Asian Space Opera on a galactic scale

The Red Scholar's Wake 

by Aliette de Bodard

The writing is lyrical. The character in a terrible fix. That much the opening makes clear but if you are not already familiar with this space based, Asian history-based, complex cultural hierarchy on a pirate ship in alliance with other pirate fleets (to use an English-language approximate synonym for ‘banner’) you may feel lost for a page or two.

Fortunately, this author quickly brings the wider, stranger universe down to a more easily contextualized contest of wills. If one  will belongs to a human tinkerer and the other to a mostly projected ship’s avatar, well, that’s just the way things work here.

The ship’s technology is fascinating, shifts of shade and image and motion, yet for all that it is grand and complicated, there are still human scale people and issues for our heroine Xich Si to deal with. She has to make a fast and terrible choice, with lifelong consequences for her only child, and for herself.

What makes this interesting particularly is that the ship is also making a fast and terrible choice, with lifelong consequences for itself.

I was immediately hooked by the complexity of the world and the language, although the shifting forms of address - respect and familiarity and affection  - require some adjustment for readers like me, raised in western cultures where family hierarchies and relationships are immutably defined by the blood, marriage, or adoptive tie.

The fusing of Asian and North American speculative fiction styles and directions/influences/objectives is not always an easy one but here it works. This is space opera in the truest sense of both space and opera: a 3D backdrop encompassing galaxies, on which is staged a libretto roiling with human passion and pain. In the hands of this adept novelist the vast blend includes deep insight into the core of a very human (albeit technologically enhanced) protagonist.

I was entranced from the earliest pages but given my lack of familiarity with Vietnamese culture and history, there are undoubtedly layers and subtleties that I missed. This is a book I would like to come back to with more cultural knowledge to enhance my experience.

Highly recommended. 

 

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