James Nicoll Reviews

Aliette de Bodard’s 2023 A Fire Born of Exile is a stand-alone SF story of revenge and romance that takes place in her Xuya Universe setting.

Half a generation earlier, the Ten Thousand Flags Uprising was suppressed through a combination of miliary and judicial force. Naïve scholars like Dã Lan discovered that unwary words and misplaced trust could lead to the nearest airlock and sudden death. As tragic as the results were for the guilty and innocent alike, Prefect Tinh Đức flourished, building status on the skulls of those who passed through her court. Only General Tuyết rivals the prefect for power in the belt. Currently, the balance of power is tilting from military to civil.

Newcomer Quỳnh is a wealthy but seemingly unremarkable social climber, potentially useful but of no particular significance. Quỳnh is a reinvented Dã Lan, back to exact revenge on the two women — the general and the prefect — who cost the scholar so much.

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Aliette de Bodard’s 2022 The Red Scholar’s Wake is a space opera set in de Bodard’s Xuya Universe.

Captured by Red Banner space pirates, scavenger Xích Si is painfully aware of a number of possible fates. She will probably have to choose between immediate death and involuntary indenture to the pirate fleet. Should she somehow survive capture without joining the fleet, she will forever be an outcast; her native An O Empire will assume that she bought her life with signing up as a pirate and will execute her for crimes against the state¹. If Xích Si were to contact her relatives, they could be arrested and executed for abetting piracy.

To Xích Si’s astonishment, the recently widowed mindship Rice Fish comes to Xích Si with a proposition. Or rather, a proposal.

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2022’s Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances is the second entry in Aliette de Bodard’s Dragons and Blades series. 

Visiting his shape-shifting relatives in their kingdom under the Seine, Prince Thuan ventures to babysit, on the entirely correct assumption that his bloodthirsty husband Asmodeus is poorly suited for the task. 

A family outing to a nearby ruined shrine takes an unexpected turn when a ghost appears.

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Aliette de Bodard’s 2021 Fireheart Tiger is a standalone secondary-universe fantasy.

Princess Thanh was dispatched to Ephteria as a child; the least favourite child, she was the natural choice to send as hostage to the powerful faraway country. As a young woman she has returned to her homeland, Bình Hải. Her experiences changed her in ways that she is reluctant to reveal.

There was a fire. There are fires.

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2020’s Seven of Infinities is a short (138 pages) science fiction novel set in Alliette de Bodard’s Xuya universe. 

Scholar Vân ekes out a meagre living as a tutor. She is therefore alarmed to learn from her acquaintance, the shipmind Sunless Woods, that the poetry club to which both scholar and AI belong wants to eject Vân for being too commonplace. This could trigger an economic catastrophe for Vân, as her clients might take ejection as a signal to dump Vân and hire someone else. Nevertheless, Vân cannot fight, because to fight would attract scrutiny she cannot afford. 

A suspicious death comes almost as a welcome distraction.

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Aliette de Bodard’s 2019 Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight is a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories. The science fiction stories are set in her alternate history, the Universe of Xuya (in which North American colonization was first settled by Asians), while the fantasies are set in her Dominion of the Fallen, in which Paris is recovering from a war between fallen angels. 

The title is apt.

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Aliette de Bodard’s 2017 The Dragon that Flew out of the Sun: Stories of the Xuya Universe collects three stories set in her alternate-future Xuya universe. 

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Aliette de Bodard’s 2018 novel In the Vanishers’ Palace is a standalone secondary world fantasy (unless it’s SF; see comments). 

The Vanishers used the world as their toy until they broke it. Having ruined the world, they absconded, leaving their former slaves and playthings behind to scrabble for life in the poisoned wreckage. 

Yên’s village has no room for the useless or the weak. Her mother’s knack for healing magic pays her own way, but it’s not enough to support Yên. She is only a mediocre scholar. She has failed to pass the metropolitan exam and escape to the comparative security of the imperial court. It’s only a matter of time before Elder Tho finds a pretext to eject Yên from the village or feed her to the purifying artifact in the Plague Grove. 

Giving Yên to a dragon to do with as the dragon wishes is also acceptable to Elder Tho. 

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Aliette de Bodard’s 2018 mystery The Tea Master and the Detective takes place in her Xuya universe. 

Cashiered following a deep-space calamity, shipmind The Shadow’s Child now makes a meagre living brewing medicinal infusions. It claims that these infusions will alleviate the stresses of other-dimensional travel. 

Long Chau seems to be just another human client. She is in fact something unusual.

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Aliette de Bodard’s 2015 space-opera The Citadel of Weeping Pearls is an instalment in her Universe of Xuya, an alternate history/future in which the West never dominated the world. The galaxy is ruled by Confucian powers.

Suu Nuoc is woken from a sound sleep by his alarmed shipmind, The Turtle’s Golden Claw. The artificial intelligence reports that Grand Master of Design Harmony Bach Cuc has seemingly vanished, in a manner the shipmind cannot comprehend. As far as The Turtle’s Golden Claw is concerned, it is up to Suu Nuoc — an Official of the First Order despite his low birth — to work out what happened to the missing scientist.

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