The exceptions I made were for legibility: Dần Cháy became Dân Chay to prevent an immediate association with the English first name Dan, and the same with the imperial city of Huế, which became Huê to prevent confusion with the English word hue, and Princess Liên, who kept her circumflex for similar reasons.
For the curious, the names of the main characters are as follows in unstripped Vietnamese
Philippe’s full prior name: Phạm Văn Minh Kiệt
Thuan: Rồng Minh Thanh Thuận
Françoise’s full Vietnamese name: Lê Thị Ánh Tuyết
Aurore’s full Vietnamese name: Nguyễn Thị Bạch Diễm
Cassiopée’s full Vietnamese name: Nguyễn Thị Bạch Tinh
Dan Chay: Dần Cháy
Ai Nhi: Ái Nhi
Hoa Phong: Hoa Phong
Names in Vietnamese start with the family name and end with the personal name, so Rồng (=dragon) is Thuan’s family name, Minh his middle name, and Thanh Thuận his personal name, frequently abbreviated to Thuận.
Where I grew up, aunts and uncles are not referred to by name but rather by number in the family, so the eldest daughter is “Second Aunt,” the second eldest “Third Aunt,” etc. (Southern Vietnamese starts counting at two rather than one, and “aunt” really encompasses a variety of words depending on whether the aunt in question is a sister of the father, mother or married into the family,…). To prevent confusion between Second Aunt (Ngoc Bich, Thuan’s aunt who rules the dragon kingdom) and Vinh Ly’s character, as referred to by her niece Ai Nhi, I made the choice to have Vinh Ly referred to as “Auntie Ly” rather than have another “Second Aunt” in the narration.
I won’t go here into detail on the complexity of the Vietnamese pronoun system, but the choice of I/you pronoun depends on the relative age, gender and status of the speakers: different levels of formalities use different kinship terms. So, for instance, “grandmother” is used towards a person much older than oneself, and the corresponding “I” pronoun would be “child”. I’ve rendered both the pronouns con and cháu as “child”: technically con means child or descendant, and cháu can mean child, grandchild or nephew depending on context, but I thought we didn’t need that added complexity in the narration!
Acknowledgments
Writing a book with two young children in the house is always a challenge, and I would like to thank everyone who supported me during that process. To my beta-readers for speedy and sometimes multiple reads: Tade Thompson, Vida Cruz, Alis Rasmussen, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Fran Wilde, and Likhain. To my friends who agreed to cameos in the book: Tade, Vida, Victor Fernand R. Ocampo, Nene Ormes, Fran (as Frankie), Alis, and Rochita. To Zen Cho, Jeannette Ng, Gillian Polack and everyone else who weighed in on what to call a colonized person in the metropole (an unexpectedly complicated question!). To Nadjah M. Oumid, for helping me with Muslim practise. Any mistakes that remain in the book are my own responsibility!
To my friends for support: Zen Cho, Alessa Hinlo, Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch, Inksea, Laura J. Mixon, Ghislaine Lai, D. Franklin, Zoe Johnson, Michelle Sagara, Juliet Kemp, Ken Liu, Cindy Pon, Rachel Monte, Stephanie Burgis, Kari Sperring, Genevieve Cogman, Samit Basu, Charles Tan, Vic James, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Liz Bourke, Paul Weimer, Cheryl Morgan.
To Peter Kenny for his audiobook reads, but most of all for nailing the Asmodeus segments!
To everyone who helped with turning this manuscript into a book: my awesome editor Gillian Redfearn, my agent John Berlyne, my publicist Stevie Finegan, Gen McMenemy in marketing and the rest of the Gollancz team. And to Dirk Berger for the North American edition cover, and Patrick Disselhorst, Lisa Rodgers and Joshua Bilmes at JABberwocky for putting together said North American edition.
And to everyone who spread the word about The House of Shattered Wings and The House of Binding Thorns, for keeping this series and this author going.
To my sister, for being always there.
And to my two sons, the snakelet and the Librarian, and my husband, for bearing with me while I hammered this into shape.
About the Author
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, but moonlights as a writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her three Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Association Award.
Her first collection of short fiction, Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight, will be published in Fall 2019 by Subterranean Press. Recent works include The Tea Master and the Detective, a murder mystery set on a space station in a Vietnamese galactic empire, inspired by the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson; and In the Vanishers’ Palace, a dark Beauty and the Beast retelling, where they are both women and the Beast is a dragon. She lives in Paris with her family, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a set of Lovecraftian tentacled plants intent on taking over the place.
Visit her website www.aliettedebodard.com for free fiction (including further short stories set in the Dominion of the Fallen universe!), Vietnamese and French recipes and more.
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