The Tea Master and the Detective

Aliette de Bodars has just been added to my Read ALL her stuff list on the basis of this ninety-six-page novella. They say write what you know and it seems what Aliette de Bodard knows is how to conjure a whole universe from her imagination and capture it in a story of a strange friendship and an odd mystery that displays facets of the universe like a jewel being turned beneath a light.

I was deeply impressed by how well built this universe of mindships, and a fractured empire interstellar empire, centuries-old was. I was even more impressed that none of it was dumped into my lap like a systems manual. Everything I learned about this universe, I learned because it was important to the two main characters and the mystery that they are show more trying to solve.

The two main characters are striking and memorable: a traumatised mindship that no longer enters Deep Spaces where reality bends but blends teas that allow others to endure it and an abrasive, heavily drugged, difficult to work with detective with her own secrets and her own agenda.

This novella is a wonderful example of how much can be imagined and how deeply we can be immersed in it in the space of fewer than 100 pages. This is the kind of Science Fiction that addicted me to the genre when I was young and has never let go of me since. show less

As odd as any of Aliette's work. This has been on my wishlist for a long time, simply for the title alone. It's nothing like I expected, but at the same time well worth reading and an intriguing premise for a wider universe that I don't think has been written. It's also a very clever if not subtle Sherlock pastiche.

Scarred after a military operation was ambushed and her crew killed, a shipmind is making a living, just about, brewing tea - tisane - personalised to the customer to aid their transition through the quantum deep spaces. It's not entirely clear how much these are real physical locations and how much more mental journeys - a superposition of both. Her latest customer is already on many drugs which makes it a demanding show more preparation, and then he asks her to come with him to look at a corpse, triggering her own flashbacks.

Weird, but fun. Short but intriguing and enjoyable. show less

I went absolutely feral reading this. The setting alone was almost enough to sent me into a fit of uncontrollable salivating, but put on top of it a Sherlock Holmes riff with a female consulting detective and a Watson, who’s actually a sentient space-ship (also female, mind you)? I am THERE.

Absolute gem of a novella, with lush prose, and so much care and humanity packet into its compact form. Phenomenal. I read a couple of de Bodard’s things earlier and really enjoyed them, but this one felt like a shot of pure ecstasy. Now excuse me, while go and read everything in the Xuya universe I can get my hands on.

I love a book that lingers so much I have to reread it within a couple of hours. I came away from this story feeling like I had just been dragged through a lucid dream or more like, tumbling headfirst into someone else's lucid dream where everything makes sense in a wonderfully warped way. It has a very cosmic, midnighty-blue with purple haze and shock white light kind of feeling. If you need a break from your heavier novels and you are partial to some mind-bending sci-fi, chemistry, and detective mysteries, this is right up that alley.

Too many things to like, so let's start with the only thing that could have been...more rounded:

1. Long Chau is obviously a reimagining of a Sherlockian character. Her abstract thinking and her detached show more nature bare all the hallmark characteristics of the world's beloved consulting detective. Yet, she seems very two dimensional and even with revelations within the book, I don't see her as more than a Sherlock standin - however, this reimagining works so well with the reluctant Dr Watson in the form of "The Shadow's Child"

Now, on to the stuff stood out:

A) At it's core, it is a story about grief, untreated post traumatic stress and the overcoming of fear whether at a snails pace or forced by the threat of imminent chaos - or death.

B) The names in this book are EPIC! Picture meeting someone called "The Shadow's Child" or "Pomegranates Buried In The Sand" I know I would grab a coffee and listen to the stories of someone named "The Sorrow of Gentlemen" and play chess with "Sharpening Steel Into Needles"

C) The concept of the shipmind was interesting to envision at first. To see the whole I first imagined this echo or mind then an apparition in almost solid form and then some sort futuristic ship. This shipmind in question is fragile, riddled with fear, sensitive and traumatized. An interesting take on a sentient AI.

D) Sherlock needs a good case: In this case, the outer space mystery is intriguing and chekov's gun appears not far into the story but it's drawn out really well and comes to an excellent climax. I honestly found myself jotting down my own theories about whodunnit and it was quite enjoyable.

E) Chemistry, Human Anatomy and Psychology, it was quite refreshing to read about the monumental task of space jumping and what the human body needs to be able to mentally and physically come out on the other side in one piece.

I read this as a standalone and it was so good, I'm adding the "Xuya Universe" to my reading list (On A Red Station, Drifting / The Citadel of Weeping Pearls) show less

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

This is another standalone novella in Aliette de Bodard's Xuya Universe, and is science fiction set against a background of Vietnamese culture.

Both of the main characters have traumatic pasts which drive them to search for truth. The Shadow’s Child is a sentient spaceship, or mindship, who was traumatized by her war experiences in the "deep spaces", and after losing her crew or "family" has to make her own living in a provincial backwater of the empire mixing special teas which can alter mental states and help people function in stressful or dangerous situations.

Long Chau, a private detective, hires her to help recover things from the deep spaces (which the shipmind is show more pathologically afraid of due to her harrowing experiences there) so she can study them. What they find sparks an investigation that threatens to expose their own private secrets as well as the illegal activities of others.

As with the other novellas in the Xuya series, the principal plot dynamics are powered by a conflict of personalities, this time between the shipmind and the arrogant and seemingly inscrutable private detective.

The Tea Master and the Detective obviously took its inspiration from the tales of Sherlock Holmes, and the dynamics of the relationship between the characters are similar to how Holmes and Watson interact, albeit with more emphasis on their inner lives than on action. The Shadow's Child is astonished and disturbed by Long Chau's deductive skills and worried by her reliance on drugs, and Long Chau is not impressed by the shipmind's "guesswork". But in the end, it turns out that they need each other in order to solve the mystery.

I think this story could well become the first of a series of tales featuring the same protagonists, and I am sure it would find a welcoming and eager readership among people who enjoy both science fiction and detective novels.

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I'm actually pretty impressed with this one but I have one major complaint...

I feel like I'm missing a LOT of worldbuilding nuance here. I've never read any of her Xuya novellas and I feel the lack.

Sure, the whole mystery in space surrounded my Mindships that are pretty awesome is all pretty awesome, but the rather odd bits of Tea and special brews feel like they need a lot of backstory. Otherwise, I'm stuck just thinking about Ann Leckie's Raddich series. And maybe that's kind of a side-jab.

I found it rather fascinating in an Ian M. Banks kind of way, too.

And oddly, I'm more impressed with Bodard's SF than her Fantasy. I obviously need to keep an eye out for more of these.

Nommed for '19 Hugo for novella.

In the age of fantasy books of ridiculous lengths--why, hello, Way of Kings--and series that may never be finished--ah-hem, George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss--I've rediscovered my love of novellas. de Bodard has written an intriguing, sure to be award-nominated novella about a mind-ship hired by a brilliant, drug-addicted woman who wants to retrieve a dead body for study. Naturally, it turns out that it was no mere space-accident that caused the untimely death. When the shipmind, The Shadow's Child, takes the job, she finds herself confronting her own past.

"But she'd lived through a war, an uprising and a famine, and she was done with diminishing herself to spare the feelings of others."

I wasn't expecting a Sherlock style show more construction, but the parallels soon became clear. Of course, it might have helped that I have been very slowly working my way through the recent Cumberbatch incarnation of Sherlock. Like the Moffat and Gatiss version, this somehow manages to retain a feeling of whimsy in the midst of fear, suspicion, self-doubt, and a mildly sociopathic lead. When I finished, I thought, "well, that was fun," but fun is not the right word, not quite. 'Satisfying' might be better. It pays tribute to the Sherlock format but does something so very different that it feels very new.

As always, I enjoy de Bodard's writing style. Complex and descriptive, well-suited to the challenge of the world and the story.

"A middle-aged woman, with loose, mottled skin hanging loose on rib cage and pelvic bone, her shape already compressed into improbably angles by the pressures of unreality around her--she'd had a shadow skin to survive the vacuum of normal space, but of course it wouldn't have survived the plunge into deep spaces: the long, dark tatters of it streamed from her corpse like hair, or threads tying her to an impossibly distant puppet-master."

I was very intrigued by the setting, a pan-Asian future world in which people use mind-ships to travel through the deep reaches of space, but the world-building feels just this side of under-done. Though I eventually felt I had a working handle on the mind-ships, it wasn't early enough to make me feel like I understood all the subtext, or how A Shadow's Child could be so damaged. I'm motivated to track down some of her other works in this universe and learn more. I know she can be talented at world building; the Obsidian and Blood series (my review for the first), set in the pre-Colombian Aztec Empire, is immersive and fascinating.

On re-reading, I think that characterization could be improved somewhat, to make this an outstanding. The Shadow's Child ends up sounding a little too neurotic, with an ever-present anxiety. Anxious about money, about going into deep space, about the reliability of Long Chau, she felt barely functional or sympathetic. If you would like a reader to believe a ship can have a personality, it best be a semi-functional one, believable for competently managing existence through unseen depths of space and multiple human generations. In this, there is perhaps the most deviation from the Sherlock structure, with a Watson that is more irritably challenging and less an admiring echo.

The e-reader edition had some minor formatting issues that I would expect would be fixed, and a rare challenge in word choice or punctuation. More importantly, I'm not exactly sure if the science of the space stands up to reality (see streaming ribbons mentioned above), but I'm not one to be finicky about my space details. But I mention it for hard-core readers who might be.

Review with links to Sherlock and de Bodard's pages on the universe: https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2018/03/07/the-tea-master-and-the-detective-by-a...

Many thanks to Subterranean Press and NetGalley for an e-reader ARC. show less