The Tea Master and the Detective

This was just really imaginative and I enjoyed the universe. This is probably the first time I've come across a Chinese/Vietnamese-inspired space opera and I'm really all for it. Throw in the fact that this is also a wild, wild adaptation of Sherlock Holmes and I am sold.

Because this is a novella, a lot of details remains a little fuzzy and unexplained. How exactly does a shipmind work? Do they have corporeal bodies? Were they all human beings at one point but somehow got transitioned into being a shipmind? I only have very vague answers to all these questions. I'm not sure if they're explored further in the other novellas in this universe, but there doesn't seem to a sequence or order to read these books, so I assume that it remains equally nebulous.

The mystery isn't really the crux of this book IMO. It's a plot driver, but I think the book is primarily interested in its world and setting. We learn a fair bit about the brewers of serenity that make concoctions to help regular human beings traverse through the deep spaces of unreality. Are these brewers exclusively mindships? I've no idea.

This is such a short read that I'd definitely recommend it for anyone who's remotely OK with reading science fiction, or what I would like to call space fantasy. Again, not everyday that we have Vietnamese space opera either so hopefully that should knock this book up a few notches in your TBR.