the tea master and the detective by aliette de bodard

Long Chau wasn’t as well developed and I felt she suffered for it as a character for it but it is a shorter work.

It really made the story worth it for me.

She is a ship that is recovering from a violent event and she can’t go back into deep space as a result and she struggles to make rent and survive which is such a basic human need we would obviously not assign them to a synthetic sentient being like a mindship. The Shadow’s Child is such a wonderful and refreshing character, de Bodard imbues this mindship with so much emotion and such humanity. I have not read ANY books from an AI perspective and I found this story did it really well. The world building is very straightforward and is essentially just a description of Space but with Vietnamese inspired notes. I like shorter novellas but I sometimes feel that especially when they are sci fi that they can be short to the point it get bogged down with world building/character perspectives. This is my first time reading any of Aliette de Bodard’s work and especially anything set in her Xuya universe and I really enjoyed it. When Long Chau walks in and introduces herself as a consulting detective looking to hire The Shadow’s Child to recover a body from deep space, we slowly unravel a detective story and a study of PTSD in space. The Shadow’s Child makes her living from blending teas (YES) that function as drugs and remedies for people trying to survive deep space travel. It is here we meet The Shadow’s Child, a discharged mindship who is suffering from the trauma of a battle. Welcome to the Scattered Pearls belt! A ‘provincial backwater’ in the depths of space where humans and AI/mindships mingle and mix among each other. This story was a great merging of some of my favourite tropes and genre’s of story while packing a punch for something so short. I read this for the 2019 Hugo’s as I am attending the World Sci fi convention in Dublin this year (Dublin 2019) and it did not disappoint. That we’re all, in the end, part of the same great thing.’

‘ When you’re out there, with no one and nothing to stand in your way – when you realise how small you are – you also realise that everything that ever was, that ever will be, is connected to you.

The tea master and the detective by aliette de bodard