Free to read over at Clarkesworld.   It’s also in the collections, Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight and Scattered Among Strange Worlds.

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.

Aliette’s Page

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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.

Aliette’s Page

#scifi #aliettedebodard