Anne Leckie’s Provenance (2017) offers a lissome digestif to the meaty seven-layer lasagna that is the Imperial Radch trilogy (2013-15). Yet the modest sidequel sets in high relief a chief element of Leckie’s space-opera worldbuilding: namely, the policing of future citizens by datasets assigned ideological weights and thresholds under the aegis of machine intelligence.
After all, the novel tracks the nominal protagonist Ingray Aughskold and her scrappy confederates, Pahlad Budrakim and Captain Tic Uisine, as they are constantly and intensely scrutinized by sophisticated surveillance regimes and probes, despite the often hastily forged identity documentation of our heroes. The deftly suspenseful plot revolves around heists, jailbreaks, genderbending romance and creche family melodrama, the impossibly complex social mores of vast galactic empires, stargate portals, political revolutions, and ancient alien “ruin glass” monuments and “vestiges”, or artifacts freighted with overdetermined political baggage, all of which seems almost incidental to this all-pervasive AI surveillance that biopolitically menaces characters with dire peril at nearly every turn of the narrative. The topicality of this speculative conceit remains bleeding edge: see, for instance, the Biden administration’s deployment of the mobile app CBP One for the tracking of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
On a meta level, this omnipresent machinic surveillance extends to Leckie’s scrupulous construction of gender assumptions and stereotypes as well, given that the novel categorically resists the most relentless gender-detective reader’s desire to suss out what biological essentialism, if any, lies beneath the successive layers of political culture in which volitional nonbinary gender-neutrality is an uncontroversial norm upon coming of age.
The spider mechs, whether superficially resembling vacuums, customs agents, handbags, assassins, or bulldozers in function, never fail to give Ingray the howling fantods, even if she continually accommodates their intrusions and scans. Even the core nested murder mystery structure of the story also fundamentally revolves around the technological implications that undergird an impending treaty conclave between the alien Presger civilization and the splintering empire of the cyborgian Radchaai ruler Anaander Mianaai (not to mention the byzantine schemes of the Geck, the Hwae, the Omkem Federacy, and the independent warship AIs).
Savvy enough not to disavow the politically artificial outright, Leckie methodically unsettles the blood-and-soil rhetoric of naturalized citizenship, revealing the vestiges of such claims to be of dubious, if not forged provenance at best. Tonally, in reading these densely world-building, techno-anxious space operas, this strategic duck and weave, that is, the guarded concession to and simultaneous disavowal of the enchanted aura of promiscuous and reconfigurable AI systems, exposes chinks in the armor of unexamined techno-optimistic discourse.
Thus, on a subtle yet clearly noticeable level in an otherwise immaculately executed genre entertainment, Leckie searchingly interrogates the utter ruthlessness of the extractive, invasive, and feedback-looped infrastructures of algorithmic surveillance that tout their wares as predetermined and inevitable progress. Yet Ingray also repeatedly manages to commandeer the spider mechs for her own prophylactic self-preservation, despite her deep misgivings; and the conclave treaty will likely involve accommodating the AI warships, not to mention the ultimate fate of the self-imploding cyborg Radch, since the novel’s refusal to lapse into naïve techno-utopian peace-mongering does not preempt devastating critique, dissent, and society-wrenching change.
As Kate Crawford succinctly urges, in Atlas of AI, “instead of trying to build more systems that can group expressions into machine-readable categories, we should question the origins of those categories themselves, as well as their social and political consequences” (176).