Monday, October 24, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard

 

Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on November 24, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Red Scholar's Wake is the latest work from one of my favorite authors, Aliette de Bodard, known best for her Dominion of the Fallen series (and its spin-off Dragon and Blades) as well as her Xuya universe in which she has set a number of short stories and novellas.  This book is the first full length Xuya novel, and is also a project which de Bodard has teased on twitter, her newsletter, and her Patreon (yes I follow all three) for some time: the space pirate lesbian book inspired by the real life pirates in the South China Sea who were supported by Vietnam in taking ships belonging to the then Chinese Empire.  It's a book that I've been looking forward to for some time, so I pre-ordered it the moment it became available in North America and then requested an e-ARC the moment it showed up on NetGalley...and then read it the next day despite having way too long of a TBR already.  

And The Red Scholar's Wake delivers largely as I'd hoped - with an excellent Lesbian romance between Space Pirate/Spaceship Rice Fish and engineer Xich Si that develops both characters really well, along with a bunch of side characters in this clearly inspired by the real world universe.  And the romance is - as you should expect from de Bodard - accompanied by a story that deals with the unjustness of various systems of society, drawing a parallel between the indentures allowed by the lawful government and the taking and selling of prisoners by pirates, as well as the other ways each system can be unjust despite the good people trying to make either system better - and these themes of justice and whatnot work really well.  There's even, to add to it all naturally, themes of grief and of what turns out to be unintentionally neglectful parenting amidst a relationship in which one party is not getting exactly what she needs or wants.  All together it's pretty damn good and I really recommend it if you like space opera romance.  

More after the jump:

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Xich Si had nothing left, other than her beloved six year old daughter Khanh, when her small poor ship was attacked and taken by pirates, leaving her imprisoned and alone.  Her precious bots, built by her own hand, lie charred and ruined and without means, she expects the pirates not to bother with a futile attempt at ransoming her.  Instead, the best Xich Si expects she can hope for is to be taken as a bondsperson, forced into service of the pirates, and to hope that this "service" doesn't involve anything too violating.  What she certainly doesn't expect is to be approached by the mindship Rice Fish, the wife of the Red Scholar, the recently deceased leader of the Red Banner Pirates, and asked to be her wife. 


Rice Fish has no romantic intentions towards Xich Si - her marriage to the Red Scholar was entirely a business transaction, for the benefit of all parties, even if she might've wanted it to be more.  So she offers marriage to Xich Si solely as a contractual affair: an offer of protection in exchange for Xich Si using her engineering skills to figure out how her hated rival pirate, the Green Scholar Kim Thông (USE O HAT) had betrayed the Red Scholar to the Censor of the An O Empire...and caused her beloved Red Scholar's death.  And if the marriage might reassure those who pirate under the Red Banner, and allow her to maintain control even as her rival is insisting that the Pirates break all the laws and moral imperatives that make them worthwhile, well all the better. 

But what Xich Si and Rice Fish could never imagine is that there might be mutual attraction between them, and that they each might want more.  And so as things begin falling apart around them - with Xich Si's daughter in peril and Rice Fish's ideals for the Pirates, ideals of a more just system, being in utter jeopardy - the two find that the only way they may be able to survive...and may want to survive...will be to come together more closely than they could ever have expected....

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The Red Scholar's Wake is a novel with a bunch of familiar touches from de Bodard.  Obviously there's the Xuya Universe, a universe in which the cultures at play are based off Vietnamese and Chinese cultures (in this case quite directly as the two warring Empires are future takes on the Chinese and Viet Empires from the late 1700s-early 1800s), and in which humans travel inside mindships - ships whose minds/brains are born from human wombs, who can have relationships with humans via projections and bots that translate the touch of projections into actual feeling, allowing for physical and sexual touching between humans and mindships.  There's also the way the narrative follows the two protagonists' points of view, two protagonists who have very different perspectives and histories despite coming together, ala de Bodard's Seven of Infinities, and there's some consent issues that the characters are distinctly aware of, like in her "In the Vanisher's Palace".

This is not a fault of this work - this universe and style of writing works in those other stories, and it works really well here to tell a fascinating romance that also features some real strong themes of justice, systems, and love.  So we have Xich Si as our new face to this universe, who is able to directly contrast the justice of the An O Empire's governed space - where people aren't subject to taking and forced indenture.....but parents and guardians may still do things like sell children and those in poverty are also forced into desperate measures - to that of the Pirates, where they do seizing and well...pirating but some groups like the Red Banner will not act cruelly towards their captives and will instead provide them with a means to work into a position among them, and will make sure that the children among them grow up in happiness without starving...and certainly without the possiblity of indenture.  But Xich Si isn't just some point of view for us to examine this word, but a recognizable character in her own right, a woman who loves deeply those close to her like her daughter or the one she lost a few years ago, and whose wanting towards Rice Fish is passionate and strong once she sees how much Rice Fish cares about making the pirates and this universe a better place.  She's also a woman who, despite her initial fear, learns to hold her own and take brave decisive action, taking risks and making statements when necessary to do what she sees as right....and who can recognize when others are holding back feelings or are ignoring past hurts...like Rice Fish.

Rice Fish by contrast is a woman (well mindship) who has a strong sense of justice and is desperate to preserve the justice and moral codes of pirating that her beloved now deceased spouse, the Red Scholar Huân, worked to build.  She cares deeply for them and for making the pirates a better group, certainly a better group than the Imperial places that they pirate from.  Yet she also burns at time with romantic passion, passion that her former wife refused to share, making her not able to understand that such passion could work alongside a more practical arrangement in a relationship.  And it's also ruined her parenting of her child, who has grown up to become the head of a different pirate banner (the Purple Banner), who needed tender caring from his parents, and a loving relationship between them, and only found coldness.  And so she needs Xich Si to point out some of these things....but as things fall apart around her, it's hard for her to hear them, leading to her making some desperate drastic choices.

The result, and I don't want to spoil anything, is really well done, with the romance between the two main characters being excellent (including a very Xuya-esque sex scene that works very well), the themes of justice in various systems being explored incredibly well between the Pirates, the Empires, and the Censor who serves as an antagonist who isn't actually evil but is just trying to make a better universe as well, as well as the themes of romance, relationships, and parenthood.  It's a story with depth, and de Bodard does an excellent job avoiding the potential thorny issues of consent and ignorance of real problems in the setting (Pirates DO Kill people) that other writers might overlook.  Definitely another novel to watch out for and pick up, as usual from de Bedard.  

 


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