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.

I first encountered de Bodard’s Xuya Universe through a short story I read in one of my SFF magazines. A science fiction world based on Vietnamese culture was fascinating. But what sucked me in was the way that de Bodard writes her characters. The emotional interplay between characters is key to the stories.

Like some other SF universes, the Xuya universe (and this book in particular) have the concept of mind-ships; ships controlled by an entity that is a fusion of biological and mechanical technology. If I read things correctly in this book (and remember from other Xuya stories) it is implied that the bio part of the ships comes from someone who was once a human being. This story is a romance between a mind-ship and a human. On the surface is sounds absurd. In practice it works out quite well for the story’s purpose.