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And here is the cover for the Oct/Nov double issue of Asimov’s, which contains my Xuya novella “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” (mindships! Weapons of mass destruction! Messy family affairs!). And, hum, as you might have guessed, my story is the inspiration for the cover…. Isn’t pretty pretty? I love the dragon!

Synopsis below:

The Citadel of Weeping Pearls was a great wonder; a perfect meld between cutting edge technology and esoteric sciences—its inhabitants capable of teleporting themselves anywhere, its weapons small and undetectable, and deadly.

Thirty years ago, threatened by an invading fleet from the Dai Viet Empire, the Citadel disappeared, and was never seen again.

But now the Dai Viet Empire itself is under siege, on the verge of a war against an enemy that turns their own mindships against them; and the Empress, who once gave the order to raze the Citadel, is in desperate needs of its weapons. Meanwhile, on a small isolated space station, an engineer obsessed with the past works on a machine that will send her thirty years back, at the height of the Citadel’s power.

But the Citadel’s disappearance still extends chains of grief and regrets all the way into the fraught atmosphere of the Imperial Court; and this casual summoning of the past might have world-shattering consequences…

From the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed On a Red Station, Drifting comes a new novella set in the Xuya universe; a tale of relatives and the ties that bind them; of time travel and the weight of the past; and of the price to pay for war and peace….

The novella page is here.

Cross-posted from Aliette de Bodard

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