Note: Spoilers for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Imperial Radch trilogy will, obviously, abound. So it seems only fair to spoil a little bit of the following essay itself, and tell you that I’m going to start by saying one of the most stupefyingly obvious things someone can say. It’s going somewhere, I promise.
The thing about space is that tea doesn’t grow there. Tea grows on Earth1. This is rather famously a problem for British space traveler Arthur Dent in the first volume of Douglas Adams’ five-book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Baffled and bathrobed, having escaped the destruction of planet Earth by mere seconds, Arthur grasps at something comfortingly familiar. It… doesn’t work out: “He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”
No surprise: if tea is unique to Earth, space drinks by definition are not-tea. Picard’s utopian Enterprise might be able to synthesize Earl Grey, hot, whenever its captain wants—but Arthur Dent’s universe runs on comedy physics, dooming him to suffer the punchlines of disappointment2. In the second book, he makes another attempt to achieve tea: “He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting in the milk before the tea so it wouldn’t get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the history of the East India Company.”
This actually succeeds! “On the delivery plate of the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer was a small tray, on which sat three bone china cups and saucers, a bone china jug of milk, a silver teapot full of the best tea Arthur had ever tasted and a small printed note saying ‘Wait.’” Because both the human and the Nutri-Matic know: tea is more than just a chain of polymers. Tea is a history, a context, an experience as well as a beverage. Tea means things.
And of course for an Englishman, tea comes from the colonies: in Britain, as in space, tea must be imported3. The growing and sale of tea was one of the great engines of empire, and so Arthur only gets good tea when he explains its imperial dynamics.
Arthur himself is a remnant of a vanished empire. A refugee. Even when he does eventually return to the restored Earth, he finds he cannot trust the ground beneath his feet. In fact, he learns to fly because the world can no longer hold him quite so concretely. It’s easy to forget this when most casual references to the series focus on a few supremely quotable lines4, but rereading all five books by the trashfire glow of American democratic collapse highlights the bleak undertones. A series that starts as cheeky space farce ends with a final volume off which misery rolls like water from a duck’s back (a metaphor which, alas, no one could parse in a galaxy sans ducks5).
Between the planets destroyed and civilizations wiped out and ecological catastrophes and vast genocidal galactic wars waged, the subtext of even Adams’s best jokes is the grim certainty that short-sighted commercialism and resource extraction and shallow self-interest will destroy everything good in the universe.
It is, as the kids say, a mood.
The quest for tea is a microcosm of the whole: Arthur searches for something meaningful and mostly doesn’t get it—a cuppa, the Earth, the great love of his life—and even when he gets it he doesn’t get to keep it.
He doesn’t even get to share it—and the sharing of tea is one of the things it’s best for. In Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, tea is an important pillar of sophisticated culture: it cements connections and expresses care, even in the otherwise brutal reality of imperial military expansion via AI-colonized bodies.
Breq is an ancillary, all that’s left of the imperial troopship Justice of Toren. She has killed uncounted millions, and turned who knows how many more into living extensions of her own intelligence. But that stopped twenty years ago—now she is, like Arthur, a single-bodied refugee whose past has been cruelly destroyed by uncaring powers. Like him, she is traumatized and alone, and her hopes for the future are wildly improbable. And Breq, like Arthur, begins her story on a world with something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea: on recently annexed Ors, at the start of Ancillary Justice, we see imperial officers drinking not their usual tea but “a thick liquid, lukewarm and sweet, that bears almost no relationship to the actual thing.”
This echo of Adams’ famous line could be a coincidence—but Leckie informs us multiple times that to a Radchaai, there are no coincidences.
And tea is vital to the Radch: it is the recognized beverage of highest civilization, a central thread of the social fabric across who knows how many colonized planets. Tea is constantly being prepared by soldiers for their officers; it is shared between aristocrats angling for clientage in cafés on space stations; it is the first thing propriety demands you offer to anyone who has come for a visit, formal or otherwise. Tea is a ritual that makes room for conversation, flirtation, and diplomacy.
It is also, of course, an engine of empire: ships like Justice of Toren carry tea—and death—to every world they visit6. It even marks out who is human, and who is a human-shaped thing: “And of course tea was for officers. For humans. Ancillaries drank water.”
Not only the tea, but its servingware matters. Kalr Five, with exquisite shade, uses different sets to send subtle messages to anyone she pours for. Not everyone rates the best china. In the second volume, Breq (now a fleet captain) visits a tea plantation near the space station she’s been sent to defend: “If Athoek Station had any importance at all, it was because the planet it orbited produced tea.”
Eager to make a good impression with someone of such exalted rank, plantation owner Fosyf Denche shows off one of her most valuable possessions: a tea set in blue and green and gold glass, priceless and ancient. Breq is the only one old enough to know the language of the inscription and recognize that it came from a Notai ship, a faction that resisted emperor Anaander Miaanaai’s long-ago rise to power. Here on occupied Athoek, the inscription marks it as stolen, almost profaned, and Breq reacts with shock and dismay.
But the very ground she stands on is the same kind of relic, with the same meaning: it belonged to someone else, now long dead, and Fosyf only possesses it by theft and murder. Tea is not native to Athoek either: the Radch imported the crop when they invaded and seized the planet. The leaves are harvested by indentured workers whom Fosyf and her daughter Raughd are shamelessly keeping in poverty7.
But tea is a microcosm in this universe, too, which makes all the little gestures around it add up. The ancient rebel ship this tea set came from is lurking on the edges of this territory, and Breq’s proper appreciation of that ancient servingware (via Kalr Five, who tries to reassemble the pieces when it’s shattered) is the first step in what becomes a major strategic alliance. Breq also wields administrative leverage against the exploitation suffered by the plantation’s workers, who by the end of the third volume are the cooperative owners—meaning the excellent tea they produce, Daughter of Fishes, is no longer an imperialist’s luxury gift generating influence for a single aristocrat. Daughter of Fishes is now a force for community-wide economic justice. “Not tea but blood” is the rebel slogan, an echo of the “blood sugar” boycotts of abolitionists in Georgian England.
This rebellion is viewed as divisive by station authorities—but in reality it’s an interruption of the background pattern of quiet brutality. As in so many empires, the violence of the Radch takes the form of isolation: Breq, whose ship-self was betrayed and all but one ancillary lost; Seivarden, asleep in a pod for a thousand years and woken to find her family line no longer exists; Lieutenant Tisarwat, whose mind was wiped when her body was seized as a vessel for the emperor Anaander Miaanaai, until Breq removed her connection to the imperial hivemind. Even Anaander Miaanaai has been fragmented, cutting the lines of galactic communication to cover the fact that she is viciously at war with her own multi-bodied self.
It’s not a kind place, the Radch.
But unlike poor Arthur Dent, Leckie’s characters are not doomed to stay alone. Grief, even great grief, is lessened when losses are shared: the time it takes to split a flask of tea is nothing in itself, but if you do it as a habit or a ritual you find yourself fortified by stronger bonds of loyalty and trust with people around you. Even in Hitchhiker, the happiest time of Arthur’s life is his time as a revered Sandwich Maker on Lamuella—when he has a role in his community, and is surrounded by people who value him and the food he artfully prepares. Arthur craved proper tea as the epitome of what he’d lost, never quite realizing that it was only the symbol and not the substance of what he was missing.
Breq, though, takes full advantage of tea’s propriety: she consistently uses its symbolic rituals to bring people together and turn enemies into allies, little by little. Those brief social bonds might prove ephemeral, but then again, they might not.
Leckie’s trilogy ends with a series of tea-centered events: Breq meeting with the ships Sword of Gurat and Sphene; Ekalu and Seivarden rekindling their romance; Breq arranging for Queter, one of the tea plantation rebels, to meet Sphene as a potential ship’s captain. It’s a lot of potential beginnings—or as Breq says: “No real endings, no final perfect happiness, no irredeemable despair. Meetings, yes, breakfasts and suppers. [Kalr] Five anticipating having the best porcelain out again tomorrow, fretting over whether we had enough tea for the next few days.” A great change from the start of the first book, where we were drinking tea’s unsatisfying substitute and still constrained by Miaanaai’s imperial grip.
The close of Adams’ series snuffs out Arthur and every parallel Earth, a chain of oblivion presented as respite from nonstop pain and struggle. Breq’s finale offers us no rest—there is too much work to be done. And those ordinary pleasures—something delicious to eat or drink, shared while talking—are not distractions. They are small turns that make the big transformations more likely. Bit by bit, step by step, sip by sip.
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- And not even all of Earth—many of the herbal and floral blends we call tea have no camellia sinensis at all and are more properly described as tisanes. I recommend Courtney Milan’s Weekly Tea newsletter for an ongoing exploration of the many kinds of tea and their preparations.
- The series doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a cascade of frying pans and fires our heroes are constantly tumbling into/out of.
- Britain’s first homegrown tea plantation was established at Tregnothan in Cornwall in—and this was even later than I was expecting—the year two thousand fucking five (2005). And they still have to supplement with tea leaves from Assam and Darjeeling.
- Including the one I wear as a stylish tattoo.
- The most surprising bit to modern eyes, though, has to be this passage from 1984’s So Long and Thanks for All the Fish: “‘This Arthur Dent,’ comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the Galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep-space probe thought to originate from another alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, ‘what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?’” Arthur then, canonically, fucks.
- As the great Susie Eddie Izzard once said: “Tea and cake or death! … Cake or death? Uh, cake please.”
- Even when the full extent of Raughd’s crimes are revealed, Fosyf expresses moral disappointment in economic terms: “To think I might have left my tea in the hands of someone who could do such things.”
Oooh, interesting. Now I’m wondering about the use of chamomile tea in the Goblin Emperor or the tea houses of the Cemeteries of Amalo series. Though I think tea is a local product in the elflands.
The Xuya universe books by Alliette de Bodard also feature a lot of tea but I couldn’t tell you how it connect to Empire in those books.
An interesting question. We get a lot of details about other economic drivers like silk and factory made goods in Goblin Emperor and lots about mineral rights and mined ore in Cemeteries of Amalo but the economics of tea doesn’t come up despite being a constant presence. Perhaps the tea growing regions of the Elflands are less of an obvious pain in the emperors neck or its imported from a country with less political impact to the story so far.
This brought to mind the contrast between tea & coffee in Victoria Goddard’s Greenwing & Dart world(s).
Of course, this is about the British form of tea…
The Japanese usage of tea often carries a very different cultural loading (waves at Uncle Iroh.)
Interestingly enough – or not – the US only produces 1% of the coffee it consumes.
I think the US production of tea is an even smaller percentage of consumption, but there is tea production in the Continental US.
Wow! I truly never thought I would stumble upon another place where someone was connecting sci-fi and tea but alas, here it is. This is truly one of the ultimate pairings IMO. Two rich and complex topics both with the potential to be the catalyst for connection and create a space to explore the human experience.
I created Tea and Sci-Fi Social a while back to explore this further and see what kinds of conversations pop up.
Thanks for writing and cheers!
http://www.instagram.com/teascifi and https://discord.gg/k6e2MD2v3C
I wonder why tea is so much more the focus of SF/F than is coffee. Leaving aside vastly extended Hitchhiker’s trilogy, where Arthur Dent’s quest was important to one of the fires that Heart of Gold finds itself and its passengers in, Nathan Lowell’s Ishmael Wang books have a strong focus on coffee, and there seems to be some concern about coffee in The Mote in God’s Eye. I would be surprised if tea weren’t important in the Xuya universe, as Vietnam has a long history of tea-drinking, especially among the elites. For other milieux, such as the Raadch, is tea being used, vs coffee, to give some feel of exoticism? Is coffee just too banal?
James Holden in The Expanse series loves a great cup of coffee.
Americans tend to see coffee as a utilitarian/quotidian beverage, while tea is less common and often culturally associated with formality/culture due to a combination of broad awareness of British, Japanese, and Chinese versions of formal/ceremonial tea services and lack of day-to-day familiarity with it. I’m sure there’s also the fact thay even if we limit ourselves to just camellia sinensis there’s a lot more ways tea is consumed than coffee, globally, and it has historically been much more widespread. Coffee is only made from dried, hulled, roasted beans, while tea can be made from leaves, buds, and even stems, dried or aged or fresh, picked at different times, etc. Then, of course, there’s all the other things colloquially called tea that aren’t. Coffee has no such linguistic equivalence going for it.
All that said, coffee is absolutely ubiquitous in English-language sci-fi, it just carries slightly different connotations. Almost all space navies are powered by the stuff, it’s guzzled by engineers on long shifts and packed along by scouts in the field, it’s absolutely everywhere. Sometimes there’s notes about how hard it is to grow off Earth, and the real thing is precious.
In sf, I’ve rarely seen coffee as anything other than utilitarian: no concern about the captain’s exquisite coffee service (they do exist) or the coffee’s roast or grind or cultivar. Nothing about the perfect crema on the espresso. Nothing about the porcelain cups and saucers.
Despite Starbucks’ attempts to co-opt the invention of anything past percolator coffee, the Mediterranean countries have taken coffee seriously for centuries. Of course, tea drinking is older, being mentioned in the 3rd Century CE.
There’s bean tea and Andrej’s appreciation of it in Susan R Matthew’s Under Jurisdiction series (highly recommended, btw).
Those places haven’t heavily influenced the Anglosphere, though.
What’s interesting is that the opposite is the case in Europe – or at least, in the UK and Ireland. Traditionally tea is what builders on a construction site have with their sambos, whereas coffee is something bought by office workers and is a lot pricier (in Ireland, a box of 80 teabags costs the same as two cups of coffee).
That’s deliberate to a certain extent; around the time the US declared independence, drinking coffee instead of tea was a political statement, and since it was by the side that won, it stuck. Tea* has a tinge of the foreign about it and is heavily understood through a lens of Regency romances full of posh people having posh teas where they drink from fancy cups and servants bring finger foods, or else via samurai movies where samurai do tea ceremonies.
*Except heavily sweetened iced tea served with lemon, which is a very Southeastern beverage for reasons unclear to me.
In the Liaden universe books, tea is assocaited with the Liaden culture, while the rough Terrans drink coffee,
And poor Terrans and mercenaries drink ‘toot, short for coffeetoot, as I recall, evidentiy a coffee substitute.
I read the tea in the Radch trilogy as much more China-inflected: there’s no mention of milk, for one thing, and tea-drinking occurs much more in contexts of hospitality and ceremony, with associations of harmony and reflection rather than domesticity and comfort.
Of course, Brits drank green tea as well, particularly in the eighteenth century. But as time went on, tea came to be much more dominated by Indian chai, because that’s where imperial resource extraction was concentrated.
Also, tea in the UK, as opposed to the Radch, cuts across classes. Everybody drinks it, though richer people are more likely to have fancy varieties, like Darjeeling or oolong.
Tea in the Raadch definitely cuts across classes
My wife and I have been reading the Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series by Malka Older; in keeping with the “SF Victorian mystery” flavor of the stories, the main characters drink tea quite a bit,
“Tea’s up!” The first sign that a camp has been established in Monstrous Regiment (Pratchett).
Tea also plays a role in Blaze Ward’s ‘The Science Officer’ tales.
” That included tea leaves. His tea leaves. The kind I’ll cut you over, pal.”
and also in Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently book ‘The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul’
Great piece. I’ve just finished reading The Splinter In The Sky, which takes a look at the role of tea within colonial society, from the perspective of a tea maker who is held as a political hostage.