Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
From a writer fast becoming one of the stars of the genre, Aliette de Bodard, multiple award winner and author of The Tea Master and the Detective, now brings readers fourteen dazzling tales that showcase the richly textured worldbuilding and beloved characters that have brought her so much acclaim.
In de Bodard's first collection come discover the breadth and endless invention of her universes, ranging from a dark Gothic Paris devastated by a magical war; to the multiple award-winning Xuya, a far-future space opera inspired by Vietnamese culture where scholars administrate planets and sentient spaceships are part of families.
In the Nebula award and Locus award winning "Immersion", a young girl working in a restaurant on a colonized space station crosses paths with an older woman who has cast off her own identity. In the novelette "Children of Thorns, Children of Water", a shapeshifting dragon infiltrating a ruined mansion finds more than he's bargained for when his partner is snatched by eerie, child-like creatures. And in the award-winning "Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight", three very different people—a scholar, an engineer, and a spaceship—all must deal with the loss of a woman who was the cornerstone of their world.
This collection includes a never-before-seen 20,000-word novella, "Of Birthdays, and Fungus, and Kindness", set in Bodard's alternative dark Paris.
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.
