white_hart

Aliette de Bodard's novella In the Vanisher's Palace is set in a world devastated by an alien (or possibly magical) race known only as the Vanishers, who exploited the planet's resources, enslaved the population and then left, leaving behind only pollution, plagues and horrific remnants of killing technology. In this world, Yên, a struggling scholar, and her mother, the village healer, are at the mercy of the village's elders, only allowed to live as long as they are considered to be of value to the community, and when Yên's mother summons a dragon to heal the daughter of the village head, who has succumbed to one of the plagues, the village elders give Yên to the dragon as payment.

I'd seen this described as a dark f/f retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and I can see that, though a lot of the details are different and I thought it would be just as accurate to describe it as a dark retelling of The Sound of Music (and am now wondering to what extent The Sound of Music can be considered to be a retelling of Beauty and the Beast); either way, Yên's developing relationship with the dragon, Vu Côn, is central to the story, but I found Yên's relationships with Vu Côn's children, whose teacher she becomes, just as interesting and compelling. As well as the central f/f romance, there are several gender-neutral/non-binary characters and I loved the way the novella manages to convey a sense of the possibilities for relationship dymanics of a language with gendered first-person pronouns and different forms of address based on levels of intimacy and respect through the medium of a language which doesn't have that facility. The evocation of the ruined, decaying world and the impossible architecture of the palace is wonderfully atmospheric, and, more than anything else, I loved the novella's use of Vietnamese culture and mythology for its fantasy background, and the way that it uses the postapocalyptic setting to explore the legacy of Western colonialism in the real world. This is a novella that packs a lot into its 145 pages, and I thought it was a terrific read.