SciFi Novella Review: The Citadel of Weeping Pearls by Aliette de Bodard

The Citadel of Weeping Pearls by Aliette de Bodard:

The Citadel of Weeping Pearls is a novella set in Aliette de Bodard's Xuya Universe, featuring a scifi world based upon Viet (and sometimes Chinese) cultures, featuring Viet family/ruling structures as well as the existence of things like mindships (ships with AI minds born within a human womb) and memory implants (memories/personalities of ancestors that can be implanted in their descendants).  This story is actually a distant sequel to another novella of hers, "On a Red Station, Drifting" (which I Reviewed Here) although other than the cameo appearance of a major character from that novella, it's entirely separate.  I'm a huge fan of de Bodard and enjoyed "On a Red Station, Drifting" (among other Xuya novellas and short fiction that I've enjoyed) so I was looking forward to this one for a while (and got it on sale in August or September)

And The Citadel of Weeping Pearls is another really interesting novella from de Bodard, taking a classic Vietnamese tale and moving it to this SF setting to tell a tale about family and dealing with the past and future.  It's a lot more fragmented of a story than Red Station, with four viewpoints instead of two and kind of two major plots that don't really connect, but it still works and is very worth your time.

More specifics after the jump:

Quick Plot Summary:  Years ago, The Bright Princess Ngoc Minh - Empress Mi Hiep's heir and favorite daughter - married a minor station-born and was exiled to The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, where she remained until, because of further defiance, the Empress sent her military against the Bright Princess.  But before the Empress' forces could get there, the entire Citadel seemed to disappear from time and space, where it was never seen again. 

30 years later, Suu Nuoc, a lowborn but favored general of the Empress discovers the disappearance of a researcher tasked by the Empress with finding the Citadel - and who was seemingly on the verge of a breakthrough.  His investigation, alongside a younger princess and sister of Ngoc Minh, will lead him to an engineer whose mother disappeared with the Citadel and to the truth of what really happened.  But time is growing short, as the Empress has received word of a foreign threat with the power to subvert the Empire's own people - a force that they may not be able to withstand without the Bright Princess' miracle....

Thoughts:  The Citadel of Weeping Pearls essentially has two storylines, although one is the major focus.  The first, and the main focus, is the search for what happened at the Citadel and with Bright Princess Ngoc Minh and the man sent to find a way to reach her and the lost Citadel.  The second, is the Empress' worrying about the foreign invaders, who have found a way to subvert mindships, through manipulating their minds until they become no different than mindless drones.  We see this all through each of four main characters who have their own ties to the stories.  The storylines don't quite intersect or even finish - the war is just beginning by the end of the novel.  Because honestly that's not really the point of this novella or that storyline.

Instead the story is about not just family duty and relations - as seen through a younger princess who regrets not being closer to either her lost older sister or the mindship who is technically her daughter, or through the engineer searching for her lost mother - but also about letting go of both the past and one's pride and looking towards the future.  The Empress thinks to herself that the search for the Citadel is really for the purposes of finding a weapon that could save them all, but really it's more for her own desperate need to correct her mistakes in the past that drove her daughter away.   Pride in one's birth and standing leads nobles to discount Suu Nuoc and leads to the main researcher acting incredibly reckless, whereas an objective view of the future could possibly save everyone.  Only by letting go of the past and one's pride will they have a chance of survival by the story's end....

So yeah, another really interesting novella, worth your time, as always.