The Red Scholar’s Wake: A Xuya Universe Romance (Xuya Universe Romances)

I've loved Aliette de Bodard's Xuya Universe series for a while now so I was super excited when she announced she was writing a romantic sapphic space opera set in it! I was just excited for a new Xuya book but Y'all! She wrote a book about lesbian space pirates that features a romance between a scavenger bot engineer and a sentient space ship who also happens to be the leader of a band of space pirates. Y'all. I need Aliette de Bodard to write more space opera romances! The romance in this was a slow burn filled with a lot of will they or won't they and so much sexual tension. I may have squealed when Rice Fish and Xích Si started to get together. Aside from the romance, this book was full of political intrigue, found family, family drama, grief, and lots of queerness. It was also about learning to be brave and how to dream bigger than your circumstances have dictated while finding your place in the universe. It was soft, romantic and I wanted more of this world when I finished. My only complaint is I needed more space battles to go along with the political intrigue. I loved the Vietnamese-inspired world building and how beautiful and imaginative de Bodard's writing is. I will say that the world might be a bit confusing at the first if you go into this without having ever read any of this author's other work. One thing I have adored about this world is the sentient space ships and how they are portrayed. I love that they have avatars and bots and can interact with the…

I only discovered Aliette de Bodard's work this year, but it's been such a pleasant experience to slowly go through her writing! <i>The Red Scholar's Wake</i> is no exception, and I'm really excited by the promise of more stories in this universe. Now, I am <i>always</i> a sucker for love stories between humans and AIs, so as soon as I saw "one of the protagonists is a sentient ship who is also a pirate", BAM. I was sold. The fact that <i>Rice Fish</i> is...kind of a milf, does not hurt at all. (I'm being partly facetious, but hey! It's also partly true!) The world of this novel is particularly wonderful: immersive, lived-in, utterly believable. I love how present all of the various sentient ship characters were, and de Bodard has a deft hand with describing the intricacies of the world without spending a lot of time explaining how everything works. She shows us through context, and through the characters interacting with their world, which for a soft science fiction novel like this works quite well. The story is full of complex relationships, and doesn't hesitate to show the evils of both sides of the equation. No easy or perfect answers are found, but there's hope for something better, and the characters are willing to work toward it. That's good enough for me (and surprisingly realistic; if you've seen Mad Max: Fury Road, you know that there is no Green Place -- it's about fixing the world you have). I feel like the romance elements get downplayed a bit, in…