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Complex and descriptive, well-suited to the challenge of the world and the story. It pays tribute to the Sherlock format but does something so very different that it feels very new.Īs always, I enjoy de Bodard's writing style.

When I finished, I thought, "well, that was fun," but fun is not the right word, not quite. Like the Moffat and Gatiss version, this somehow manages to retain a feeling of whimsy in the midst of fear, suspicion, self-doubt, and a mildly sociopathic lead.

Of course, it might have helped that I have been very slowly working my way through the recent Cumberbatch incarnation of Sherlock. I wasn't expecting a Sherlock style construction, but the parallels soon became clear. "But she'd lived through a war, an uprising and a famine, and she was done with diminishing herself to spare the feelings of others."

When the shipmind, The Shadow's Child, takes the job, she finds herself confronting her own past. Naturally, it turns out that it was no mere space-accident that caused the untimely death. de Bodard has written an intriguing, sure to be award-nominated novella about a mind-ship hired by a brilliant, drug-addicted woman who wants to retrieve a dead body for study. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss-I've rediscovered my love of novellas. In the age of fantasy books of ridiculous lengths- why, hello, Way of Kings-and series that may never be finished- ah-hem, George R.R. When the corpse turns out to have been murdered, Long Chau feels compelled to investigate, dragging The Shadow's Child with her.Īs they dig deep into the victim's past, The Shadow's Child realises that the investigation points to Long Chau's own murky past-and, ultimately, to the dark and unbearable void that lies between the stars. When Long Chau walks into her office, The Shadow's Child expects an unpleasant but easy assignment. Meanwhile, abrasive and eccentric scholar Long Chau wants to find a corpse for a scientific study. In this fluid society, human and mindship avatars mingle in corridors and in function rooms, and physical and virtual realities overlap, the appareance of environments easily modified and adapted to interlocutors or current mood.Ī transport ship discharged from military service after a traumatic injury, The Shadow's Child now ekes out a precarious living as a brewer of mind-altering drugs for the comfort of space-travellers.

Welcome to the Scattered Pearls Belt, a collection of ring habitats and orbitals ruled by exiled human scholars and powerful families, and held together by living mindships who carry people and freight between the stars.