Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight
Dust jacket by Maurizio Manzieri.
A major first collection from a writer fast becoming one of the stars of the genre... Aliette de Bodard, multiple award winner and author of The Tea Master and the Detective, now brings readers fourteen dazzling tales that showcase the richly textured worldbuilding and beloved characters that have brought her so much acclaim.
Come discover the breadth and endless invention of her universes, ranging from a dark Gothic Paris devastated by a magical war; to the multiple award-winning Xuya, a far-future space opera inspired by Vietnamese culture where scholars administrate planets and sentient spaceships are part of families.
In the Nebula award and Locus award winning "Immersion", a young girl working in a restaurant on a colonized space station crosses paths with an older woman who has cast off her own identity. In the novelette "Children of Thorns, Children of Water", a shapeshifting dragon infiltrating a ruined mansion finds more than he's bargained for when his partner is snatched by eerie, child-like creatures. And in the award-winning "Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight", three very different people - a scholar, an engineer, and a spaceship - all must deal with the loss of a woman who was the cornerstone of their world.
Contents:
- Introduction
- The Shipmaker
- The Jaguar House, in Shadow
- Scattered Along the River of Heaven
- Immersion June
- The Waiting Stars
- Memorials
- The Breath of War
- The Days of the War, as Red as Blood, as Dark as Bile
- The Dust Queen
- Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight
- A Salvaging of Ghosts
- Pearl
- Children of Thorns, Children of Water
- Of Birthdays, and Fungus, and Kindness (original novella)
- Story Notes
Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard is a French-American speculative fiction writer. She is of French/Vietnamese descent, born in the USA, and grew up in Paris. French is her mother-tongue, but she writes in English. A graduate of École Polytechnique, she works as a software engineer specialising in image processing and is a member of the Written in Blood writers group.
She was a 2007 winner of Writers of the Future, and in 2009 was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She has been published in Interzone, Hub magazine, Black Static, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Apex Magazine, among others.