★★★★☆ A broken mindship and lost children

In the Shadow of the Ship

Aliette de Bodard

Aliette de Bodard's In the Shadow of the Ship is a novella set in her Xuya Universe. Like many Xuya stories, this one takes place aboard a mindship. This particular mindship is called Nightjar and was damaged escaping from the collapsing Empire. (Exactly which Empire this was I am not sure -- there is more than one in the Xuya Universe.)

At any rate, Nightjar is not a healthy place. She escaped carrying some of her family. They still live aboard and afford her the loyalty she expects, mostly. Nightjar demands tribute in the form of children whom she lures into her dead zones, from which they never emerge. When Khuyên was a child she was invited to the dead zones by her cousin Anh, but she refused. Later she did the unthinkable: she left Nightjar for the broken Empire, where she rose to the post of Magistrate.

Now Khuyên has returned to Nightjar for her grandmother's funeral, where she is met with a complex mixture of disdain for her disloyalty and awe for her chutzpah in having left. As a Magistrate, Khuyên is an experienced investigator, so she does that.

This felt to me like a retelling, although of what I could not say. De Bodard's stories are often based on Vietnamese folklore, which is less familiar to me than the European flavors. It felt like a sort of mixture of Hansel and Gretel with Theseus and the Minotaur.

I enjoyed it. As always with de Bodard, it required the reader to exercise what Hercule Poirot called the "little grey cells", which is always satisfying, as long as it's not too frustrating, and this one was more the former than the latter.

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