Short Fiction Recs: Tea and Underwater Ballrooms

The Underwater Ballroom Society ed Stephanie Burgis and Tiffany Trent -- I got an ARC of this fun short story anthology! Each story features and underwater ballroom in some way shape or form. I was excited because I enjoy stories of balls and romance, and I like many of the authors featured. However I was also a little worried that these stories would fell same-y because I wasn’t sure how much variation you could get with underwater ballrooms. Well it turns out that the answer is lots, the ballrooms were created in different ways and felt very atmospherically different. While I liked all the stories for me the standouts where, "Penhallow Amid Passing Things" by Iona Datt Sharma an f/f romance between a smuggler and a revenue agent in Cornwall and “Spellswept” by Stephanie Burgis the prequel novella to the wonderful Snowspelled.

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard -- A new novella de Bodard's Xuya universe. This story features a mindship that has lost her family and a consulting detective who prefers to go through life drugged to the eyeballs who decide to work together. I always like De Bodards prickly people interacting with each other and this was full of that. This is marketed as genderbent far future Sherlock Holmes story and that description lead me to expect lots of twist mystery details but really this book is more of a character study -- but that's just fine with me. I really enjoy sentient spaceships and the mindships in Xuya are one of my favorite takes on that.