SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

The Tea Master and the Detective is a novella in de Bodard's "Xuya" universe, which is a SciFi universe which is heavily influenced by Vietnamese and Chinese cultures as those cultures conquered the world and got into space first.  This is my first Xuya work (I know de Bodard from her Dominions of the Fallen series), and I can say quite clearly that no prior knowledge of the universe is needed to enjoy The Tea Master and the Detective - the only sign that this book is part of the universe is the presence of the Chinese/Viet names and clear influence on society.  And I did enjoy The Tea Master and the Detective quite a bit - the book is advertised as a gender-swapped Sherlock Holmes in the future with a Mind-Ship as her Watson, and it delivers as promised.




Quick Plot Summary: When a woman named Long Chau, drugged to the gills, comes into the office of The Shadow's Child, a retired mind-ship, seeking a Brew that will enable Long Chau to think in "Deep Spaces," The Shadow's Child hesitates just a second.  It only takes that short second for Long Chau to deduce the mindship's tragic past in Deep Spaces, starting a need for the mindship to figure out who Long Chau actually is.  But as the pair's business interaction plays out, they will discover a dead body that suggests a non-natural cause, and The Shadow's Child will have to decide to confront her own tragic past if she wants to help the Detective...if she even wants to.
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Thoughts: The Tea Master and the Detective is a relatively short novella - only 93 pages long (as opposed to some of the Tor Novellas which are around 150 pages long) - and it makes every page count.  This is a world involving "Deep Spaces" (an alternate space sort of like Hyperspace) and Ships with minds of their own who are treated not as things but as their own beings, with their own offices and lives if they so choose.  And the novella takes no time to explain any of this, trusting the reader to figure it out from the narration and context.  And it works.

As I mentioned before the jump, this is essentially a version of a Sherlock Holmes story (it is very very loosely based on A Study in Scarlet) with a mind-ship playing the role of Watson and Long Chau (a woman) playing the role of Holmes.  That said, this novella is less about the mystery and more about the introduction and interplay between the characters, so a reader shouldn't go in expecting a fascinating mystery novella to try and solve alongside the characters.  But de Bodard inhabits in the characters and this world quite a lot of nuance and makes them very interesting to get to know, and I really hope this isn't the last we've seen of them.