The Tea Master and the Detective
About this ebook
Finalist for the Hugo Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella
“A window onto a beautifully developed world that widens the meaning of space opera.” —The New York Times
Once, the mindship known as The Shadow's Child was a military transport. Once, she leapt effortlessly between stars and planets, carrying troops and crew for a war that tore the Empire apart. Until an ambush killed her crew and left her wounded and broken.
Now the war is over, and The Shadow's Child, surviving against all odds, has run away. Discharged and struggling to make a living, she has no plans to go back into space. Until the abrasive and arrogant scholar Long Chau comes to see her. Long Chau wants to retrieve a corpse for her scientific studies: a simple enough, well-paid assignment.
But when the corpse they find turns out to have been murdered, the simple assignment becomes a vast and tangled investigation, inexorably leading back to the past--and, once again, to that unbearable void where The Shadow's Child almost lost both sanity and life...
“[The Tea Master and the Detective] is a window onto a beautifully developed world that widens the meaning of space opera, one that centers on Chinese and Vietnamese cultures and customs instead of Western military conventions, and is all the more welcome for it.” —Amal El-Mohtar, The New York Times
“The Tea Master and the Detective is the Sherlock Holmes retelling I always wanted and now I have it. And I want so much more of it.” —Ana Grilo, Kirkus
“The Tea Master is an astonishing Holmesian mystery, in which Holmes is a woman and Watson is a spaceship. It is everything I wanted it to be. Tea, space, and mysteries within mysteries.” —Mary Robinette Kowal
“Ingenious... As a classical blend of far-future SF and traditional murder mystery, The Tea Master and the Detective should satisfy readers unfamiliar with the Xuya universe, but at the same time it’s an intriguing introduction to that universe, much of which seems to lie just outside the borders of this entertaining tale.” —Gary K. Wolfe, Locus
“De Bodard constructs a convincingly gritty setting and a pair of unique characters with provocative histories and compelling motivations. The story works as well as both science fiction and murder mystery, exploring a future where pride, guilt, and mercy are not solely the province of humans.” —Publishers' Weekly
Ratings and reviews
- Flag inappropriate
About the author
Aliette de Bodard has won three Nebula Awards, an Ignyte Award, a Locus Award, a European Science Fiction Society Award, a British Fantasy Award and six BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) Awards. She is the author of Navigational Entanglements (forthcoming summer 2024), as well as A Fire Born of Exile, a sapphic Count of Monte Cristo set in space. She also wrote The Red Scholar’s Wake (2022 BSFA Award finalist, 2022 Locus Award finalist, 2022 Clarke Award finalist), a lesbian space pirates romance set in Vietnamese-inspired galactic empires. She is well-known for the multi-award-winning, Hugo-award nominated series The Universe of Xuya, Vietnamese-inspired space opera with sentient spaceships. Finally, she is the author of the Dragons and Blades series, comedies of manners, murders and family shenanigans set in a Gothic Vietnamese court, which comprise Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders and Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances (2022 BSFA Award Winner). She lives in Paris, France.
