Ancillary thievery

 March was VERY BUSY for me, and as such, it took me the ENTIRE MONTH OF MARCH to read Anne Leckie's Provenance, a book I specifically picked because it wasn't too long or dense and I knew it'd be a fun break from all the conference planning and stuff I had to do this month. 

 

And it was! I just wished I got to break more, so that it didn't take me five weeks to get through a fairly zippy 400-page sci-fi novel. 

 

Anyway. I figured I'd like this one since I had the pleasure of hearing Ann Leckie herself read from part of it at Pandemonium Books when it was first released, which is how I knew that the opening incident involves a politician's daughter, Ingray Aughskold, spending every time she's ever made to spring a convicted thief from "Compassionate Removal," a.k.a. prison. The thief is Pahlad Budrakim, the child of a rival politician who was convicted of stealing some very valuable relics (called "vestiges" in this civilization) and replacing them with advanced forgeries. There are a few snarls to this plan. Snarl number one pops up when the person Ingray springs from prison insists that they're not Pahlad Budrakim. Over the course of the book many other snarls pop up, like that they might indeed be Pahlad Budrakim; that Pahlad Budrakim might not be either a thief or a forger; that the person sprung from prison (who might or might not be Pahlad Budrakim) might or might not be Geck now, that the captain Ingray and Garal (as the person who might or might not be Pahlad Budrakim is known) catch a ride from might be either a thief or Geck or both, that various important historical artifacts might or might not be forged or stolen or both, and on and on. All this goes on against a backdrop of political turmoil as the conclave called at the end of the Ancillary trilogy starts being put together, and as another planetary system seems to be gearing up to invade Ingray's homeworld in order to take possession of a strategically useful gate. 

 

Then there's Ingray's family, which is a mess of political maneuvering and status jockeying, especially between Ingray and her obnoxious brother Danach. 

 

I'm a huge sucker for Leckie's whole "comedy of manners in space" schtick, and this one has extra heist elements and less revenge element, so it was really just an enormous amount of fun as far as I'm concerned. The Hwaean culture she builds is inventive; it's very different from most existing human cultures but it's still very human, unlike the Geck, who are very alien and also hilarious. Most especially their spider mechs are hilarious, if also kind of creepy.

 

The Ancillary books made a big splash for having a tenet of Radch culture being that everyone is socially considered female; in Hwae, they keep up what the Radchaai consider the barbaric practice of gender: Children are non-gendered (they/them/their); upon reaching majority, they pick an adult name and gender, of which there are three: man, woman, and neman (e/em/eir). I'm sure some Sad Puppies are having a raging meltdown about this somewhere in their rancid corners of the internet; I found that, much like the previous trilogy's mono-gender thing, it took like three pages to get used to and then I didn't even think about it. 

 

Anyway, it was fun, I liked it, the only thing that would have made it better would have been if I could have read the whole thing in one day lounging by the pool with a margarita.