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…

I initially heard The Red Scholar’s Wake pitched by the author as “lesbian space pirates” (which is from a blurb quoted on the front cover of the book). I immediately bought a copy, a month before the book came out, based on those three words. It was exactly what it said on the tin and so much more. Xích Si is a scavenger; Rice Fish is a sentient pirate ship. When the former finds herself on board the latter, the ship offers the human a literal proposal of marriage. It’s a marriage of convenience, to be sure, as they each need something the other can offer. But it hauls Xích Si into the turbulent world of space piracy, and along the way, it drags Rice Fish into feelings of which she she never believed herself deserving. Along the way, there are politics, treachery, and some of the most gorgeous descriptive language. But it’s not just a book about piracy and unusual marriages, it’s a book about what is right and wrong (regardless of legality), love, and sacrifice. Fans of space opera science fiction with strong romantic subplots will adore this book. For me, there are faint whispers of Farscape with a dash of the spectacle of Jupiter Ascending, and of course some parallels to the space piracy of Firefly. But even these fragments pale in comparison to The Red Scholar’s Wake.

A sapphic space opera with a big dollop of longing and unreciprocated feelings which are in fact reciprocated as should be in any decent romance. Bodard has the knack of description, long hair that turns into nebulas, cabins filled with art and stars. I'd love her characters and plots to gather more depth. Some things definitely deserve more showing rather than telling.

I love the Xuya universe, and this book is now my favorite story in the series, not to mention my new favorite romance! I can't wait to see where we go next!