogy, Provenance is a more intimate book, almost fitting more in the heist genre than space opera (except there's....no heist).  That said, Provenance also differs from the trilogy in that it lacks anywhere near as strong a central character, and as a result I found it rather hard to care about large parts of the plot.

More after the jump:

-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Ingray Aughskold was born in a public creche on the planet Hwae, before being adopted by a prominent family/politician.  Hwae is a planet obsessed with names and pieces of history - vestiges, basically mementos of things from the past such as famous party invitations, autographs, etc., are prized and possessing them is a sign of merit/power.  Unfortunately for Ingray however, only one child can inherit the name of their parent on Hwae, and Ingray feels certain her mother's name is destined for her brother.

So Ingray hatches a crazy scheme:  She'll use the rest of her money to break out the son of her mother's political rival out of maximum security prison.  That son, one Pahlad Budrakim, was jailed for allegedly stealing the vestiges of his father and replacing them with forgeries, and Ingray believes Pahlad can lead her to those vestiges, aiding her mother politically and embarrassing her brother.

But the plan goes wrong practically from the start: the person broken out of prison LOOKS like Pahlad, but denies being him or knowing anything to begin with.   And then the ship Ingray has hired to take her back to Hwae is being chased by a crazed Alien Ambassador, accusing its captain of theft.  And then a human from another planet is murdered in the company of Ingray and "Pahlad."  And things keep piling on top of one another......

Ingray will soon find herself caught in a chain of Plots within Plots.  Ingray is insecure, but others suggest she is very good at adapting and coming up with new plots after a short time to think - but can she come up with something that can get her out of this mess, and come up with SOMETHING that will allow her to keep her standing....and maybe even her life?
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Probably the most common legitimate critique I've seen of Ancillary Justice is that the book starts off rather slowly, making it that some readers aren't interested in reading on.  Provenance has the same exact problem, maybe worse, in that it's really hard to see where the plot is going for quite a while - even having finished the book, you can tell in how long it took me to describe the plot above.

This is a particular problem here because I didn't find the characters that interesting - Ingray is a fine main character, but I didn't enjoy her that much, and many of the secondary characters, mainly Garal and Tic, aren't particularly well drawn out or that interesting (Tic's motivations for the 2nd half of the book didn't really make sense for me).  And the love interest/romance in this book feels REALLY thrown in, as the love interest character for Ingray has very little else to do than be there in her job and feel infatuated with Ingray.

The end result of this is that while I generally enjoy reading about gambits within gambits and guile heroes, for large swaths of this book I just didn't care about what was going on since I wasn't invested at all in the outcomes.  The stakes for most of this book (until the end) are entirely based upon Ingray/Garal/Tic's own personal futures, and when I didn't really care about those, that's a problem.

Now others might like the characters more than I did (I see other reviewers seem to have), in which case, I suspect those people will enjoy this book a lot more.  Because the plots of Ingray are certainly well done, and except for Tic's motivation midway through the book, I do think this is well plotted.

One other thing - if you haven't read the Imperial Radch trilogy, I'm not sure how easy things are to follow with this book.  The plot is entirely separate from that trilogy, in a different part of space (the only Radchaai character is the Radchaai Ambassador, who is probably the best character in the book, but a minor one and totally new to this book), but it references the outcome of Ancillary Mercy a few times, and the Presger treaty is a big deal to this book.  It certainly seems possible to read this book as a stand alone, but as I HAVE read an enjoyed the prior trilogy, it's hard for me to say how much of a handicap this is.

Overall, Provenance was a bit of a miss for me, as I just couldn't care for the characters, and this is a book that deals not with some universal crisis, but one of the characters' themselves.
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