REVIEW: A Fire Born of Exile by Aliette de Bodard
The Scattered Pearls Belt is a string of habitats on the edge of a huge galactic empire—a glittering, decadent society rife with corruption. Now, one of its victims—Quynh, a scholar betrayed and left for dead—has come back for her revenge, under the guise of the glamorous and enigmatic Alchemist of Streams and Hills.
Quynh’s path intersects that of Minh, the daughter of one of her oldest enemies, who chafes at her own lack of freedom; and of Hoà, a near-destitute engineer who poses a threat to all Quynh’s careful plans. Quynh finds herself inexorably attracted to Hoà, even as her plans upend the fragile political equilibrium of the Belt.
Falling in love wasn’t part of Quynh’s plans; but will she be able to grasp this second chance at happiness, or will she cling on to a revenge that may well consume her whole?
A poignant, heartwarming romantic space opera about love, revenge and the weight of the past.
CW – Use of State sanctioned torture is mentioned. One character is emotionally abused by a parent.
Dear Aliette de Bodard,
I’m going to admit that I will think twice about reading another full length novel in the Xuya Universe you’ve invented. It’s magnificently invented, richly described, and it also gives me a headache trying to understand the background parts of it which are not filled in. Each and every book I’ve read set in it drops the reader straight into the action with little worldbuilding to ground us. I feel as if by this point I should be past all that but no, I’m not. It’s as if I’m being lead through a detailed tour of the luxurious cabins and rooms of the Titanic, introduced to a ton of characters – some of whom have more than one name or title, had the details of their clothes described, been told about the rich food and entertainment provided but nothing is mentioned about the icebergs ahead in the ocean and the fact that there aren’t enough lifeboats on board. You know, the important stuff.
As this is a revenge plot story, I also feel I need to understand and connect with the reason for it. But I never got emotionally involved. Everything felt at arm’s length from me. So many of the things that drove Quynh’s and mindship Guts of Sea’s thirst for revenge happened off page and in the past. Other characters think about these events in brief remembrances or tell them dispassionately and this just didn’t get me invested as much as it should have. Yes, this is a space opera about revenge but it’s still about revenge. I needed blood-pumping emotion but got sketchy clinical details.
There are a ton of characters. Many have interconnecting relationships. Most apparently have extensive past histories. Since I really didn’t come to care about – well, basically any of the characters, I wasn’t on the edge of my seat seeing the revenge plot carried out. Wait, it goes deeper than not caring about them. I actually disliked most of them. The one I didn’t dislike came across as a saintly drip. I know she was supposed to be the “light in the dark” but she came off one note. The children were just plot moppets. The villains were just evil. When they weren’t sulking, the teens were mouthpieces for high flung orations on the future, loyalty, family, personal growth. The main character seeking revenge started strong and mysterious but as she was fleshed out and “redeemed,” she weakened until by the end she seemed as confused about things as I was. Yes, this is a space opera but I need to care about at least some of the people in it.
At last we get to the culmination of the plot. But the denouement of the payoff of revenge dragged on. The characters trying to bring down the baddies kept letting events slip out of their control. They would let the villain monologue or they would appeal to the villain’s better self one last time and – yep, here it is again – get caught, imprisoned, poisoned, taken down, held captive … whatever. Then to rub salt in the wound, the finale fizzled out. I wouldn’t have minded a few explosions or fist fights or something dramatic. And in the end, what do we get? Things swept under the carpet and promises of change that even the characters don’t truly believe in.
As for the romance, it didn’t work for me either. It’s insta-love and the relationship never felt real to me. Instead it’s merely a means to manipulate Hoa’s and Quynh’s actions.
So although I got to be immersed in the intricacies of the social hierarchy of this world (yay, loved this bit!) and read endless details about what characters wore, the tea served, the overlay backgrounds, how well each woman’s top knot was smoothed, and about each character’s bots, I felt emotionally cut off about the reason for the revenge, dissatisfied in the romance, disliked most of the characters, and was disappointed in the satisfaction I should have felt when the book ended. Not a good experience. D
~Jayne
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I wonder if Sirius has read this. I know she is a fan of the author.
Jayne, your mention of a mind ship made me think of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and the other two books in her debut trilogy. Those also follow a revenge-seeking ship but I did feel the emotion in that one.
@Janine: Is that ship AI? In the Xuya books, a human mind is actually imbued into the hardware of a spaceship. Since I don’t read a lot of SF, I didn’t realize that this isn’t as unusual as I thought it was when I read the first story by de Bodard.
I don’t recall! The ship is many people at once, it has ancillaries, human bodies it inhabits. The ship blows up and everyone aboard including the crew and all the ancillaries but one dies / are destroyed. One of the ancillaries escapes and the trilogy is her story of how she gets revenge on the person behind the sabotage. It’s interesting because she has all the ship’s memories but is much more limited since she now only has one body.
@Jayne: On further thought I do think it was an AI. It had to be to do the things it did.
@Janine: no, I have not.
@Jayne: The Ship Who Sang series by Anne McCaffrey has a cyborg ship with a human brain embedded in it and that came out in the 60s. I haven’t read it, so I don’t know if there was a revenge plot or not.
@cleo: Weirdly I’ve never read it either, even though I was a big McCaffrey fan and The Ship Who Sang was written early in her career, before her writing deteriorated. I would love to hear more about the book if anyone here has read it.
@Sirius: If you read it, I would be interested in hearing your opinion.
I read The Ship who Sang back in the 70s when I was in my early teens. I loved it back then, but I suspect that the book hasn’t aged well. Even when I was 13, I felt uncomfortable about the way that people in the book barely seemed to acknowledge how eugenics and corporate slavery underpinned the book’s society. And like many of McCaffrey’s books gender stereotypes abound and the dialogue is very 1960s/70s science-fiction dialogue.
The book is not a novel, but a series of linked short stories (written I think from 1961 to 1968) about the experiences of Helva, a cyborg who is permanently encased in a spaceship as its “brain”, and who becomes known for the fact that she loves to sing while traveling the galaxy. No revenge plot that I can remember offhand. There are a couple of romances and the death of at least one character.
Helva is a human, born seriously physically disabled but whose mind is excellent. People like her are automatically encased into a cyborg shell and trained up to serve as the “brains” of spaceships. (What happens to people with mental disabilities? I don’t think it’s ever explicitly spelled out in the book, but it’s hard not to infer that they just are eliminated.) This “saving” of the physically disabled, but mentally “sound” is done by a galactic space corporation that essentially passes onto these saved children all the costs of making them cyborgs, plus the cost of their training and ship (and yes the children have no say in any of this). Thus most brainships spend years working for the corporation paying off these costs, along with, of course, their ongoing maintenance costs. (Hmmm, maybe this book will resonate more than I think with a lot of people in 21st century who are underwater due to their education debts.)
I can’t remember if there are larger brainships, but Helva’s ship only has 2 crew, herself as the “brain” and a second non-cyborg human who serves as the “brawn”. The stories in The Ship who Sang centre mostly upon Helva’s relationships with her various “brawn” and on the choices that she and they have to make in difficult situations. And there is some really interesting stuff here as McCaffrey tries to explore what it is like to be differently embodied and yet human. Can Helva really experience human emotions as a cyborg? How does one age when one’s body never changes? What does it mean to love someone when you can never touch them and when you know you will outlive them. How do express your sorrow when you literally are unable to cry?
I don’t know if I would enjoy the book now, but at the time it really worked for me — as did the Pern books. Many years later McCaffrey co-authored additional “Brainship” books with other authors (e.g., Mercedes Lackey, Jody Lynn Nye). I tried one, maybe two, but I didn’t care for them at all.
@Kathryn: Thanks for all that. I think I never read the book because I was put off by the idea even as a teen also. For me I think the notion of being encased in a spaceship at birth with no choice about it was the sticking point, though if you really think about it, parents make a lot of choices for their babies and children that their young offspring have no say in even in our world (surgeries, medications, etc.). I also got the impression that Helva falls in love with her pilot at one point? And this seemed to me at the time like it couldn’t lead to HEA, but I was wrong to view it that way.
Was the corporation presented as a positive or negative force? For me a lot would depend on that.
I loooved the early Pern books as a teen though they have problematic aspects as well. I think at their best the early Pern books also asked the question of what it meant to be human, or rather what it meant to be part of a hive mind, a communal society that demanded great sacrifices but also offered great rewards. How that made them different from everyone else around them–were they still human, or part something else?
Also, what it means heroic was explored in an interesting way in the first book. I liked that Lessa was ambitious and strong-willed and vengeful, as well as more than capable of killing. That she wanted to rule the world and not just to save the world. And of course there was a lot of queerness in the books. At times presented problematically but not in every case by any means. Considering I never saw happy gay couples in any other books of the time, and when I did encounter a gay character in other books, he was almost always a villain, I think the series was more progressive than regressive for the 1960s.
McCaffrey’s later works moved on with the times to an extent but many of them seemed bland to me.
@Janine: I forgot to say, the worldbuilding in those books was amazing too. And the dragons. Best dragons ever.
@Janine: I don’t have a copy of “The Ship Who Sang” nearby, so I’m depending on my faulty memory. Helva actually falls in love with two different (male) pilots. The first romance clearly is a sweet teen first love romance, one with a sad ending. It happens at the beginning of the book — Helva is about 16 and she has been installed into her ship as its brain. Her pilot is also a newbie and they bond over music and the fact that they are both fairly young.
The second romance is supposed to be her adult one and happens about a decade after the first — she falls for a recognizable McCaffrey hero — he’s brash, very alpha, hyper-masculine. He’s originally one of the ground control supervisors. Niall had wanted to be a pilot, but I think was considered too short (I cannot remember why there would be a height requirement for pilots). Anyway he’s become a super-competent spaceship wrangler and is so good that he is finally able to request and receive permission to be Helva’s pilot when she needs a new one. I’m not sure exactly what McCaffrey wanted to do with this second romance — it’s a romance that is supposed to be rooted in admiration for each other’s intelligence and cleverness and it’s clear that that it can never be more than platonic. But there is lots of angsty and hyper-sexual longing that just felt odd. I suspect I would find it even more cringey now than I did back then. I do remember (and think I’m right about this memory) that Niall is so obsessed with Helva that he secretly had an image of her created that would be what she would have looked like without her congenital disabilities. She of course would have been a stunning tall blonde — and once again it was something that bothered me. Even back then I couldn’t help wondering would he have still been attracted to her, if the image had shown that she would have been a plain dumpy brunette. Why did he even have this image made — it’s not a picture of Helva; she’s a cyborg now hooked into a ship’s control system. And I gotta say that I also wondered why, if they could create images like that and faster than light spaceships, why couldn’t Helva’s genes had been fixed before she was born so that she wasn’t so severely disabled.
Which I guess leads to the second point — it was hard not to infer that there was no help for those who were severely physically disabled (but not mentally disabled) because it suited the corporation to have children like Helva available for exploitation. I, of course, didn’t think it at the time, but there is definitely a whiff of Le Guin’s “Omelas” here — this is a civilization that profits from enslaving its “defective” children to perform dangerous labour so that everyone else may live well. As I said in my previous post, I think there’s a vague acknowledgment that this is unjust, but it’s muted. The corporation may not be well liked, but I don’t recall any discussions of trying to establish a better way of doing things. Maybe there’s more focus on the problematical political and economic systems at play in this universe in the other Brainship books that McCaffrey co-authored later on? I just don’t know.
And yes I loved those Pern books and I also loved this book in spite of its problems. I think the reason is in part because McCaffrey for all her flaws put women at the centre of her science fiction books. Her main female characters are competent, complex, brave, intelligent, and ambitious and they are admired and valued for possessing those traits. And this is a nice change from much of the SFF that was available at the time, where women exist mostly to support the hero or don’t exist at all. And I agree with you that overall McCaffrey does offer positive queer characters. There are definitely problematical elements in her takes on queerness but there are also very problematical elements in her takes on on non-queer sexual and gender relations.
The dragons were the best!
@Kathryn: The first romance sounds much better than the second. And good point on the inconsistency — that if they could do all this, surely they could have corrected Helva’s disabilities at birth. Maybe the corporation was evil enough that it preferred to have human brains reserved for making cyborgs with (You can tell I’m rereading the Murderbot series right now!)
Re the corporation being disliked but there being no discussion of how to make things better–for me it depends more on the way the authorial voice seems to view it (as filtered through the narrative). I don’t mind characters not agitating for change because not everyone does. But it sounds like even the authorial voice kind of shrugs it off as “It’s bad, but not that bad.” And that would really bother me.
Agree with all you said about her female characters (except maybe Brekke and Nerilka who were both doormats to me). And yes her books were refreshingly female centered. And yes definitely lots of problematic stuff in her relationships.
The dragons /dragonriding have been copied so much in other books and I have to think it’s because so many readers loved them/it.