Provenance by Ann Leckie
Ann Leckie , Orbit , Sci-Fi / September 28, 2017

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. I’ll admit that sometimes I stumble a little when it comes to science fiction. Of all the different genre fiction that is out there, it’s sci-fi that is regularly my great white whale. Space battles and aliens blowing up into small piles of green goo is fine, I get that. It’s when the science fiction gets a bit more thoughtful that I tend to have problems. I remember the first time I tried to read The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F Hamilton, boy did I struggle. I could not get my head around the first chapter. The plot seemed so weird and outlandish that I just didn’t get it. I have a…