Provenance by Ann Leckie

It’s January in London and the temperature has dropped.

It’s fucking freezing.

Well, freezing for London…

I was meant to be in Canada this week-

Well, not “meant to be”, because I don’t really know what that means as a phrase, but I was certainly expecting to be there until I discovered – bag packed and ready for sleep then a morning trip to the airport – that I’d filled in an immigration form incorrectly, as it turns out that I currently have a valid work permit over there, which I didn’t realise (a good surprise?), and had I entered with the form I had, I would have invalidated that permanently, which was not something I wanted to do. So, around 20 hours before my flight, I was sent an incredibly complex new form to fill in, which (after some very intense panic attacks, the really, really, really, good kind) my lover helped me to file, but, alas alas alas, even flagging that new form as urgent wasn’t enough for me to get a response in time for me to get that flight. It’s almost 3 days later now, and that form still hasn’t arrived, so I don’t even know why I (we) bothered spending 5 hours completing it on Friday night…

Anywaaaaay, what this means is that I’m home alone, when I was expecting to be neither home nor alone, but in a much colder place, so I did not expect the London temperature to plummet like it has…

To try and not be too sad, I decided to read some more frothy sci-fi (I will read something serious soon, I promise, though I don’t know what tbh), choosing to grab Provenance by Ann Leckie, the fourth (currently of five) of her books that form a series the name of which I don’t know, now that it isn’t just the Ancillary Trilogy.

Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Trilogy is a set of books I red a couple of years ago, the first one (Ancillary Justice) is fucking excellent, with some great narrative twists and turns, the second one (Ancillary Sword) functions as an extension of that world without being quite as good, while the third one (Ancillary Mercy) only really finishes off narrative threads introduced in the earlier books and without anything unexpected or surprising happening, which makes for a rather unsatisfying end…

It is likely the misfire of that trilogy’s finale that led Leckie to return to this world with this narratively disconnected story.

None of the characters from the previous books feature… or if they do, they are minor characters whose names and roles I didn’t remember, and as I didn’t feel like I lacked anything in this book by not recognising anyone, it’s a moot point, really, if I did.

Provenance, then, tells the story of a young woman trying to impress her foster mother, who is a politician about to choose her political heir.

It’s set on a different set of planetary systems to the main action of those previous books, but all of the alien species mentioned/created by Leckie before are mentioned here, and the action of those earlier stories is referred to, but it doesn’t play a significant narrative role, forming more “background” than plot.

Ann Leckie’s fictional universe was an engaging and a fun one and definitely had the scope for expansion – to reiterate, it was the lack of exciting narrative in that third book, rather than any failure of world building or imagination, that made it feel like a disappointment…

–///–

And now it’s literally fucking snowing…

Not very hard and none of the snow is staying where it lands, but there us snow in the air as I waltz home from the gym, where I’m currently watching (on the treadmills) a coupla episodes of The Sopranos a week, which is unsurprisingly (and I comment unoriginally) very excellent!

Provenance also is very excellent.

It opens with the hero busting some guy out of a prison who claims to be a forger of ancient artefacts (ancient space artefacts, so not that ancient; future ancient artefacts) and they hatch a plan to try and undermine some local politician, but chaos ensues when the forger’s identity is revealed and then they become embroiled in the middle of other people’s political machinations and their own little petty, personal plans and motivations pale in comparison to the planetary threat that they must help to avoid.

Well, not “must”. They could very easily have walked away, but choose not to. And that’s the the fun of it, and a very standard trope of adventure and mystery narratives, innit….

Provenance is good, swashbuckling fun, with shapeshifting biological robots, with strange alien social practices… there’s lots of humour, lots of adventure, lots of excitement, and though it doesn’t quite have the “hashtag omg this is so original and exciting” element of Ancillary Justice, it’s absolutely a fun, big stakes space adventure, and I enjoyed it a lot!

Will read Leckie’s fifth one in this series at some point, too!

Okay.

Going back to being slightly sick and very sad now…