The Tea Master and the Detective (2018)

I never imagine mentally unstable AIs, but Aliette de Bodard did when she wrote this short book. I have imagined crazy AIs but in The Tea Master (the AI by the way) and the Detective (not the AI), the main character (the AI; the Tea Master) suffers from very human like mental problems.

The book starts with the Tea Master being asked for a brew that will allow entering the "deep spaces" without breaking down. As far as I can tell the deep spaces is some kind of orthogonal dimension. Being there puts a lot of stress on matter and mind and you need special drugs to handle it.

The story is kind of interesting, but I didn't quite buy into the human like flaws in the AIs and therefore could not really connect with the book. There is also a mystery embedded among the rest but that comes second, or third to the mental state of the AI while I would have liked a book where those things are just the background.

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This is pretty good. Sherlock riff set in Bodard's Xuya universe. Great/weird character development, not straining anything by nodding too hard at Holmes, and the setting (weird space opera with non-Eurocentric culture) is superb.

Full review: http://www.positronchicago.com/2019/02/the-tea-master-and-detective-by-aliette.h... ( )

I loved the mix of tea blending and weird technology tied into the mystery. ( )

This novella was a fun, very fast-paced female-Sherlock-Holmes-in-space story with a murder mystery (or was it?) and cool world-building, told from the perspective of a sentient space ship.

Even though it was a really enjoyable read, I found myself wishing the author had turned it into a full-length novel instead. The characters' back stories, their traumatic, mysterious pasts and current relationships, as well as the setting deserved a more intricate treatment, a slower pace, and more resolution (e.g. actual treatment of the space ship's trauma). Same with the mystery plot: almost no time passes from discovering the body to solving the entire thing, even though the dead woman was an interesting person, belonged to a strange cult, and I had all kinds of further questions I would have wanted to see explored.

I was also a little mystified by the setting's mono-culture, in which everything is Asian-inspired and everyone drinks tea and loves poetry, no exceptions. A culture that is this homogenous made sense in the past when a culture was fairly isolated from other influences, travel, extensive trade and immigration. But here, space travel seems to be easy, cheap and swift with frequent exchanges, and access to news and entertainment from all sorts of sources seems equally unrestricted. So why would it become so seemingly homogenous?

But perhaps this is explained in the author's other works set in the same universe. Anyway, this point was just an unanswered question (I had many!), not something that truly affected my enjoyment of the story.

If you like a very fast pace, then this story truly has it all: quirky, memorable characters, great world-building, mysteries, cults, detective work, and even a bit of action and life-or-death tension at the end. If only it hadn't left me with so many questions and unsatisfied curiosity! But I'll certainly read more by this author, since this was a nice little appetizer. ( )

I'm actually pretty impressed with this one but I have one major complaint...

I feel like I'm missing a LOT of worldbuilding nuance here. I've never read any of her Xuya novellas and I feel the lack.

Sure, the whole mystery in space surrounded my Mindships that are pretty awesome is all pretty awesome, but the rather odd bits of Tea and special brews feel like they need a lot of backstory. Otherwise, I'm stuck just thinking about Ann Leckie's Raddich series. And maybe that's kind of a side-jab.

I found it rather fascinating in an Ian M. Banks kind of way, too.

And oddly, I'm more impressed with Bodard's SF than her Fantasy. I obviously need to keep an eye out for more of these.

Nommed for '19 Hugo for novella. ( )