Strap into your flight seats, book clubbers, it’s time to blast off into Radch colonial space to visit Hwae! This session, we’re reading Ann Leckie’s Provenance (2017), a sci-fi tale of a politician’s daughter who tries to solve the mystery of stolen artifacts for personal gain by bringing an infamous thief out of cryogenesis to help her.
A power-driven young woman has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned.
Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray’s future, her family, and her world, before they are lost to her for good.
If you enjoy family politics, alternate family systems, three genders (neman use e/eir/em pronouns), archaeology, history, and forgeries, come back June 15 to discuss!
More on Provenance here. More on Leckie’s others books here.
Topics: nonbinary genders, gender identity, queer folks in space
Contains: political intrigue, family drama, biomech, depictions of violence, nausea, imprisonment/penal systems
What’s the Beyond Binaries Book Club?
Our focus is on books (and media) about characters with sexualities, gender identities, or gender expressions that aren’t simply male/female or gay/straight. That is, characters who are bi/pansexual/queer-identified, or whose gender expression or identity is not strongly fixed to the gender binary (may include agender, transgender, gender-nonconforming, gendervariant, genderfluid, intersex [as identity], non-binary, genderqueer, et al.). We tend to read speculative fiction novels (as opposed to non-fiction, including autobiographies), but other genre fiction, graphic novels, comics, and short stories may be on our list.
The Lobster Dance 
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