Hugos 2018: Provenance by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 441 pages
Published 2017
Acquired April 2018
Read June 2018

Provenance by Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie won the Hugo, the Nebula, and basically the everything for Ancillary Justice-- her very first novel. Provenance is her first book since the Ancillary trilogy concluded. The first was amazing, an excellent, gripping, clever novel. The second was low-energy and disappointing. I haven't yet got around to the third. Provenance takes place in the same universe as the Ancillary books, but is entirely unrelated.

In terms of quality, Provenance is somewhere between the first and second Ancillary books. It's about a young woman who comes up with a desperate plan to curry favor with her mother, breaking someone out of jail to get him to help her locate artifacts he stole. It feels a little generic YA at times: I liked Ingray, but she is brave and clever and nice and resourceful, and is on the verge of tears a little too often. (The back cover calls her "power-driven" but this is completely untrue.) The beginning is quite good, as you figure out what Ingray is up to, and she keeps being thwarted in her desires; no sooner do you figure out her plan than it is completely upset by a new revelation, one that made me actually say "uh oh" aloud.

But after that I felt the book tapered off. About halfway through, Ingray's original goal just kind of dissolves and the books feels like it's treading water for a while with incidental details before it finally gets going again... but then it's moving in a completely different direction, and a new plotline with only tenuous links to the first. This is exciting, but not as interesting as what the book's beginning promised, I think. It's never bad, but it feels generic in a way that Ancillary Justice did not, which had strong attention to cultural detail and a cool sf hook with the ancillaries. Provenance doesn't have a cool sf hook; the technologies here are all pretty bog-standard stuff you've seen in other sf. A good adventure book, but I had hoped for more from the author of Ancillary Justice.