Review: Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Mon May 1 20:46:23 PDT 2017


Ninefox Gambit
by Yoon Ha Lee

Series:    The Machineries of Empire #1
Publisher: Solaris
Copyright: 2016
ISBN:      1-84997-992-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     384

Charis is a Kel, which means that she's a soldier of the Hexarchate. A
captain, to be precise: Captain Kel Charis of Heron Company, commanding
infantry forces to stamp out heresy. The heresy she's stamping out at
the start of the book are the Eels, or the Society of the Flourish as
they call themselves, and they're strong enough that they can also
command heretical technology.

Charis manages to win through, but only because she has enough
flexibility and quick thinking to adjust to the presence of a heresy
and reach beyond the Lexicon Primary, improvising formations on the
spot to adjust for the affects of the rebel calendar. Military victory
is prized among the Kel, but stepping outside the bounds of Doctrine to
achieve it is not. Charis is not particularly surprised when her
company is disbanded for re-education after the battle. She is very
surprised when she personally is tapped to offer a solution to a far
greater attack on the Hexarchate.

I first encountered Yoon Ha Lee's fiction in the short story "The
Unstrung Zither", was blown away by the creativity and delightfully
weird twist on science fiction war, and have been following his writing
ever since. Most of it is short fiction, though, and I'm not much of a
short fiction reader, so there haven't been many reviews. Ninefox
Gambit is his first, and much-anticipated, full-length novel.

It's probably not too surprising for someone from the generation that
grew up with Star Wars, but I have a soft spot in my heart for
magitech. Hard science fiction has its merits, as does the softer sort
that takes standard, if impossible, genre tropes for granted. But
something about a far-future, space-faring society based on magic that
straddles the rules of technology, physics, affinities, and beliefs
calls to that part of me that spent hours thinking about the nature of
the Force. It has to be good magitech, though: something odd and
different but well-thought-out, full of implications and twisty
consequences that reshape society and that inspire a whole new type of
engineering and science. Magic that's not physics as we know it, but
that's knowable, researchable, and something that a society can reshape
itself around.

This is the good magitech.

In the world of the Hexarchate, calendrical systems are more than just
a mutual agreement for conveying time. They order and structure the
laws of the universe as much as they structure society. What
technological devices, and what weapons, are possible is influenced by
the calendar in observance, which in turn is based on what calendar
people believe in and follow. Close adherence to a calendrical regime
enables exotics: weapons with incredibly powerful and often horrific
effects, such as the threshold winnower that plays a repeated,
nightmarish role in this story. Invariant weapons, ones that will work
in any calendar system, are much weaker.

The Hexarchate is called that because it is a society formed by six
factions, who divide the work of ruling its scattered planets according
to the expertise and tendencies of each faction. Together, they impose
the high calendar, and maintain it against heresies with an iron fist
lest their power be undermined or transformed and their exotics fail to
function. The Kel is their military faction, a key component of that
fist, and their specialty is formations: specific arrangements of
humans or ships that channel the power of the calendar to defend
against or attack with exotics. Formations have to be held exactly to
hold their power and yet have to be flexible enough to change based on
fast-changing battlefield conditions. To assist in this, Kel are
programmed with formation instinct: psychological conditioning that
helps them obediently take and hold formations. And, not
coincidentally, offer nearly absolute obedience to their chain of
command.

I just finished reading another book that attempted to use math as a
key component of its world-building. I think Lee was far more
successful. The math here is realistic for its purpose, obviously
necessary given the formation structures built into the world's
physics, and a lovely nod to the importance of calendars. A single
calendar might involve only simple arithmetic, but the formation and
technological implications of a calendar, let alone the fuzzy
boundaries between two calendars each partially in force, would
naturally require tricky advanced mathematics to work out. For someone
in Charis's position, mathematical training is a rare but vitally
important tactical advantage.

As you might have guessed from the amount that I'm talking about
combat, Ninefox Gambit is military SF. Charis is a military officer,
and a comfortable majority of this book is combat of one kind or
another. That's not normally my thing, and I did wish there was a bit
more non-military social development. But my normal problem with
military SF is that I lack the interest in battlefield tactics and
strategy to stay fully engaged by description of battle after battle.
Ninefox Gambit is the story of Charis attempting to retake a stronghold
of the Hexarchate that's fallen to heretical forces, but Lee adds an
important twist that does keep me engaged: Jedao.

General Shuos Jedao was the greatest general the Hexarchate had ever
seen. He never lost a battle. The only catch is that, in the middle of
a highly successful campaign against heretics, he went mad,
slaughtering both the heretics and his own troops with a horrific
weapon while simultaneously murdering all of his command staff. He's
much too dangerous and insane to leave alive, but he was also much too
valuable and skillful to lose as a weapon, so for the subsequent
centuries he's been kept in a threshold state, an undead ghost. A ghost
that the Hexarchate can put into Charis's head, a constant advisor as
she's placed in charge of the swarm sent to retake the Fortress of
Scattered Needles. A brilliant tactician, sociopath, and mass murderer
who's advice can never be trusted.

The heart of Ninefox Gambit isn't the combat. It's the interplay of
power, analysis, and guesswork under the combat, as Charis attempts to
use Jedao's brilliance while not losing her own sense of identity or
letting him mess too badly with her head. At the start, she's way out
of her depth. But she's thoughtful, careful, has a strong internal
sense of identity, and learns fast. And the story of Jedao's past is
accurate, but incomplete.

For those who are familiar with the often-ornate language and prose
style of Yoon Ha Lee's short fiction and who are worried it wouldn't
hold up at longer length, note that his style here is much different.
There are a few touches of ornate description, but most of the book is
written in a straightforward and easily-understandable narrative style.
Thankfully, because the layers of tactical thrust and counter-thrust
are complicated enough that I would have lost them entirely beneath
too-complex prose.

There's a lot of brutal death in this book. I got a bit tired of both
that and the tactical maneuvering, although that's less the fault of
the book and more my own mild antipathy towards military SF. But the
unique universe background held my interest long enough to become
intrigued by Charis's slow but determined probing at Jedao's secrets
and the politics of the Hexarchate. I still would have preferred the
story to have a somewhat lower body count, but as long as one can read
past some gore, there's plenty here to appeal to someone who normally
gives military SF a pass. I think its biggest drawback is that,
although it has a narrative arc that comes to a clear conclusion,
Ninefox Gambit raises a lot of important questions about its world and
mostly doesn't answer them. There are more books coming, and I hope
they contain more definitive answers.

Followed by Raven Stratagem.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2017-05-01

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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