Review: A Fire Born of Exile

This book is a companion piece to The Red Scholar’s Wake. I kept looking to see if there were any through lines, but the only one that I found was a mention of The Fire Palace near the end of this book. Otherwise, consider it as taking place in the same time area of the Xuya timeline as Red Scholar, but without any intersecting plot lines.

This is my second novel-length story by deBodard. Previously I knew her from short stories in the Xuya universe that had appeared in various SFF magazines I’m subscribed to. Over the course of these two novels it has become quite clear that deBodard excels in writing character relationships. The plots exist in each book, but they almost seem to exist as a means throw characters into contact with each other. Perhaps because this was the second Xuya book and I was familiar with the overlays and Mindships being considered children and so on, I found the relationships to work on a much stronger level here than they did in Red Scholar. I enjoyed Red Scholar, but the love story seemed slightly forced. Here each relationship seemed to make perfect sense as the characters interacted with each other.

If you’ve read enough of my reviews, you know that I’m often spotting tropes and archetypal stories as I’m reading. This is not a knock on any given author - the seams show a little more easily with some authors than others, but when I recognize the tropes, part of my enjoyment comes from finding the subversions or even the way in which the author follows the trope. One other thing you might know if you’ve read enough of these is that I tend not to re-read the back of the book blurb before reading a book so I can go in clean. (Like watching a movie without seeing the trailer and all the spoilers in the trailer) So, I though it was a testament to deBodard’s writing style that i was so absorbed into the character relationships that I didn’t realize it was The Count of Monte Cristo in space. (Not a spoiler - this is how deBodard describes it on their Mastodon feed)

One final thing in the book’s favor: people often want to see themselves in novels and movies. Yet, so often science fiction books are a generically western European/American culture projected into the future. The Xuya universe is a Vietnamese culture in outer space. There are tons of references that pop if you happen to be familiar with the culture and brings an extra dimension to all the relationships and interactions.

I strongly recommend, you just have to let some of the unexplained science fiction things (like the mindships and overlays) just wash over you and keep reading. They will eventually make sense in context and I like that deBodard doesn’t stop the narrative to explain them.

• Books

• Xuya