I've read Aliette de Bodard before, but she seems to shift cultures like she's changing T-shirts. She was born in New York but grew up in Paris, with French her first language. Her ancestry is French and Vietnamese, but she tends to set her science fiction and fantasy in cultures that are Aztec or Vietnamese, the latter before the rise of Communism. This is very much the latter, which means a lot of strangely accented characters, from a western perspective. However, it's easy to pick up on a lot of the cultural backdrop because her characters are at once of their culture and universal.

She's written a lot of stories set in space that's dominated by the Vietnamese, even though those haven't been the ones I've read thus far. I can't say whether this is connected to any of the others, even through a shared fictional universe; but I read it as a standalone and it works that way. The thrust of this novella is that these Vietnamese spacefarers have mastered faster-than-light travel and, when it's used, by Navigators who work with shadows, you enter and exit the Hollows through navigational gates. In the Hollows are Tanglers, vast and dangerous creatures that feel like space jellyfish. And, as we begin, a Tangler has escaped the Hollows, presumably via a navigational gate, and an unusual team is assembled to find and destroy it.

It's unusual for a whole slew of reasons. Sure, the five crew members all seem to be women, even if some of their names are traditionally male. Sure, they're all Vietnamese, hence those strange accented characters. However, they're each from different clans, which means that each has their own prejudices against the others. And all are broken in some way, so that they don't fit very well within their individual clans and are even less likely to fit together in a cross-clan setup. Of course, they're brought together for a reason; and we and they will eventually discover that reason, but I won't let you in on that spoiler.

Instead I'll introduce you to the characters. The most sympathetic for me is the nominal lead, who is Việt Nhi, from Rooster Clan. She's clearly neurodivergent, needing distance and quiet to work effectively and I related to a lot of that. There's Hạc Cúc of Snake Clan, a seasoned assassin who's suffering from an inferiority complex that's rooted in worship of her sư phụ, Quang Lộc. Lành, of Ox Clan, is justifiably scared from experience, changed by trauma in a previous encounter with an errant Tangler. Bảo Duy, from Rat Clan, is simply reckless and overconfident. They're all tasked to work under Ly Châu of Dog Clan, the dominant clan in this future. But she's dead in the morning, poisoned by a substance that's carefully restricted to the clans.

There's a story here, of course, and these characters do their best to do what needs to be done to get through it, in their individual broken ways. However, de Bodard is far more interested in these characters and how she can evolve them. Ly Châu aside, who doesn't have anywhere near enough time to grow, each of these four has a very distinguishable story arc, each of which need to merge so that they can get their job done. There are many clashes, because they're each at each other's throats from the outset, sometimes quite literally; but this is about how they can come together as a team when clearly nobody expects them to be able to do so.

If that sounds feminine, then you're on the right track. I'm not sure how many male characters are in this book, but it may be just one and him a supporting player. Certainly the leads are all female and they interact in a fundamentally female way. It's not really feminine, in any of the senses that word might suggest, but it's absolutely female-centric and much of the character growth is found through emotional dissection. Aliette de Bodard's very name is clearly feminine, but were this to be presented as by 'John Smith' or some such overt male name, no reader would buy into it being real. There's absolutely no doubt that this was written by a woman and, further to that, a woman who has no reason to pretend to write like a man in order to sell books.

I liked this a lot, albeit less because of its actual story and more because of the way it was told. I'd love to dip deeper into this universe, which is impeccably imagined for a skimpy hundred and sixty-page book, very likely a novella rather than a short novel. If this doesn't fit in the same universe as her other stories and novels about Vietnamese-dominated space, then it will likely fit into her next work, because this is too rich a backdrop to restrict to one slim volume. And, even if it always remains standalone, I'm eager to read those other works to see how she did things there.

This is likely to appeal most to readers who want to experience characters and stories that have no roots in their own culture. I'm English living in the United States, straight and into my second half century. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a young and queer Vietnamese woman thrown into very female inter-clan conflict on a claustrophobic mission into space. About the only way I can relate is through sharing some neurodivergence with Vi?t Nhi and, even there, we're hardly the same. Every neurodivergent is different, even if we often share common traits.

Yet I loved this, because Aliette de Bodard imagined it for me and it was a fascinating experience, a worthy look into how people utterly unlike me function (or don't). The less open you are to that sort of thing, the less you're likely to get anything out of this. If it sounds like your cup of tea, then I'd highly recommend it, even if its lack of connection to your own personal experience might mean that you don't retain a lot of it except in a very broad sense. It's likely to stand very much alone in your experience. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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