★★★★☆ A spaceship makes tea and a detective looks for bodies

The Tea Master and the Detective

Aliette de Bodard

Aliette de Bodard's The Tea Master and the Detective is a novella/novelette (it took me about two hours to read) set in de Bodard's Xuya Universe. In my opinion, a reader will benefit from a little background reading on Xuya before attempting any Xuya stories. Of the three I have read so far, which are The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight, and The Tea Master and the Detective, this is the only one that is really comprehensible without a prior introduction to the world.

The main innovation in this story, and one of the principle features of de Bodard's Xuya, is the existence of spaceships who are persons. Science Fiction fans will have encountered the idea of conscious spaceships before this. The earliest example of it that I know was Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, and a more recent example is Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch books.

De Bodard's mindships are human/machine hybrids carried in the womb of a human mother and brought forth in pain (to use the Biblical phrase) inside the heartroom of a spaceship that has been carefully prepared for her/him by a team of artists and engineers. Mindships are capable of faster-than-light travel by navigating "deep space". (Thus, it is essentially an Asimovian hyperspace-type FTL system.) De Bodard conceived of her mindships after giving birth to children of her own, an experience that she wanted to bring to her science fiction.

That's all background. The two main characters are the mindship The Shadow's Child and the detective Long Chau (which, we are informed, means "Dragon Pearl"). Because of trauma in her past, The Shadow's Child no longer undertakes space travel -- she makes her living by preparing special pharmacologically active teas. Long Chau, the detective, also drags a difficult past behind her. The outline of the story is familiar, two damaged people who help each other. I don't feel I can say much more without spoiling.

Like all of de Bodard's work that I have read so far, this is a subtle story that repays a reader's attention. Because there are only two important characters, it is less demanding than other work by de Bodard that I have read.

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