tl;dr

More stories featuring The Shadow Child and Long Chau, please!

opening remarks

While I haven’t read them all, I’ve enjoyed each of Aliette de Bodard’s stories set in the Xuya Universe.  I was therefore already excited with the news of a new tale set in that Universe.  My anticipation went up a hundredfold when I discovered that The Tea Master and the Detective was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche.

knee-jerk observations

The Shadow Child is a transport ship that suffered a significant loss – the death of its entire crew – during a recent battle. Now discharged from military service, the ship has taken on the profession of brewing narcotics and calming drugs for those who find space travel terrifying.  The ship’s customer, a woman named Long Chau, is seeking a blend that will sharpen her senses in deep space.  The Shadow Child, who recognises a drug-addict when she sees one, agrees to brew a blend as long as she can monitor Long Chau.  The following exchange, and Long Chau’s observational skills – her knowledge that The Shadow Child suffered trauma in space – makes obvious what was already clear (if you know anything about Sherlock Holmes):

de Bodard has changed things up (beyond the fact that a sentient spaceship is playing the role of Watson) by having her analogue for Mrs Hudson, Bao, be the landlady for The Shadow Child (Watson) not Long Chau (Holmes).

Long Chau – in the spirit of Holmes – can’t help but show off her observational skills, even when the subject matter is sensitive.

Long Chau wants to travel out into deep space because she’s researching the decomposition rate of bodies exposed to the vacuum.  Lovely and morbid and in keeping with her male with the eclectic interests of her male analogue.   In viewing the floating human remains from a mindship that was irreparably damaged five years ago, Chau picks out the one corpse that doesn’t belong.

The corpse has a name, it is Hai Anh, and before she died, she was a member of The House of Saltless Prosperity.  Not exactly a religious order like the Mormons in A Study in Scarlet but I’m going to infer the connection anyway.

The Gist Of It

During the Passover meal, we sing the song “Dayenu”, which loosely translates to “it would be enough”.  As a thank you to God for all the acts He performed on behalf of the Jewish people, the song remarks that even one miracle would have been sufficient.  For example, it would have been enough if God had taken the Israelites out of Egypt and not delivered them the ten commandments, or it would have been enough if God had split the Red Sea and not led the Israelites to dry land.  You get the drift.  Well, echoing that Passover song it would have been enough if Aliette de Bodard’s The Tea Master and the Detective had just been a gender-swapped Sherlock Holmes pastiche where the Watson analogue happens to be the consciousness of a spaceship, both of them solving all manner of complicated murders and crimes.  The fact that the novella provides more than just this thrill is a testament to de Bodard’s refusal to accept the easy or obvious.

The actual detective work, while well plotted and smart, is the least interesting part of the story, more fascinating is how economics drives the decisions made by the characters.  The Scattered Pearls Belt, the setting for the novella, is a place of the haves and the have-nots.  It’s a reality that affects everyone, whether they’re flesh and blood or made from metal and plated armour.  In that environment, it is genuinely shocking that a sentient spaceship, something that implies strength and power, barely makes a living from brewing mind-altering drugs.  Those moments when The Shadow Child anxiously considers how she will be able to pay rent on her small apartment – the only thing that connects her to the wider universe – are more thought-provoking then the mystery The Shadow Child and Long Chau have been tasked to solve.  And that’s not to say that the death of Hai Anh isn’t intimately linked to the economic reality of the Scattered Pearls.  When she was alive, she was a member of The House of Saltless Prosperity which, as its leader Grandmother Khue notes, is a home for the cheap and easily replaced.  Even Long Chau’s secret – which I won’t spoil here, but I appreciate that de Bodard’s Holmes has more depth than just a guy with almost omniscient powers of observation – links back to the economic and social realities of the society.

It’s this focus on inequality, on the struggle to make ends meet that elevates The Tea Master and the Detective beyond a garden variety pastiche.  And yet, if that’s all it had been… it would have been enough.