SFF For National Hot Tea Month

The tea is right in the title of the book, though what you might not know is that the tea master of the title is a sentient space ship who, Watson-like in many ways, joins up with the detective to investigate a murder. I know I’ve mentioned this book many a time, but it’s because I love it. I’m a sucker for both Sherlock Holmes pastiches and space opera.

This is actually the second book in this space opera series (the first is Ancillary Justice), but a huge chunk of the plot turns on the planet that produces the most tea for the Radch–an empire for which tea is a huge part of its ceremonial culture–and political machinations that are connected to it. And this, too, has a sentient spaceship as a main character… one that happens to be trapped in the body of an “ancillary.”

The opening scene of this fun novella takes place in a tea house, and will make you think of every kung fu movie you’ve ever seen where there’s a fight in a tea house. Found family, wuxia, gender critique, zany goings-on… there is everything I love in this little book and I will never shut up about it.

The start of a massive and long-running series about a human diplomat moving in an alien world. The whole series has a lot of fascinating politics and sociology in it… and a lot of the diplomacy takes place over slightly less formal teas or highly formal dinners. Tea and food both serve as a really neat window into character and culture. (Convergence is probably the most tea-heavy of the books, but it’s not a good starting place.)

Ah, my favorite sad gay elf book. This is sort of a sequel to The Goblin Emperor, though I think you can get away without reading that book since this one is about Thara Celehar, the aforementioned sad gay elf. Anyway, the point here is that in addition to being sad and solving mysteries, Thara drinks a LOT of tea and frequents a lot of tea houses for plot reasons, and it’s such a fun cultural note that makes the world feel very lived-in.