Welcome to Litsy!

March #bookspin and #doublespin! I‘m hoping to at least get to the tagged book since it‘s only a novella but the other is a bit of a chunker and I‘ve been struggling to pick up larger books lately. So we‘ll see how it goes. @TheAromaofBooks

After her planet is over-run by rebels against the Da Viet Empire ,Magistrate Linh arrives on Prosper space station which is run by her family. Can she adjust to her change in status in the face of hostility from Quyen, the insecure acting Administrator of Prosper, as the Honoured Ancestress, the station's AI, starts to fail?

One of the best from an author who always intrigues me even when I'm not sure I've really understood her.

So I absolutely loved this book, and now I'm looking for more like it. I would classify it as silkpunk or silk sf (that is, stories based in Asian cultures and traditional technology, as opposed to European/European-derived).

So, can anyone recommend other great silkpunk stories? I'm interested in short stories, novellas, and novels. Thanks!

I have a complicated relationship with this author. I‘m not fond of her style, but she‘s good at worldbuilding, and I‘m a sucker for that, especially when it‘s not based on overdone Western mythologies. Still, this is the first of her works I truly liked—maybe because it‘s not a romance.

And either I‘ve gotten used to it, or the writing is better in this one.

3.75/5

#sf #spaceopera #sfwrittenbyawoman #standalone #novella #smallbooks #onedayread

June was a good reading month for me. Eight books finished, all but one sci-fi/fantasy of some variety (and the main character of that one had psychic flashes, so we can include it under the sff umbrella too if we want). Two didn't really work for me but the rest were good. On the positive side, the two stand-outs were On a Red Station, Drifting and The City We Became. #JuneWrapUp #MonthlyWrapUp

Like The Tea Master and the Detective, this is a sci-fi story that's really about the relationship between two women. Linh and Quyen take an immediate dislike to each other and work at cross purposes through almost all of the book. The writing balances making sure each woman's motivations are understandable and neither one looks like a villain, even as the other absolutely thinks she is.

I loved this novella! I devoured it while road tripping to see some somewhat distant relatives and the family in this just really spoke to me. The conflict between duty and one‘s personal goals as well as the misunderstandings everyone had of each other was truly interesting.

🥟 Anything by Aliette de Bodard will have a lot of food related content, especially tagged.
🍫 Chocolate!
🍅 Tomatoes.
🎂 All of them. It's food!
🍛 My favourite of all closed a few years ago. A good Ethiopean restaurant is always the best.
#manicmonday. @JoScho

I LOVE a good #outofthisworld novel, but I realized a lot of the books I own that are set in space don't display covers because I downloaded them from storybundle! So this is a selection of space books and books set on worlds that aren't THIS one :) #booktober

I put this off until today because I thought I was going to finish one more last night, but I didn't quite make it.

I'm having a hard time writing a coherent review of this one. A sci-fi novella with familiar tropes, but a very different story, focused on family drama on an isolated station. There's not much world building, but I was intrigued and would love to see more. In a weird way it reminded me of Firefly.