Liz Bourke Reviews In the Shadow of the Ship by Aliette de Bodard

In the Shadow of the Ship, Aliette de Bodard (Subterranean Press 978-1-64524-147-8, $40.00, 96pp, hc) September 2024. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.

In the Shadow of the Ship is the latest Xuya universe story from Aliette de Bodard. A short novella or a long novelette, it clocks in at around 90 pages of text, and it has many of the elements I’ve come to expect from de Bodard: elders who should have protected their young people but didn’t; conspiracies of silence; and a protagonist who must decide whether it is more important (or even possible) to shield her family, and especially her parents’ generation, from consequences or to do what her own sense of ethics tells her is right (or the course of least harm). In the Shadow of the Ship veers closer to horror than much of de Bodard’s more recent work, in both atmosphere and sensibility, and its protagonist shares with one of the protagonists of A Fire Born of Exile the ongoing emotional betrayal – the ongoingache and scar – of having a mother who does not love or accept her adult child.

Khuyên ran away when she was sixteen. She left behind the ruined mindship The Nightjar, Thirsting For Water and her entire family, and left behind, too, their loyalty to the ship’s needs and half-mad, unspoken requirements – for a mindship might be intelligent, but Nightjar has been badly damaged for years, able to act but not to speak in words to its occupants. Khuyên found success in the civil service, became an official in the service of the Dragon Throne, and learned how to tend to her duties among the war-ravaged Numbered Planets. She’s only returned now, four years later, because her grandmother has died, and her sense of duty combined with her guilt at abandoning her family in the first place prompted her to pay her respects.

The ship that she fled – Nightjar, an oasis of peace among the devastation of war – eats children. Its own children. They’re sent into the ship’s dead zones, these Tribute, and are never seen again: The price the ship exacts from those who live aboard her. Thirty children since the start of the ship’s flight, and Khuyên, though she’s a magistrate with the right and obligation to pursue justice, has never said anything to any other authority about it. It would destroy her family and the community that she was born to.

Khuyên felt the warmth of Sunflower’s lips on hers, and it was… wrong, profoundly wrong and yet comforting – and as they walked down that corridor it came to her that the reason it was wrong was because no one had ever taught her to value her own happiness.

But the Tribute is happening more and more often, and things aboard Nightjar are more and more wrong. With an unexpected ally and unexpected dangers, Khuyên has to face the very real terrors of her childhood and decide what she can do about them as an adult.

For all its brevity, this is a dense and emotionally complex piece, carrying grief and hope, pain and potential, in equal measure. The ashes of the past meeting the chance to build something different for the future. I always enjoy de Bodard’s work, and In the Shadow of the Ship is no exception: a sharp-edged and glittering science-fictional gem.

This review and more like it in the July 2024 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.