Aliette de Bodard
May. 17th, 2022 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Citadel of Weeping Pearls and The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard
3/5. A pair of novellas in her universe featuring mindships and a large interstellar empire and tea and other stuff. The second one got a lot of traction for being yet another, my god when will we ever stop please I'm begging you, Sherlock Holmes Pastiche, where Watson is a traumatized mindship that brews teas that effect brain chemistry. These are extremely of their era. Like I was able to guess the exact year of publication for one of them of their era. They're intensely of a piece with Leckie's first trilogy and Yoon Ha Lee and Murderbot, in a sense, and I suspect readers of the future might not find these novellas particularly rewarding if they don't have a rich background in the context.
But anyway, these were entertaining, and I did genuinely like the nindships and how it is culturally understood that the child you carry and birth and that immediately becomes a shipmind is no less your child, and continues to be part of the family for generations to come. It doesn't always work out exactly like that but, well, when does it.
3/5. A pair of novellas in her universe featuring mindships and a large interstellar empire and tea and other stuff. The second one got a lot of traction for being yet another, my god when will we ever stop please I'm begging you, Sherlock Holmes Pastiche, where Watson is a traumatized mindship that brews teas that effect brain chemistry. These are extremely of their era. Like I was able to guess the exact year of publication for one of them of their era. They're intensely of a piece with Leckie's first trilogy and Yoon Ha Lee and Murderbot, in a sense, and I suspect readers of the future might not find these novellas particularly rewarding if they don't have a rich background in the context.
But anyway, these were entertaining, and I did genuinely like the nindships and how it is culturally understood that the child you carry and birth and that immediately becomes a shipmind is no less your child, and continues to be part of the family for generations to come. It doesn't always work out exactly like that but, well, when does it.