The Tea Master and the Detective

 The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard (2018 JABberwocky paperback 116pp) 

Last year (2022) Aliette de Bodard’s novel The Red Scholar’s Wake generated a lot of positive reviews, ended up on many a best of the year list and won several awards. Naturally I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I discovered that the French-Vietnamese de Bodard had written many earlier short stories and several novellas in the same Xuya science fiction universe. Set at some time in the distant future, all the stories involve a space empire dominated by the Vietnamese and Chinese culture. Spaceships, space habitats, mentions of recent uprisings and wars are all overlaid by a rigid traditional hierarchical political system, or so it seems...

The Tea Master and the Detective is a short (87 pages in this slim paperback edition) novella which won the prestigious Nebula award in 2018.

The Shadow’s Child is an artificially intelligent ‘mindship’, the controlling presence of a starship who has recently been traumatised in an incident which saw her lose all her crew. Still recovering, she ekes out an existence creating ‘blends’, personalised tea-like beverages that help humans survive space travel into ‘deep places’. She also carries out the occasional transport flight to generate enough money to pay her rent.

One day self-proclaimed ‘consulting detective’ Long Chau arrives in The Shadow’s Child’s office at first wanting a blend then offering to hire the ship for a mission into the dark places to recover a corpse from one of the many wrecked vessels there.

Fighting her fears, the AI carries out Long Chau’s request. A body is recovered and the pair goes its separate way. The Shadow’s Child becomes obsessed with finding out Long Chau’s history and consults a network of other ships and contacts.

Long Chau returns with the news that the recovered corpse has irregularities – it is a young girl who didn’t die in a space accident instead it suggests a cruel form of torture or coercive control

The pair then rapidly dive into an adventure to uncover what really happened and both of them must face their traumatic pasts to help bring about justice.

Much has been made about this story being somehow based on Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t really see it myself; the resemblance is mainly superficial. There are so many things hinted at and unexplained in this novella, it really does feel like just a tiny part of a much bigger world that the author has been building for years. I can’t fault the writing, it is economical and packs a lot into its short length.

If you like space opera with a slightly different edge this could be a novella and perhaps a whole new universe for you.