I only bought this for Memorials by Aliette de Bodard.
Available in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight, or you can buy the Apex Magazine and find it in there.
Just like The Weight of a Blessing before it, i couldn’t figure out any connection between this and the rest of the Xuya stories we’ve been reading up to now. But, that’s not to say this isn’t worth reading, it is a rather good read in itself.
However, i think the problem lies in that these two stories could have been much better presented as one longer story but with a context to it all, some background, stage setting, etc.. I really feel that if Aliette were to do this then it would make a great stand alone novel that would not need to be shoved in, bizarrely, as part of the Xuya stories.
One of the best things about Memorials for me was the “perpetuates” in “V-space”, which reminded me of All the Retros at the New Cotton Club by DeAnna Knippling. As i said in my review of that, i would have loved to have more of the New Cotton Club and its “retros”, and likewise, with Memorials i’d really like to read more stories from the Memorial and it’s “perpetuate” characters, and maybe similar places hosting “perpetuates”.
So, after all is read and said, The Weight of a Blessing and Memorials ended up as quite an enjoyable read once i figured out what was actually happening and that they really don’t have any connection to Xuya and trying to find one while reading these just messes things up. So read them as a standalone pair and re-read The Weight of a Blessing again, after Memorials, and you should enjoy yourself.
And now, The Waiting Stars.
This one had me completely lost.
Without any explanation of where we are or how we got here, we suddenly find this squabble between the Rong, the Vermilion Seal, and the Galactics — whoever they all are — all played out with Halls of the Dead and V-Space and some old battle between continents and a memorial being thrown into the mix. I have no idea how this fits into the Universe of Xuya. It’s all a bit of a confusing ramble me thinks.
But, anyway, i worked my way through this story taking it at face value but not really understanding any of it because there’s no real context to understand it in; then i moved onto Memorials, which is the next book in the Xuya series, which is also in the same context as this one and slowly things began to make a bit more sense.
After i finished Memorials i came back to The Weight of a Blessing and re-read it and it finally made a lot more sense.
So a part of me says that this should be after Memorials, but i don’t think the story’s timeline would fit that way around and i also think it would then leave Memorials without a context and then you’d have to come back to Memorials and re-read that after this — i know, confusing, right?
And having read both and re-read The Weight of a Blessing and finally made sense of it all, i still don’t understand where it actually fits into Xuya.
But you can read it for free over at Clarkesworld.
Ho hum. As i say, next up is Memorials.
A short little story with the war between the Empire and the rebels hotting up while also giving us a whole new mindship/human interaction thing that we haven’t encountered before.
It feels like this is just a step between On a Red Station, Drifting and where ever it is we’re going next: an inbetweeny setting us up for some more interesting things to come.
I know, it’s not much of a review, i agree, an inbetweeny too.
You can read it over at Subterranean Press, and it’s also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight.
And next we will be going to: The Weight of a Blessing.
More from “The Universe of Xuya”. This one comes with some high credentials as it was on the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2012, and also a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards for Best Novella — which is nothing to be sniffed at for all you weirdos who claim to prefer the smell of real books. 
You can buy your very own copy over at Amazon.
So, in sticking with our theme of Vietnamese family culture and ties, and mindships, and all that; we now find ourselves on one of the big space stations that is, like a mindship, run, maintained and controlled by one of these shipminds.
Just like the shipminds, the station’s minds are also born to humans and families and it is those families that ultimately get to control the stations. And so along with a good story about this station’s mind heading for a total break down and desperately needing fixing, we also have a good story about the family from which that shipmind was born — all while there’s a rebellion/war going on and mixed into the story.
So yeah, plenty going on, and plenty to keep all us fans of Xuya happy and content.
Next up: The Days of the War, as Red as Blood, as Dark as Bile.
Free to read over at Clarkesworld, and also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight.
Another short from “The Universe of Xuya”.
One of the really good things about these huge sci-fi universes is that there’s always a space somewhere to tell a story about anything you want to. Immersion is a story that very much warns humanity of its folly with modern technology and how we use it to hide the truth of our selves from others while also, at the same time, allowing it to filter out the truth of others from ourselves. Facebook, and it’s other entities, are very much the beginning of the immersion technology discussed in this story: the way people have created their on-line personas that they window dress to impress others for a few more likes, covering up the truth about their shitty little dull lives while eagerly consuming an equally fictional illusion of the reality of other people’s lives.
It’s all lies, all bullshit, all an illusion!!!
How far down this rabbit hole do people go? How lost in the addiction? At what point does it end? How many suicides? How much depression? How deep the anxiety? When will people pull the plug and get back to living their real lives and is that even possible any more with the internet being so pervasive? People are now having their fridges and other appliances hooked up to wifi and the internet, FFS — Oooh, look at all the nice food in my fridge, gloat, gloat, gloat, please hit that like button please, please, please!!!
Or maybe i’m just over-thinking everything too much while i’m under house arrest.
Ho hum. One day we will be free. Sadly, it will most probably be the day we die.
And thus endeth my cheerful review. 
Seriously though, it’s a good story and one well worth reading for a lot of people.
Next up, On a Red Station, Drifting.
Free to read over at Clarkesworld. It’s also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight.
This story reminds me of Butterfly, Falling at Dawn in the way people and cultures change and shift, with those who fight to maintain things, those who fight to rid things, those who adopt the new and those who refuse to. But unlike Butterfly, Falling at Dawn where we had an external power come to support those who wanted change within their own society, to free themselves from the tyranny of their own people; in Scattered Along the River of Heaven we have a post conflict situation where one society has freed itself violently from the slavery and tyranny imposed upon it by an external society.
Likewise, within that society there were slaves who wanted to maintain the status quo, as they had been granted privileged positions amongst the slaves: the masters deliberately creating a tier system ensuring that the privileged slaves would keep the under-privileged slaves in place by overseeing, snitching, reporting, etc.. However, once their enslavers had been overthrown these privileged slaves were either killed or exiled along with their masters, hated and despised by those of their own people that they kept downtrodden for their own comfort and importance.
It’s also another one of those books by Aliette where a second reading is a must: at least it was for me. It’s like i just couldn’t see the overall picture until the last 10th or so of the story, where things become clear and fall into place, and then i was left hanging, needing to go back and read it all again with a much clearer idea of what it was i was reading. I think there’s some important information that is missing from the beginning that you don’t find until the end, but, doesn’t matter. Or maybe it’s like one of those poems that you have to keep going back to hoping to glean a little more meaning each time.
But yeah, good book, plenty to think about culturally and things.
Next up, Immersion.
Very much in keeping with the rest of the Xuya books and i absolutely recommend reading them before diving into this deep space.
A lot longer than the previous short stories and novellas that we’ve so far been used to: as such, this one is available as a real book that you can buy over at Amazon.
For those reading my previous review on Pearl, you’ll now know how i feel about pricing and this is no different to that. At the time of writing this the brand new paperback is £7.75 while the Kindle version is £7.34. And Amazon will deliver the paperback for free if you buy something else from them for £2.25 to make the total £10.00.
However, i’m not going to get back into my rant on the pricing of a teeny tiny data file compared to a forest of processed trees and environmental damages of such, you can read all about that at Pearl. Like that, it’s up to you if you are willing to pay that or not, or you can simply get a copy elsewhere, like get your local library to buy the paperback and then a thousand people can read it for free. Or you can buy the paperback with free delivery and then sell it on ebay to make some money back, or share it with a few friends, or give it to a charity shop. At the end of the day, it’s up to you, but ebooks aren’t going to be priced fairly for what they are if people — you the reader — keep paying silly prices for them. It’s utterly ridiculous to be charging every Kindle user similar prices for a single use, data protected copy while the paperback can be bought once and shared and read by dozens of people for years and years.
So, onto the content: great story, this time we’re going into the deep spaces within the deep spaces. Yeah, deep spaces squared get seriously bizarre. Lots of court intrigue and military invasion matters and the normal everyday life things as well.
Once again, super great writing from Aliette that keeps your attention from beginning to end. Shame about the ebook pricing.
And now let’s go get Scattered Along the River of Heaven.
Well this is a new one on me: genocide by nebula.
It does make one wonder what depths of fucked-up-ness humans will descend to as we get ever more dangerous technology to play with. Like what will happen when we eventually develop the ability to destroy whole suns, allowing one group of Homo sapiens to eradicate another, purely out of fear and mistrust, or just plain and simple, old fashioned, nastiness.
I like to think that future species of Hominids will be a lot nicer than this current bunchacunts, the arrogantly self titled Homo sapiens. Heaven help the universe if Homo sapiens ever escapes this solar system.
Anyway, it’s free to read over at Uncanny and also in the collection The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun and Other Stories, so have at it.
Next up: The Citadel of Weeping Pearls.
Ok, people, today i’m going to begin with a good little rant. Are you sitting comfortably? Then i’ll begin.
Ones day started off well enough in that trying to find a copy of this story to read was fairly easy: as with all the Xuya stories, you just go to Aliette’s website and you’ll find a comprehensive list.
So you look down the list to find Pearl, click on the link and go to the page about it.
Follow the link on that page and you can find a way to Amazon where you get to see that Pearl is included in an anthology and that the cost for the Kindle edition is an utterly ridiculous £11.99, which is bad enough in itself, but then consider that the brand new paperback is only £8.44 — at the time of writing — with new hardcovers from £10.00 and that £11.99 becomes more than utterly ridiculous …
… like, seriously, WTF!!! 
All i can think of to explain this appalling discrepancy is that this is done by someone who is clearly a Luddite hell-bent on making some kind of statement that they hate Kindles and the people who use Kindles: at £11.99 they obviously have no intention of ever wishing to sell this to anyone with a Kindle. If, by strange chance, the person setting this price gets to read this and wishes to let me know that they had another reason to insult and abuse Kindle owners in this manner, then please let me know and i’ll be more than willing to update this page adding your excuses — and please do make it entertaining for posterity, if nothing else, we could all do with a laugh.
The reality is this: the Kindle version is a very simple, teeny, tiny, data file — FFS — we’re not buying shares in the AI program that lands and manages a rover on Mars, no land has to be cleared and farmed for decades to grow the trees, no trees had to be harvested and killed, no dead trees had to be processed and shipped to mills, no logs had to be turned into wood and pulped, no pulp had to be bleached and made into paper, no ink had to be made and printed onto the paper, no glues and binders and card covers and more inks and shit, no boxes and packing materials, no shipping from publishers to reseller, no warehousing, no trucks and vans and transport hubs, no MOT’s and fuel and repair bills, no insurance and driver, no ferries and ships, no adding to road congestion, no shit loads of environmental damage, polution, CO2 and carbon footprint, etc., etc., etc., and that’s just getting the paperback made and delivered to Amazon’s warehouse. So why the fuck is the Kindle book £3.55 more than the paperback?
And i can’t even resell the Kindle version. Yes folks, Amazon made it so a Kindle e-book cannot be lent or resold, while your far, far cheaper paperback can passed on, re-sold, put in the library, and read by several dozen different people all for the much cheaper price of £8.44 which you can share with 10 of your friends so you only have to pay 84p each, while i still have to pay £11.99 for my single user read.
And then, at the end of it, how many of these paperback and hardback books are left unsold, needing to be dumped, pulped or burned by the publishers, otherwise thrown in rubbish bins by the end users up and down the land and sent to landfill the world over when people are fed up with them — the environmental damage of real books is never paid for by those that use them. Give yerselves a big round of applause!
When more than half the books sold in the world now are ebooks, one can almost feel a little twinge of sympathy for the loss of sales experienced by those writers who ended up giving their work to publishers like this who think that charging £3.55 more for the e-book than a brand new paper back is acceptable. But, at the end of the day, its incumbent upon the writers to insist in their contracts that any publisher of their work ensures that the ebook version will always be significantly cheaper than the paper version. Because, after all is said and done, if you’re getting paid by royalties on books sold, this publisher is totally shitting on you because they won’t be selling any of your stories to Kindle users because we’re not stupid enough to be thoroughly taken the piss out of in this fashion. And whether you like ebooks or not, they’re here to stay and more and more people are using them. When the world is now buying more ebooks than real books you have to be out of your mind to be shitting on such a large demographic with draconian pricing tactics simply to further some retarded, Luddite mission.
So yeah, sorry to all the writers who gave this publisher a story to go in this anthology, but next time you do anything like this make sure it’s in the contract that the Kindle version will be significantly lower than the price of a brand new paper back: the keyword being significantly. You’ll find that most Kindle users will happily pay for an ebook if it’s significantly cheaper than the paperback, if not we will happily take our hard earned money else where and eagerly hand it all over to writers who do recognise that an e-book should be significantly cheaper than a paperback.
And worse of all — yes there is actually something worse than all the above — is that i only wanted to read this one single story from this pathetic, retarded, Luddite’s campaign against the 21st century masquerading as an anthology. Yeah, £11.99 for one fucking short story’s data file. You couldn’t write this shit …
… anyway, rant over, just don’t pay that, don’t be ripped off, boycott the Luddites, go to Google and read it for free.
I would definitely suggest reading the original version of Dã Tràng and the Pearl before undertaking this story. Not totally necessary but you’ll enjoy Pearl much more if you experience the original writing upon which it is based.
And all that said, yeah, it’s a good little story about little AI things who start making their own improvements and evolving, but it most certainly ain’t ever gonna be worth £11.99.
Next up: The Dragon that Flew out of the Sun.
PS. Me thinks Aliette took notice, because i know she read this, and since me giving all the above rant it’s since become available in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight, which is much, much cheaper, especially when you consider that you get a whole bunch of Xuya books included, which makes it quite a bargain really. 
Currently available to read at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight.
And so we’re back to the endings of mindships, this story being about those that are lost when things go wrong, broken apart in the deep spaces. We’re told about this through the adventures of the scavengers, the divers who throw themselves out of other mindships to collect the gems that the bodies of the passengers become in the unreality of the deep spaces when they no longer have the protection of the mindships.
Mmmm, so yeah, this one’s a bit weird: like a bunch of odd-ball poets who like dropping too much lsd while base jumping and free diving — all at the same time — just to pick up their next fix as cannibal junkies. I’ve often wondered what mind altering substances future hominids will encounter when we spread out across the galaxy and it seems like Aliette’s been thinking along the same lines, but i got to say, Aliette’s imagination is way beyond mine in this matter.
So yeah, the future, dude!
My only thing is that while this is a fun read in and of itself, i’m not sure how this is fitting with what we’ve been reading. We just had several books telling us how rare and unbelievable it is for a mindship to be lost and/or die — that, by human standards, they seemingly live forever — yet now we have a story where it seems like broken mindships are scattered all over the deep spaces with scavenger junkies being able to find enough of them to pick clean enough of the dead passengers’ gems for their own addictions but also enough to sell to cover the costs of their own mindships and living expenses. One can only presume that this story is about a different culture/people than the recent stories dealt with and that this new lot aren’t very good at making mindships.
So yeah, bit of a weird one.
Coming soon: Pearl.
You can read this at Lightspeed.
Looking at the BBC news before i wrote this, the current discussion concerning our real-world plague of Covid-19 is how we get out this quarantined, house-arrested mess that we’re currently stuck in: specifically, what is the UK government’s lock-down exit strategy.
Of course, in times like this, there are those who bang on and on about vaccines, like, if only we could have a vaccine tomorrow then we could all go out to play again and everyone would live happily ever after: yeah, right!
Crossing the Midday Gate is a story that looks back at the scientists who developed the vaccine for our in-story plague, Blue Lily, and what can go wrong if we aren’t careful. I think this book should be essential reading for everyone at the moment.
So what we have is a scientist who develops a viable vaccine to Blue Lily, but the manufacturing process simply cannot be made to a scale that can produce enough vaccine, fast enough, without allowing billions to die. Not to be outdone, another scientist comes up with a method that can scale up the production, albeit, reducing the efficacy of the vaccine.
It was decided that it was better to have a vaccine for everyone, albeit at a reduced efficacy, than it was to have a much more efficacious vaccine for the few.
This new method of producing the vaccine was then rushed through, without proper testing, and a vaccination program began: many subsequently died because the new method of production was fundamentally flawed.
And this is where we very much are with Covid-19 at the moment: too many people, including governments, screaming for a vaccine, or cure, will happily encourage Big Pharma to rush through yet another product that will destroy lives.
Remember, history is already littered with the failures of Big Pharma: the horrendous side effects that have ruined, and continue to ruin, so many people’s lives; not to mention the countless deaths caused by the addictive poisons that Big Pharma rushes to market with bogus, corrupt studies purely for the profits of its shareholders.
So yeah, Crossing the Midday Gate is about this very thing, and also how governments — who are more than happy to be the cheer leaders, stirring up the masses’ clamour for the scientists to take these short cuts — will soon wash their own hands of blame when it all goes wrong and will always find a suitable scape goat amongst the scientific community to throw to the wolves.
Coming soon to a world near you!
You’ve been warned!
Next up: A Salvaging of Ghosts.
You can read this for free over at Uncanny.
Once again, we return to the death of a mindship; this time the cause of death is a plague known as Blue Lily. I’ve often picked up a book and found, completely by chance, that it reflected what was going on in the real world in quite an uncanny way — this story being found in Uncanny magazine in this time of a plague known as Covid-19.
I think we could also do so much better if we could just give our diseases much nicer names — like Aliette has with Blue Lily — because Black Death, AIDS, SARS, MERS, EBOLA and now Covid-19 doesn’t really help with people’s mental health during these difficult, anxious and depressing times. The last thing people need is a disease that sounds like a violent street gang, MS-13, just got more nasty and is coming to get you, yes you, just you!!!
Anyway, this was another story, like Starsong, in that as soon as i got to the end i went all the way back to the beginning and read it all again. I really didn’t understand what had actually happened after the first time through. I’m not sure how much of this is Aliette portraying the effects of Blue Lily so well in her writing that i was as confused as someone coming into contact with a victim of this plague, or how much my mind kept on being taken away from this story and drawing certain parallels with Homo sapiens’ current plague of Covid-19. Suffice it to say that a second reading in which i paid a lot more attention to what i was reading was much better.
If you need your stories spoon fed to you then this most probably isn’t for you as there’s all kinds of temporal, spacial and virtual shifts going on and you really have to pay attention. However, pay attention and you’ll be rewarded with a rather good sci-fi, plague story.
And next up, we’re going to be Crossing the Midday Gate.
You can now read this for free over at Clarkesworld, and it’s also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight.
As with our last book, Two Sisters in Exile, we’re once again visiting death. This time it’s not the death of a mindship but the deaths of the humans in a long-lived mindship’s life. Imagine that you knew you would live for centuries while all the people you know and care for would only have decades.
We’re also introduced to the idea of having a person’s memories condensed and inherited by their next of kin who then has them implanted, and how the powers that be will, when it suits them, take and use those memories as they see fit. Consider also that the person whose memories you just inherited may have also inherited memories of their forebears who have also inherited memories or their forebears.
To be honest, i can’t imagine anything much worse than having your ancestor’s floating around in your head, pestering and badgering your every decision. I could have a big long rant about this but i won’t. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. Suffice it to say, i’m with The Tiger in the Banyan in that i wouldn’t want them even if you offered.
And so…
…coming soon: In Blue Lily’s Wake.
Originally published in Solaris Rising 1.5, but you can now read for free over at Clarkesworld.
And so we leave the birth of mindships behind us and move to the other end, to their deaths.
Once upon a time there was the Dai Viet Empire, now that has become divided between the Northerners and the Nam, the Nam are a warring bunch whose mindships don’t last for very long, while the Northerners are a peaceful, creative, trading people whose mindships simply never die: that is, until Nam kills one by accident.
I’ve enjoyed every book from this universe i’ve read already, they’ve all been really good, but this one felt like it all just got even better as we learn ever more about these living space ships and each culture’s attitude towards them.
Once again, Aliette writes perfectly, continuing to build this universe story by story, while at the same time setting a stage and giving us delightful little teasers of what i hope is going to be played out in future stories.
Next up: Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight.
Originally published in Interzone Issue 241, which you can now read for free over at Clarkesworld and also in the collection, The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun and Other Stories, which is also free to download.
Another story that’s similar to the last two, being centred around the birth of a shipmind, and like The Shipmaker, i feel it would be better placed in the reading order before Shipbirth as we are given even more information about these shipminds and their beginnings that i would have liked to have known before Shipbirth.
In this story Aliette explores the sibling dynamics between a human boy and his mindship sister, but its a dynamic that begins corrupted by the boy attending the extremely difficult birth of the shipmind. Aliette also introduces us to the fact that these mindships can communicate as fully sentient beings and that the ship is part of the family from which it is birthed.
We’re also introduce to another fact in this ever more interesting universe: that some cultures do not use mindships and have banned them from their space. So we’re given quite a few teasers of more interesting things to come, which i’m looking forward to.
Once again, very well written and just at that perfect length to enjoy in one easy, flowing read without even having to put the Kindle down — so make a cuppa, go to the loo and turn your phone off before you start.
Next up: Two Sisters in Exile.
Originally published in Interzone Issue 231, and also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight. Or you can read it for free over at Clarkesworld.
Aliette lists this on her Xuya page as being after Shipbirth, but i feel it would have been much better read before that because in The Shipmaker we are informed of all the various things that would have occurred in Shipbirth before Acoimi turned up, albeit this is a completely different ship and birth, but the issues remain the same.
As you can probably surmise from the title, this is a story mostly about the person who makes these ships — or is in charge of doing so. We’re given quite a good tour behind the scenes of construction and the chaos caused when the woman, fully pregnant with the shipmind, turns up a few weeks early to give birth. All the parts of one of these shipmind births that were missing from Shipbirth are filled in for us — including a description of one of these shipminds as it is birthed. We’re also told how the different cultures within the Xuya universe view the women who gestate and birth these beings.
Once again, Aliette continues her universe building, this time adding Vietnamese characters — and lesbians — and how those people who chose to live lives without creating children are shunned within conservative Viet culture because there won’t be any future progeny to maintain the graves of their ancestors. I’m not sure why we’re given a lesbian couple to make this point because there’s nothing to prevent a lesbian having a child; contrary-wise, there are plenty of hetero couples who either chose not to have children or aren’t able to. Curious.
I could go on a big rant here about my thoughts on burial and the fucked up ideas that certain cultures have with keeping and collecting dead people, but i won’t, i’ll keep it short. Needless to say, i won’t be maintaining anyone’s grave, ever — heap your shunning and scorning upon me all you like. If i had my way i’d dig all the grave yards up, grind up all the bones for bonemeal fertilizer and return all that land to the living where it rightfully belongs.
Yeah, sometimes when i read something in a book i get so annoyed that my inner curmudgeon ventures forth for a good rant. 
So yeah, i’ll stop me ranting now and go and read the next book: Ship’s Brother.
As far as i’m aware this has only ever been published in Asimov’s February 2011. You can contact them to either buy a copy of that edition or to ask them nicely to scan a copy of this article and email it to you.
So we left the story in Starsong with our first melding of pilot and ship into one being, albeit a temporary mistake, and being told that the ship and pilot would be studied intensely to see what exactly had happened. From there we have taken some huge jump forward in time to where women give birth to shipminds that inhabit ships specifically built with “Heart Rooms” where the shipminds join and flow into the ship becoming one being. How we get from the events of Starsong to the events in Shipbirth we aren’t told, and what, exactly, these shipminds are like that birth out of these women and crawl into the ship’s heart is left quite unclear and left for one to only presume — use your imagination people!
We begin this book with our protagonist, Acoimi, travelling on a mindship and describing his utter distaste for the mind bending strangeness of how the ship deforms and changes as it travels according to its own will through the deep planes between the stars. When we reach our destination Acoimi is then transferred to another ship, a new ship, not quickened by a shipmind: the birth has not gone well and it’s Acoimi’s job, as a military physician, to determine if the mother can be saved or if she should be euthanised.
There’s a lot going on in this story: on one hand we have the fertile birthing woman, used to gestate the shipmind of this ship; then the midwife, a sterile woman who, not being able to produce offspring herself, aids those that do, but in this case sits idly by as she has given all the aid she can; and then there’s Acoimi, now male but born female, a physician whose only job seems to be to euthanise the women who fall in birth or the men who fall in battle — both considered glorious ends in Mexica society.
Here is where i will point the reader to Aliette’s “Author’s Notes”.
I also found this review, which i thought sums things up rather well.
So where have we got to? Well, we now know that the shipminds are things that come out of women who gestate them — which reminds me of the axolotl tanks in Dune. So once again, just like in my Starsong review, i’m reminded of Dune. We also get to learn that gender reassignment seems to be quite the norm and relatively easy in this future but that our protagonist has realised that just because she didn’t want to be female didn’t mean he would be ok as a male.
Once again, Aliette writes wonderfully and continues to build this universe in a really interesting and deep way portrayed through these troubled characters she presents to us.
Next up, The Shipmaker.
The first of “The Universe of Xuya” stories that take us into space.
One thing this book made me think of was the navigators in Dune. We’re told how the navigators began, by taking too much spice that they changed their whole being into one that could meld with their ships and fold space and travel anywhere in the universe, but we’re never told, as far as i’m aware, what it was like for that first navigator who experienced this. And that to me is what Starsong is about, the story of those who travel first. The outsiders who will never belong who are shoved far out beyond the boundaries of where other people’s fear will never allow them to go.
Originally published in Asimov’s July 2012, you can now find it at Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show where you can read it for free. And while you’re there be sure to also read “InterGalactic Interview With Aliette de Bodard”.
My first Xuya book was The Tea Master and the Detective, which, in my review, i mentioned needing to get up to speed on all things Xuya and mindships, and Starsong is where all the mindship things begin.
So we have ships and pilots, the pilots of these ships have some kind of implants — neural shunts — that allows their minds to plug directly into the ship’s systems and thus fly the ships, but, they remain separate, a ship and a pilot. However, this story begins with the ship telling us that the pilot has just got in and connected and the safeguard’s and barriers have failed, the pilot’s neural shunts have been overwhelmed and engulfed by the ship’s systems, melding pilot and ship into one being.
The pilot, who one moment is a whole and separate being, is now no longer, lost in the new embrace of this completely new being, drifting in the “deep planes”, listening to the starsong and able to travel wherever they chose simply by willing it.
And then we are thrown, back and forth, throughout this short story, between past and present and various characters. It’s like the total cacophony of a full on psychotic episode: which, i suppose, if we were suddenly joined as a mindship without any warning, or prior knowledge, is exactly what our experience would be like.
I realise, from reviews i’ve read about other books with lots of temporal/spacial shifting going on, that some people really won’t like this book, but, that’s their loss. Unfortunately, some people’s minds just aren’t up for this kind of trip into the “deep planes” — and back again — several times over. But for those of us whose minds are ready and who enjoy this sort of thing, this book is genius.
Yes, i got to the end, which also takes us back to the beginning, and i went straight back to the beginning and read the whole lot again — all in one sitting.
And that’s what’s so perfect about being able to write this as a short story (6141 words) and make it work: you can read the whole thing twice in one go and it’ll only take you up to novella length. And being able to read it twice, so quickly, is really what makes this work. So don’t throw it away when you find yourself adrift in the “deep planes”, set aside a couple of hours to read this and when you begin to feel a bit/lot lost, keep going, and when you get to the end the first time go right back to the beginning and dive straight back into the “deep planes” and read it all again.
Enjoy!
And now we’re off to visit The Shipmaker — i’m definitely a Xuya addict. 
And it’s back to “The Universe of Xuya” for another detective story.
Originally published in Interzone, then printed in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and then re-printed at International Speculative Fiction where you can read it for free.
Once again we’re in the heart of Xuya, and Xuyan society, but instead of an American detective we are now given a Mexica magistrate. Once again, cultural tensions are played out as the Mexica people who are now living in Xuya are mostly refugees who fled Mexica during the civil war; and just like in real life, where we find immigrant communities we find a wide spectrum between the culturally conservative groups on one side, who do everything possible to maintain their old ways in the new land, and, on the other side, those who chose to leave their past completely behind and adopt the new land’s ways completely as their own: i think, for me at least, the exploration of this spectrum is what this story does best.
Our Mexica magistrate, the first non-Xuyan magistrate in Xuya, has been given a Mexica woman’s death to investigate and is forced to confront her own past, people and culture within this new land, a land in which she, and others, have tried to leave the past behind.
So as much as this story is another piece in Aliette’s alternative history of the world, it’s also a thought provoking look into the lives of those who have had to leave their homes and cultures behind and find a new future in a new and foreign land.
Once again, great writing, interesting characters, good pacing.
And straight into Starsong — yeah, i’m becoming an addict.
Another novella that continues on from the previous two in building “The Universe of Xuya”.
You can read this at Aliette’s website.
This time we are taken into the heart of Xuya, and Xuyan society, where a young women has disappeared and her wealthy mother — who doesn’t want to get the Xuyan authorities involved — employs an American detective to find her.
So what we end up with is a rather good detective story that also gives the reader their first glimpse into the heart of Xuya and the cultural tensions between Xuya, America, Greater Mexica and their peoples.
I’m really enjoying Aliette’s style in how she is slowly building this alternative history of the world. Not the usual, tedious, info dumps of some sci-fi writers, but each a delightful short story/novella each giving us a view of this history from a totally different perspective.
Once again, great writing, interesting characters, good pacing. I’m also liking that this is not a series that you can just buy all the parts easily from Amazon, i’m very much liking that they’re scattered all around the internet and have to be found one at a time, it’s like a big puzzle.
Our next Xuya book will be Butterfly, Falling at Dawn
And, so, further goes my journey into “The Universe of Xuya”.
The only place i could find this novella was at Space and Time magazine, where it made its appearance in the June 2010 edition. For $2.99 you get the whole magazine in PDF format which worked very well on my Fire HD tablet. I’ve no idea what the rest of the magazine is like as i haven’t read any of it, but its there for a future perusal should i find a few spare moments.
Anyways, onto the story. We’re back in Greater Mexica, 4 years after the events in The Jaguar House, in Shadow. This time we have a young couple who are being hunted by the Revered Speaker’s regime and we begin to learn more and more about Greater Mexica and Xuya as their attempt to escape to Xuya unfolds.
One thing i have to say about the few Xuya stories that i’ve read so far, is that Aliette doesn’t give the reader any respite at all. Once you start reading you just get pulled along with the non-stop action and shenanigans, totally captured. Great writing, great characters, great world/universe building going on. The more i read the more i want to read.
The next story from the series is The Lost Xuyan Bride.
I recently came upon Aliette’s book, The Tea Master and the Detective, which i very much enjoyed and, as i mentioned in that review, i was going to be reading more from Aliette in the future.
So off i went to Aliette’s website to find out more about “The Universe of Xuya”, and so began my hunt to track down each of these stories from years ago and hopefully read them all in chronological order. Before beginning to read, or listen to, these books, it is best to go to that page and have a good read through the background to Xuya and bring yourself up to speed with how everything is in this alternative past/future that Aliette has created.
And so in The Jaguar House, in Shadow we begin our Xuya journey. This story was originally printed in Asimov’s, July 2010 edition, and if you feel inclined i’m sure you can go and buy a second hand copy at your usual second hand places. It’s also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight. Or, instead, you could simply listen to the audio book at StarShipSofa.
If you want to skip all the intro stuff just skip through to 23:58, where the story begins. The narration is by Morag Edwards and it is absolutely delightful and gives the story a wonderful other worldly quality. Admittedly, i listened to this in bed in the pitch dark with the speaker just above my head, and i fully recommend everyone in the whole wide world giving this a go.
Even if you’re not into doing the whole Xuya thing, this is delightful audio book that is soooo well worth a listen simply for its own sake.
Next up: Fleeing Tezcatlipoca.
I liked the cover, i liked the title, i liked the synopsis, i liked that it was 99p, and …
… i rather liked the story as well.
The “Tea Master” is actually a mindship, which isn’t really explained fully in the story, but you kind of get the idea that some sentient being has been implanted into the heart of some kind of space ship. There’s a real enigmatic element flowing through this story, and i think a lot of it is because this is a standalone from a much wider story line, that of Xuya, and i’m fairly sure if i go and read lots of stories from the Xuya Universe i’ll soon find out all about mindships and such like.
But for this book, not being fully up to speed on the hard facts of everything really doesn’t detract. In fact, i quite like the brushing over of the science and just getting down to the real bones of the story: that of a damaged mindship turned tea maker because they can’t face deep space any more, and that of a detective, who also comes across as fairly damaged herself. The two have to somehow get over their issues and investigate the death of a child and hopefully prevent more deaths.
Nebula Award winner and Hugo Award finalist for best novella, a sci-fi book doesn’t come with much better credentials.
After reading this i just had to go and read more from The Universe of Xuya, and so i gave this book a second reading when it was due in the series. It’s much better read with the full Xuya background, and you can find that second review to The Tea Master and the Detective by clicking on it.
