FF Friday: two SF books with F/F pairings

[sholio]

That subject line has a lot of F's in it ...

I recently read a couple of sci-fi books with F/F pairings, so I figured I'd collect the reviews in one post. In both cases the pairing is a relatively minor part of a larger story, but in both cases it's also the protagonist's main and endgame pairing.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith - Yes, the "Hild" Nicola Griffith! This is her first book from back in the early 90s, and I really enjoyed it; it has a classic SF feel with an all-female cast, which means that all of the traditionally male stock roles in that kind of story are filled by women - it's great. The book takes place on a planet where a virus has killed all the men, leaving an all-female population. The protagonist is an anthropologist investigating how their society works and how they reproduce, but quickly gets sucked into the complicated local political scene, while on the outside, military decisions are being made that will determine the planet's future. I enjoyed the first, oh, 2/3 of the book more than the last third - it ended up being a little "woo" for my tastes and also dangles unsolved mysteries for a presumably planned sequel that never materialized. But it's a good, solid, old-school sci-fi read with lots of fascinating worldbuilding detail, and I liked it a lot.

Provenance by Ann Leckie - So I kinda feel like I'm the last person in my reading circles to get around to this one, but I loved it once I did; it was riveting from start to finish. I very much approve of Leckie's commitment to throwing a new completely batshit complication at her poor protagonist whenever things started to slow down. I enjoyed Ingray, the narrator, particularly her tendency to burst into tears when upset, panic and throw up in space suits, and otherwise basically have -1000 points to badassery at all times while also managing to be level-headed and resourceful under pressure. (At one point one of the other characters accurately sums up Ingray as a person who panics for the first 10 minutes and then comes up with a brilliant and crazy plan to save the day.) I had a couple of nitpicks with the ending, specifically with some of the plot threads feeling unresolved and some characters' motivations that weren't clear to me, but I think this comes down at least partly to Ingray being a somewhat obtuse narrator and just failing to pick up on things that the reader is supposed to pick up on - actually I think I'll expand on those (highly spoilerishly) under a cut. Definitely enjoyed the book, though.








Provenance spoilers follow

... so was it just me or did we never actually get a solid answer to the murder mystery? Did Hevom actually do it? Ingray was so convinced that he'd done it on the basis of, essentially, circumstantial evidence and failure to fully grok the culture he comes from that I was equally convinced that she was going to turn out to be wrong, but unless there was an actual resolution that I missed, I guess he did actually do it after all? I was also really unclear on the intended sequence of events that was supposed to result from releasing Garal/Pahlad from prison - I mean, I get the general effect it was supposed to have, but it seems like if they're doing something as spectacularly rare and risky as letting someone out of a supposedly unbreakable prison (something so unthinkable that Ingray's never even heard of it happening before, so rare that there's no legal provision for it) you'd want it to be for a more concrete purpose than something like "well, maybe this or that will happen once we turn him loose." Were there aspects to the agreement that made it less of a giant pile of variables and coincidences, possibly involving Garal having agreed to do specific things and/or having more of the original variables at the station controlled, that Ingray just doesn't know or wonder about?

Honestly, while I loved the book while I was reading it, Ingray is in retrospect a strange choice for the narrator of a murder mystery, because she's not a particularly curious person and she's also somewhat obtuse. (I spent much of the book wondering why Tic was going to the lengths he did to help them, and eventually concluded that the only way it makes sense is if a lot more went on between Garal and Tic on the ship that we the readers never knew about because Ingray didn't know about it and wasn't curious about it.) I liked her as a character and really enjoyed that she was different from the kind of narrators that you typically get in books like this, but it does mean that you end up with an ending where things aren't particularly resolved but Ingray is too busy with her own life to bother finding out more and too unclear on nuance to have figured out more of it on her own.

I don't want all of this to sound like I hated the book, because I really enjoyed it; it was delightful! It's just that the more I think about it, the more I'm kind of "????" about the plot.

Comments

[flamebyrd]

This was also my take on Provenance! I enjoyed reading it tremendously, all the characters were great, but on reflection I have no idea what actually happened in it.

[sholio]

Hahaha, yes, exactly! I still can't figure out if Leckie knew exactly what was going on and couldn't tell us because Ingray never figured out a bunch of it, or if it's one of those cases where the author had the first half of the book already planned with all the cool bits, and just kind of slapped an explanation onto it afterwards. (A number of Stephen King's books read like that ...)

[rachelmanija]

all of the traditionally male stock roles in that kind of story are filled by women

This is my favorite thing about all-female casts, which I realize sounds very tautological. But there's some types of characters you basically never see portrayed by women unless EVERYONE'S a woman.

[sovay]

But there's some types of characters you basically never see portrayed by women unless EVERYONE'S a woman.

+1. I keep meaning to write about Caged (1950) for exactly this reason.

[genarti]

Yesss. And even more than that, IMO, some types of relationships you basically never see between two women unless everyone's a woman.

[rmc28]

The exchange between Nakia and Okoye in Black Panther, about their duties taking them literally in different directions, hit me so hard, because I've seen variants on that conversation between two dudes loads of times, and occasionally between a woman and a man, but I couldn't remember ever seeing it between two women.

[genarti]

Oh man, yes. Such a great and powerful moment in a great and powerful movie.

[chomiji]

Provenance is sweet and delightful and no, I don't know who really dunnit at all, even after rereading it a couple of times.

Ingray is a hero for the rest of us. I particularly appreciate her Mommy issues.

[genarti]

Ha, yes! I loved Ingray and I loved Provenance and I do indeed have significant questions about a lot of the plot points. I don't especially care, since I enjoyed everything the book is choosing to focus on so much, but I wouldn't blame anyone else for being more bugged by the things it's choosing to either gloss over or airily handwave away.

Also, Ammonite sounds very intriguing!

[lunabee34]

LOL

I don't know!

I read my review, and it doesn't indicate that I was unclear about anything, but it mostly consists of stuff like, "I love Ingray" and "I hope Leckie will write more back story about the ruin glass," so uh, I need to read this again. LOL

[edenfalling]

I was also unclear on some of the plot stuff in Provenance, but I figured that was because the plot was mostly an excuse for the character and cultural worldbuilding stuff. And also because Ingray is the kind of person who genuinely doesn't notice or care about that kind of thing unless it's directly in her face affecting her personally. Which is both refreshing and frustrating. *wry*

I suspect that Ingray's reasoning behind retrieving Garal/Pahlad was intentionally shapeless on Leckie's part, because Ingray is acting on the principle that she needs to make a Big Gesture of some sort, latched onto her first wild idea without thinking it through, and then carried on via a combination of stubbornness, fear, and inertia. I agree that it's pretty clear that Garal and Tic established a lot of rapport when Ingray wasn't paying attention. As for the murder plot... yeah, I got nothing. I suspect it's probably more realistic for it to end anticlimactically than for everything to be neatly resolved with a clear motive and method, but one appeal of fiction is that things CAN resolve tidily the way they so often don't in real life so that remains a niggling annoyance.

What I remember most about Provenance, however, is realizing about two-thirds of the way through the book that while I was very clear on every Hwaean's gender, I had absolutely no idea about anybody's biological sex, because on Hwae that's irrelevant and so Ingray never thinks about it. I love that. :)

[kore]

I love Griffith. Have you seen her blog? It is AMAZING https://nicolagriffith.com/blog/

I so, so wanted to love Provenance, because so many people I know did, and I absolutely loved the Ancillary books. But I bounced really hard off the opening no matter how many times I tried. I think I just did not click with Ingray at all.

[lilacsigil]

I was pretty happy with the resolution to the murder plot - it was very much written off as "off-worlders gonna off-world" by everyone once they got Garal/Pahlad sorted, but I agree that I still don't get the whole release of Garal/Pahlad thing. But that's okay, I really enjoyed it anyway.

But now I keep trying to start Leckie's next book, "The Raven Tower" and while everyone says the second person narrative is that way for a reason, I just cannot get into it.

[auroracloud]

Thanks for this! I'm currently reading Hild - though this seems to be a bad time to be reading something that big because it keeps getting put aside for Hugo nominees that the library is going to want back soon, so I've been progressing on it veeeeery slowly. But I like the writing and the heroine and everything, so whenever I'll be done with it, I'll probably want to check out some of Griffith's other work. I've heard about Ammonite and I've contemplated a copy of the book at a convention book seller's table. Good to hear it's enjoyable!

I read Provenance for last year's Hugos and loved it; not as deeply as I love the Ancillary trilogy, but it was fun and made me feel good, and I felt so validated in reading about a protagonist who's super insecure and tears up and panics at everything but once that's done, ends up being really competent at what she sets herself to do. And the background f/f romance made me very happy. It probably says something about the book, though, that I forgot there was a murder mystery. And I never quite understood the details of the release of Garal/Pahlad, either, but still found that part of the story fun. I loved the worldbuilding and the particular approach this culture had to gender (and, as another commenter mentioned, the fact that we know everyone's gender and nobody's biological sex).

[dragonyphoenix]

Apparently it's posts for me. My Real Children and Ammonite!

I haven't read Provenance, but since you've reviewed two others I enjoyed, I'm going to give it a try.