Ingray Auskjold has a problem, and it’s fair to say that the scheme she begins the book with; freeing a prisoner from the anarchic “Compassionate Removal” and whisking him away to their homeworld, Hwae, will not solve it. Nor will solving the murder that occurs later in the book, or even winning the affections of the romantic interest character for her. I like this about Ann Leckie’s writing – that she is talented at creating characters whose concerns reveal that they have not read the blurb on the back of their own book’s dust jacket, but are living some sort of life both inside and outside the pages of the book they’re in.

Ingray isn’t always thinking about the events that dominate Provenance for her, she’s thinking about life, and that’s unusual enough in a novel’s protagonist that it feels oddly disconcerting. She has concerns beyond those of the immediate crisis; she’s not just trying to survive to Tuesday (well, she is trying to survive to see another day) but she is also realizing that she has to think about next month, next year, and what she really wants as a direction in life. Especially in science fiction, there are a lot of protagonists who do not reliably think about, or try to create, their futures. Mark Whatney from The Martian has reason to be so short-focused, and is believable in that context, but is Case from Neuromancer really thinking about career choices and his life beyond the MacGuffin that will free him? Or Hiro from Snow Crash? Do either of them wonder what will happen when the family gets together again for the holidays next December?

Science fiction and fantasy plots have a tendency to place their characters in situations where the immediate concerns of survival and crisis resolution absorb all the waking moments the characters have, leaving nothing for the concerns that an actual human might have for the long-term future: if you have to stop the runaway robot right now, or you have to save the world from the Dark Lich, that leaves very little room for the questions “who am I?” and “what do I want?” (nod to the Shadows and the Vorlons there.) But Ingray is wrestling with this, and as a reader who absorbs a lot of ‘standard’ science fiction and fantasy, this feels unusually strange to me. I only realized upon coming to the end of the book why it felt strange to me, and how I have for so long thought about characters who seem now unfairly stunted in their thoughts and planning in my reading. Coming to Provenance after so much Asimov and Robert Charles Wilson, authors I like, but who do not have the same talent Leckie has for characters that want to thrive after the events in their books wrap up. This might be what brings me to enjoy the characterization in a very different author, Adam Rakunas, who I might not otherwise compare to Leckie, but whose characters also want something that will tempt them from after the last page of the novel.

It reads as though Leckie is recreating science fiction in some ways, and just as surprisingly as Katherine Addison did with The Goblin Emperor, she’s writing books that pull it off. Those scenes that fans of an older form of science fiction writing might decry as ‘boring’ and that aren’t immediately related to the action that the characters are a part of; those scenes are important to Ingray, and that’s what makes them essential to this book.

I think a little about my own life, and how little I have in common with Fraa Erasmus or with Susan Calvin; and while I love those characters, it’s not my fault that I don’t see myself in them – I wasn’t designed to be in them, or them in me. There’s more than a little of myself that I can find in Ingray Auskjold, though, and that’s both a good thing for the character and a healthy thing for the novel Provenance. It’s not really a sci-fi escape caper, a murder mystery, or a thriller, although elements of those genres are found throughout the book, but those elements are all a part of the coming of age of a woman from a very different culture who needs to make her own way in her world, and find out how to go from where she’s been to where she needs to be, just as we need to make our own way in ours.