In the present day, four women, determined to find the truth behind the legends, enter the fenced-off woods.

The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup

The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard is the latest science fiction story from the author’s Xuya universe. Beyond the love story, there are more traditional space opera goings-on: power struggles, political manoeuvring, betrayals and discoveries, and many incidental pleasures provided by the detailed, vividly realised settings. AI singularity has occurred and mindships are now a thing – that’s right folks, sentient spaceships. If you are a fan of space opera, excited by pirates, or intrigued by sentient ships, then you should read this.

Fortunately, the worst of which, child abuse and rape, do not occur on page but they are referenced in the narrative. From fairytales onward, the idea of a mysterious forest in which anything can happen has deep-rooted appeal.

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

There were defiant firecrackers; noisy, screaming processions of mourners; drunken meals which degenerated into fights; all the while, Xích Si, leaning against a wall in the darkness of the hold where the pirates had imprisoned her, prayed to her long-dead ancestors to be forgotten. This is the third book in a sequence that began with the award-winning Children of Time, but can be read on its own as a thoroughly absorbing and enjoyable novel. In 1643, a small group of civil war soldiers make a hasty retreat from the battlefield, hoping to find safety in the trees. Politics, pirate politics (more openly violent), examinations of different types of relationships (familial, sexual, marriage, friendships and so on), but lesbian space pirates and sentient ships for the win!

If you want to explore an original and compelling universe, or see love conquer the most monumental obstacles, then you need to read this. In her thesis, Ziggy concluded that these “gods” may have been aliens, and a cigar-shaped structure revealed in photographs of a lunar crater could be their spaceship, the “Thunderbolt Vehicle” described in Buddhist writings. When her feelings change, she initiates sex in the normally forbidden “heartroom” of the ship with the semi-solid avatar, in an orgy of surreal perversity. Xích Si is a scavenger, scraping together a meager living salvaging and selling whatever tech she can.

The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard: Book Review The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard: Book Review

Refugees from Earth wake from cold storage on board the ark ship Enkidu to find they have arrived at the empty planet Imir, which they hope to transform into a new home. For a moment its owner was only a dark silhouette in the doorway, and then the lights came on in the hold, and some kind of ambient filter descended, silencing the noises from outside.This is a refreshing change from the usual macho adventure story, one more about inner than outer space. Rice Fish’s robes reflect swirling stars and nebulae, her eyes are the black of the void and – “she tasted like brine, like oil – a sharp tang on Xích Si’s palate – the lips under her faintly oily, faintly pulsing with a beat too slow to be a human, tightening in response and pressing back, and Xích Si was afire now, breasts and belly aching…” Phew! The latest novel set in the Hugo-nominated, Vietnamese-inspired Universe of Xuya begins with that cliche of genre romance, two people entering into a marriage of convenience. Founders of the pirate alliance, they work tirelessly to create a society free from the corruption that plagues the empire, But when the Red Scholar is ambushed and killed by imperial forces, Rice Fish (the Red Consort and a mindship) suspects betrayal. There are quite a few content warnings for this book including torture, violence, death, and the indenture of captives.

Sworn to secrecy, she learns the reason is connected to her postgraduate studies into ancient religious beliefs about gods on the moon.

The tension and weirdness keep ratcheting up in both narrative strands, making for a memorable, spooky tale.