The Waiting Stars, by Aliette de Bodard

I never quite know what to make of Aliette de Bodard.

Critics like her work a lot, she gets nominated for awards every year.  But I find her work difficult to read--not that it's gross or anything, it just seems heavy.  Now that I've read a few other pieces, The Waiting Stars makes more sense to me.  The Mind Ships and their companions are more interesting.  But in the shorter fiction, there just seems to be a lot left out.

In this story, we have a Ship and its human companions searching a Ship graveyard set up by the Outsiders--a group of people very offended at how Mind Ships come about.  The story comes together from two perspectives--a woman named Catherine, who has been "rescued" by the Outsiders and somehow rebuilt to fit into their society, and Lan Nhen, the human companion of the Ship searching the Outsider graveyard.

As her stories go, I was able to follow this one better than most, and the Mind Ships are growing on me a little.  But not really enough to spend a lot of effort searching it out.  Two stars from me, probably more from the critics.