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![The Black Tides of Heaven (Kindle Single) (The Tensorate Series Book 1) by [Neon Yang]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51+6DkRz5IL._SY346_.jpg)
The Black Tides of Heaven (Kindle Single) (The Tensorate Series Book 1) Kindle Edition
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"Joyously wild stuff. Highly recommended." —The New York Times
One of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time, according to Time Magazine
A Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards for Best Novella
The Black Tides of Heaven is one of a pair of unique, standalone introductions to Neon Yang's Tensorate Series, which Kate Elliott calls "effortlessly fascinating." For more of the story you can read its twin novella The Red Threads of Fortune, available simultaneously.
Mokoya and Akeha, the twin children of the Protector, were sold to the Grand Monastery as infants. While Mokoya developed her strange prophetic gift, Akeha was always the one who could see the strings that moved adults to action. While Mokoya received visions of what would be, Akeha realized what could be. What's more, they saw the sickness at the heart of their mother's Protectorate.
A rebellion is growing. The Machinists discover new levers to move the world every day, while the Tensors fight to put them down and preserve the power of the state. Unwilling to continue as a pawn in their mother's twisted schemes, Akeha leaves the Tensorate behind and falls in with the rebels. But every step Akeha takes towards the Machinists is a step away from Mokoya. Can Akeha find peace without shattering the bond they share with their twin?
The Tensorate Series
Book 1: The Black Tides of Heaven
Book 2: The Red Threads of Fortune
Book 3: The Descent of Monsters
Book 4: The Ascent to Godhood
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTordotcom
- Publication date26 September 2017
- File size5157 KB
Product description
Review
"Joyously wild stuff. Highly recommended." --The New York Times
"Yang conjures up a world of magic and machines, wild monsters and sophisticated civilizations, that you'll want to return to again and again." --Ars Technica
"Full of love and loss, confrontation and discovery. Each moment is a glistening pearl, all strung together in a wonder of world-creation." -- Ken Liu, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Award winner and author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie
"I love Neon Yang's effortlessly fascinating world-building." --Kate Elliott, author of Black Wolves and Court of Fives
"A fascinating world of battles, politics, magic and romance." --Zen Cho, author of Sorcerer to the Crown
"Filled with memorable characters and set in a wonderfully imaginative and original universe." --Aliette de Bodard, Nebula Award-winning author of The House of Shattered Wings
"Like a Miyazaki movie decided to jump off the screen and sear itself into prose, and in doing so became something entirely new." --Indrapramit Das, author of The Devourers
"Relentlessly captivating, heartbreaking, and powerful." --Fran Wilde, award-winning, Nebula & Hugo-nominated author of Updraft, Cloudbound, and Horizon
"Yang's prose carries the reader along... A really good book." --Locus
"Yang's writing is quiet, but it is the quiet of strength. It doesn't need to shout to be heard." --Michelle West for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
"Yang captures an epic sweep in compact, precise prose." --Publishers Weekly starred review
--This text refers to the paperback edition.Review
Book Description
From the Publisher
About the Author
JY Yang is a lapsed journalist, a former practicing scientist, and a master of hermitry. A queer, non-binary, postcolonial intersectional feminist, their work often examines issues of race, class, and gender. They have short fiction published or forthcoming in places including Uncanny, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. They are the author of the Tensorate Series, which begins with the twin novellas The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune. They live in Singapore, edit fiction at Epigram Books, and have a MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia.
--This text refers to the audioCD edition.Product details
- ASIN : B01MTMY52H
- Publisher : Tordotcom (26 September 2017)
- Language : English
- File size : 5157 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 258 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 188,993 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 4,627 in Epic Fantasy (Kindle Store)
- 7,745 in Epic Fantasy (Books)
- 56,895 in Whispersync for Voice
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

JY Yang is the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.Com Publishing (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, and The Descent of Monsters, coming July 31st, 2018). Their work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Kitschy awards, and the first two Tensorate novellas made the Tiptree Honor List.
In previous incarnations, they have been a molecular biologist; a writer for animation, comics and games; a journalist for one of Singapore’s major papers, and a science communicator with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).
JY works and lives in Singapore. They identify as queer and non-binary. Find them online at http://jyyang.com or on Twitter as @halleluyang.
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Customer reviews
Top reviews from Australia
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I'd start with this before Red Threads, but can highly recommend both.
Top reviews from other countries

It's a tall order to cram 30-odd years of backstory into a novella, and at times it feels this is at the expense of some detailing that would help explain the world - but the focus is on Akeha's struggles to figure out where they fit and on the increasing strain the twins' bond comes under. This isn't, ultimately, an epic story of Machinist rebellion against Tensor rule (in spite of the gloriously evocative setting), but a personal story of resistance and the emotional entanglements that drive us - and I have a soft spot for personal stories told in big epic settings. Good stuff.

Both novellas are set in the world of the Tensorate, which is a place where people can manipulate energy to do all sorts of things (known as the Slack) and which is ruled by the mother of our two main characters. She's a distinctly ruthless individual, for example giving birth to Akeha and Mokoya in order to give them to the temple which had provided her with support during an attempted rebellion, in 'payment' for help received. After that, in The Black Tides of Heaven, she shows minimal interest in their welfare until Mokoya begins to demonstrate prophetic powers and the rest of this novella is the aftermath of that dynamic.
Anyway, the world-building is something I liked very much about both these, including the use of gender terms - this is a world where people declare they are male or female when they feel certain about it, using they/them until that point. In the second novella, Mokoya spends some time trying to figure out her relationship with the power she thought she'd lost and also testing the boundaries of what she can do with the Slack. All in all, I enjoyed them and would very much like to read more set in this universe.

Downloading the second book as we speak!




Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 August 2018

