Ann Leckie's New Novel, Provenance, Turns Interplanetary Art Into Mystery

As a child, Ann Leckie dreamed of growing up to be an archaeologist. Instead, she became a best-selling science fiction author—though she didn’t write her hit debut novel, Ancillary Justice, until she was well into her 40s. Two years after completing her trilogy about a body-hopping, sentient spaceship, her new book, Provenance, delves into her youthful passion for digging in the dirt, and what our impulse to unearth the artifacts of the past can tell us about ourselves.

Provenance takes place in the same universe as Ancillary Justice, but in a different corner of it. The novel is set on a planet called Hwae, whose people ascribe enormous significance to “vestiges,” momentos and artifacts from important moments in history that can command prestige, money and even political clout. The value of vestiges lies not in how they look, but in the power conferred by the physical presence of important people or events—a power that can be almost spiritual, making forgery of these items a trespass more akin to blasphemy than mere crime.

“I started with archaeology and I ended up reading a lot about art fraud,” says Leckie. “Say there’s a forged Rembrandt worth millions of dollars that’s discovered as a fraud, and suddenly it’s only worth ten dollars. But what’s the difference? It’s the exact same painting, except that Rembrandt didn’t touch it.”

The hero of Provenance is Ingray Aughskold, a young woman who sets out to recover a valuable set of lost relics with the help of an infamous thief. But when things go awry, Ingray finds herself embroiled in a murder investigation with intergalactic implications. For Leckie, there’s a clear link between archaeology and murder mysteries; both investigate events in the past by listening for echoes in the things the dead have left behind. “A whole section of Agatha Christie novels is murder mysteries at archaeological digs.” Leckie says. “When I initially started the book, it was going to be about the archaeology of ancient alien artifacts—but as I kept reading, I saw how the history of archaeology feeds into the history of museums, which fits in nicely with a certain kind of traditional mystery plot.”

Themes of identity have loomed large in all of Leckie’s books, and one of the most fascinating (and contentious) elements of the Imperial Radch trilogy that began with Ancillary Justice was the way it conceived of gender: namely, ignoring it as much as possible. The story takes place in an empire where everyone is referred to by the default pronoun “she,” making it impossible to distinguish the genders of the characters. In Provenance, Leckie reintroduces gendered pronouns, but also makes them more nuanced than a simple binary. Hwaean culture sees gender as both fluid and tripartite, and characters are as likely to use gender-neutral pronouns—e, em, eir—as anything else.

“When I wrote Ancillary Justice, the sensation of removing gender from the equation was really freeing,” says Leckie. “But some readers pointed out that it erases the complexity of gender: it erases masculine identities, and obscures the possibility of trans identities. I thought, that’s a really good point. So I decided the culture I built for this book would conceptualize gender in a different way than ours.”

Although children in Hwae are assigned names and genders at birth, they can select different ones when they reach adulthood. Why should people be saddled for their entire lives with markers of identity given to them as infants, the book seems to ask, especially if they don’t fit the people they become? “Plenty of cultures don’t do it that way,” says Leckie. “You have a child name and an adult name, or you change names over the process of your life as you do things or accomplish things or change your outlook.”

Where Ancillary Justice often focused on the body itself—how living in a physical form influences our identity—Provenance is more concerned with the influence of the past: How do the people and places we come from define us? Like many children on Hwae, Ingray is adopted; her adoptive mother, a prominent politician, plans to pass both her name and her position to her children after her death. Ingray undertakes her quest in order to impress her mother, to win her love—and possibly, to become her.

“If I was going thousands of years into the future,” Leckie says, “I wanted a family structure that was different. My mother was adopted. I’ve often been very irritated when people would ask me, do you know who your ‘real’ grandparents are? But ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ don’t have any meaning, except the ones we culturally valorize.”

This notion of the real infuses so many questions of identity and culture: What makes our families real, our genders real, our love real? What do we need to legitimize the advantages we have in life, our right to possess things or take them from others? How far are we willing to go to justify the things we believe about ourselves and the world? “It’s hard for me now to walk through a museum without seeing an explicit statement,” says Leckie. “When people dig things up, what are they looking for? They’re looking for proof of the story about where they come from, or where other people come from. It’s about inheriting a mantle that says something about who you are.”

The most important museum in Hwean culture is the System Lareum, which collects vestiges from the founding of their settlement and their declaration of independence from another system called Tyr. These ancient scraps of metal and cloth are displayed not as just interesting reminders of an earlier time, but living pieces of history that reinforce the defining stories of Hwean culture and even their claims of sovereignty. Museums, here, are not just historical collections but a form of propaganda, and discovering an important vestige—or its fraudulence—can have serious cultural, political, even diplomatic implications.

“One of the questions I asked myself as I was looking into the history of archaeology is why do we care so much about the history of ancient Egypt?” says Leckie. “Why is there a whole room full of Egyptian artifacts in the British Museum? Well, the British Empire considered itself to be the inheritor of Western civilization, which descended to them in a line from the Romans, who got it from the Greeks, who got it from the Egyptians. The more I thought about it, the more I began to see that it was imperialist in some ways, and about looking for certification of a particular line of inheritance.”

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