Seven of Infinities
Aug. 24th, 2020 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaAliette de Bodard's Seven of Infinities is a novella about two scholars. One is a mindship who has retired from a life of daring heists and knife-edge adventure. But the human she cares about, the virtuous woman from a poor family, has secrets too. Most scholars carry the advice and guidance of an ancestor, but Vân's muse is an artificial person, fragments of many people's memories assembled on a single chip. None of the people in Vân's new life know what she built, but her old friends, the friends caught and tried for sedition, might. If, somehow, they're still alive.
Seven of Infinities shares a setting with an earlier de Bodard novella, The Tea Master and the Detective. Both are stories about a human and a ship slowly weaving a friendship as they try to solve a mystery. In this case the ship, The Wild Orchid in Sunless Woods, is a thief--a legendarily competent thief, who struggles at the edge between competence and arrogance. Like many de Bodard romantic leads, she shifts between the shape of a human (here, in projected image, with tiny bot assistants) and something larger, with the beauty of a galaxy or a star.
Sunless Woods has promised that her meticulously planned operations will never involve murder. That's refreshing, in a story that's so aware of the layered harms of power. It's a style of intensely moral stubbornness that Vân and Sunless Woods have in common, and that pushes their shared attraction toward something larger and more permanent.
Another stubbornly moral character is Uyên, Vân's student, who plans to excel in the imperial exams and become a magistrate wielding justice. Aliette de Bodard often writes about strong-minded yet vulnerable young people. The shifting balance of authority, obligation, and affection between Uyên and Vân is particularly well drawn, and the climax of the story turns on Uyên's courage.
(Thank you to NetGalley and Subterranean Press for giving me an ARC to review!)
Seven of Infinities shares a setting with an earlier de Bodard novella, The Tea Master and the Detective. Both are stories about a human and a ship slowly weaving a friendship as they try to solve a mystery. In this case the ship, The Wild Orchid in Sunless Woods, is a thief--a legendarily competent thief, who struggles at the edge between competence and arrogance. Like many de Bodard romantic leads, she shifts between the shape of a human (here, in projected image, with tiny bot assistants) and something larger, with the beauty of a galaxy or a star.
Sunless Woods has promised that her meticulously planned operations will never involve murder. That's refreshing, in a story that's so aware of the layered harms of power. It's a style of intensely moral stubbornness that Vân and Sunless Woods have in common, and that pushes their shared attraction toward something larger and more permanent.
Another stubbornly moral character is Uyên, Vân's student, who plans to excel in the imperial exams and become a magistrate wielding justice. Aliette de Bodard often writes about strong-minded yet vulnerable young people. The shifting balance of authority, obligation, and affection between Uyên and Vân is particularly well drawn, and the climax of the story turns on Uyên's courage.
(Thank you to NetGalley and Subterranean Press for giving me an ARC to review!)