Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A stunning and vibrant collection from a rising star of the genre.
This collection of fourteen tales showcase the range and talent that garnered Aliette de Bodard multiple awards, from Nebulas to the Locus Award. From a dark Gothic Paris devastated by a magical war, where Fallen angels, dragons and magicians intrigue in the drawing rooms of ruined mansions; to the Vietnamese-tinged space opera universe of Xuya, where sentient spaceships become the heart and living memory of families and scholar-officials travel from planets to space stations.
In the Nebula award and Locus award winning “Immersion”, two women on a colonised space station grapple with loss of identity and culture. In the Hugo finalist “Children of Thorns, Children of Water”, a shapeshifting dragon on an infiltration mission to a ruined mansion must rescue his partner from creepy, child-like creatures. And in “A Salvaging of Ghosts,” a diver-scavenger cast off into deep spaces faces a dying midship and the ghost of her daughter. Unique to this collection is a new novella, “Of Birthdays, and Fungus, and Kindness”, set in Bodard’s alternative dark Paris.
Praise for Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight:
“This stunning collection showcases de Bodard’s lush worldbuilding, meticulous research, and emotional prose.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“De Bodard (The House of Shattered Wings, 2015) proves, again and again, that space opera can be intensely personal against its galactic backdrop…. The collection covers the consequences of war, survival in colonial culture, motherhood, mindships and space-travel, and aspects of grief.” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These 14 deeply culture-bound tales, set in the universes of de Bodard's Xuya and Dominion of the Fallen series, evoke heartbreak from sacrifice, the price of peace, and memories lost. "The Shipmaker" and "The Waiting Stars" tell of mindships that are implanted with human-birthed artificial intelligences that teeter on the line between humanity and technology. In "A Salvaging of Ghosts" and "The Dust Queen," priceless treasured memories are retrieved at the cost of life and reality. The reader also gets a taste of the dark alternative world in the two Dominion of the Fallen prequel stories, "Children of Thorns, Children of Water" and "Of Birthdays, and Fungus, and Kindness," in which power and betrayal often go hand in hand. Fans of artificial intelligence will be enchanted by the Xuya stories, while those partial to fantasy with fallen angels will devour the bonus peek into characters of the Fallen. Readers prepared for melancholy and heartbreak will find them finely crafted here.
