Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Taut, well-written, with excellent character work. It *is* a Holmes pastiche but it’s a lot more than that in practice. (In fact I think approaching it as a pastiche risks blinding a reader to the work’s own independent virtues, but the debt is there.)
If the mystery plot of this one had come together a little bit more strongly, I'd put this at 4.5 stars. I absolutely LOVED the characters, world, and themes of this! Particularly the concept of mindships and how they were integrated into the story really delivered for me
Vietnamese-flavored Sherlock Holmes IN SPACE, except that Sherlock's a woman and Watson's a spaceship. This novella should have been right up my alley, but I didn't care for the style or the slow pace, and the characters just didn't gel with me. Not my thing, but maybe it's yours.Also, damn it, one arrives at deductions by deducing, not by deducting.E-arc from NetGalley and Subterranean Press.
This novella reads like the lovechild of Sherlock Holmes and the Ship Who Sang, dropped into a wormhole inside a space capsule made of Asian history. My first sample of de Bodard: while it is a part, or at least inside, of a longer series, and I suspect the world-building might make for a more leisurely unpacking if one started at the beginning novel, I thought this story worked just fine as a stand-alone.Now I want to hunt up the proper beginning.(Also, it turns out I like the new way of sellin...
In the age of fantasy books of ridiculous lengths--why, hello, Way of Kings--and series that may never be finished--ah-hem, George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss--I've rediscovered my love of novellas. de Bodard has written an intriguing, sure to be award-nominated novella about a mind-ship hired by a brilliant, drug-addicted woman who wants to retrieve a dead body for study. Naturally, it turns out that it was no mere space-accident that caused the untimely death. When the shipmind, The Shado...
If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.The Accepted Aliens: “The Tea Master and the Detective” by Aliette de Bodard“When you’re out there, with no one and nothing to stand in your way - when you realise how small you are - you also realise that everything that ever was, that ever will be, is connected to you. That we’re all, in the end, part of the same great thing.”In “The Tea Master and the Detective” by Aliette de BodardI find it extremely funny that in some reviews rega...
A glorious spaceship/detective story in which the Holmes-style Consulting Detective is a woman in a Vietnamese-influenced future culture, and Watson is a traumatised sentient starship. Absolutely terrific novella, packing in wonderful ideas and images and a huge amount of humanity. Plus, what a lovely cover. I hope we will get a lot more of these, I wolfed it down and relished every sentence.
I'm actually pretty impressed with this one but I have one major complaint...I feel like I'm missing a LOT of worldbuilding nuance here. I've never read any of her Xuya novellas and I feel the lack.Sure, the whole mystery in space surrounded my Mindships that are pretty awesome is all pretty awesome, but the rather odd bits of Tea and special brews feel like they need a lot of backstory. Otherwise, I'm stuck just thinking about Ann Leckie's Raddich series. And maybe that's kind of a side-jab.I f...
An update of A Study in Scarlet in the author's Xuya universe with the part of Watson being played by a war-traumatized shipmind and with a female consulting detective. There's not much more to it than that; de Bodard's Xuya universe continues to delight and most versions of Sherlock Holmes demonstrate how compelling the broad outlines of these characters are.
3.5*Not really sure what to think of this one... A re-telling of A Study in Scarlet sounded exactly like my kind of thing, especially since set in a different universe.The world building was indeed fascinating, as was the notion of shipminds and mind altering concoctions to alleviate space-travel. The Shadow’s Child’s voice was engaging and made me want to find out what was its story. The mystery was a good one and introduced the detective, someone who is of course rude, eccentric, and yes, bril...
Sherlock in space! Discharged from military service after a traumatic incident in deep space, the mindship The Shadow's Child is barely making ends meet blending drugs to her clients' individual specifications. Then infuriating, brilliant, and already-drugged-to-the-gills Long Chau hires her to find a corpse in deep space for a study in decomposition. This plan goes off the rails when they realize the corpse they picked up is probably not dead from natural causes...The duo seek to solve the case...
Ahoy there me mateys! I received this sci-fi eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. So here be me honest musings . . .The cover drew me in and three things convinced me to read this book:1) I previously read some of the author’s short stories and loved her writing style;2) It is a Subterranean Press book and they do great work; and3) One of the characters is a mindship . . . This mindship, named The Shadow’s Child, is not just any ship. It was previously a military ship who physic...
