Grey light suffused the shrine, the pillars and walls fading away to reveal a much larger place, a cavern where everything found its end. I slashed my earlobes and drew thorns through the wounds, collecting the dripping blood in a bowl. Even if the magic is of an unfamiliar sort, its reality is asserted from the first page: Servant of the Underworld takes its historical setting and the mythology of the Aztecs seriously, to deliver a historical fantasy. There is no hint of the doom that Cortez will bring upon the Mexica. Indeed, rather than being alternate history, Servant of the Underworld is set at the heart of the Aztec Empire, before the time of Columbus. However, while Roberson's books took his Chinese and Aztecs forward to Mars, de Bodard's debut has moved in the other direction. Both writers have subsequently produced novels. As it happened, her story was not the only one in the issue to introduce an alternate history in which China prevailed, and the Aztec Empire retained its mastery of Central America into what we would call the twentieth or twenty-first centuries Chris Roberson's "Metal Dragon Year" set out a similar timeline. The first story I read by Aliette de Bodard was "The Lost Xuyan Bride," in Interzone 213 (November/December 2007). Servant of the Underworld cover" border="0" />
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