Ninefox Gambit

First in the Machineries of Empire series, Ninefox Gambit tells the story of Kel Cheris, a captain in the hexarchate who has been disgraced for “heretical tactics” during a battle. Knowing that there is a price that must be paid for going against her superiors, Cheris is prepared to accept the inevitable – but what she receives is not what she expected. Instead of punishment, she is given an incredibly prestigious assignment: to take back the impenetrable Fortress of Scattered Needles, which has recently fallen under heretic control. However, this is a big operation, and it is clear that Cheris cannot do this alone. So she is given a partner in the form of Shuos Jedao: a brilliant tactician famous for never having lost a battle, show more but notorious as a madman who massacred an opposing army – and his own. And as the siege wears on and they spend more time together, Cheris begins to wonder if all that she knows about Jedao is actually true – and if such questions are not a sign of her own, impending madness.

That’s the pitch. However, you have to be ready for the hard drop into deeply alien territory.
What I have come to find is you really have to be in the right frame of mind to read this one. Because Yoon Ha Lee does not hold your hand.

Ninefox Gambit takes place in a complicated and well-thought-out world (although it is slightly confusing at first), where calendars, religion and formations combine to produce magic-like effects used in warfare (and factions battle it out in living space ships). Math is a part of the world, but you are not going to be hit with equations (don't think too hard about it or it will make your head hurt). Instead, you are shown an unfolding and highly political world of different factions (think the houses of Dune), where religion is enforced to create military superiority, and the 'grunts' of the military have an enforced group-mind.
The main characters Cheris and Jedao are brilliantly imagined characters and really, although Ninefox Gambit is full of space battles, strange numerology, living space ships, etc. it's the character interaction between these two characters that make this book really shine and provides food for thought regarding identity, gender issues, and conformity.


In Ninefox, Lee is playing with the idea of consensus reality — of a techno-political system that relies on rigid belief in order to function. Which, more specifically, requires near-religious (actually super-religious) adherence to a calendar: A numerical system which can be manipulated to alter reality. Our main character, Cheris is paired up with Jedao to destroy the heretics - the ones who don’t adhere to the hexarchte calendar. Yet, this very pairing leads Cheris to question her own belief system and revolt. And in the end:

“[Cheris] had learned that not all masters were worth serving.”

Cheris, by the end of the novel, can’t agree with the consensus reality. And it’s their break with such a reality that catapults us into book two of the series, which I can’t wait to read.
A brilliantly realized, fresh, take on military space opera. Both human and utterly alien.

A book worth revisiting. show less

I like it! It's not an easy read. The beginning has the potential to set the reader adrift in terms of how much novel information immediately starts getting thrown around, but it all ultimately comes together for a very satisfying conclusion in the end. You'd better enjoy the ultraviolence of future war, because there is a lot of it! The characters, who are rock-solid in terms of motivation and compellingly tortured, feel like a bonus tagged on to the similarly solid central story focused on the nitty-gritty tactics and politics of battle. Perhaps the most compelling element of the book for me is its exploration of the relationship between the structure of government and the technology it uses/develops in order to uphold itself and show more justify its rule--very amenable to historical materialist readings! show less

Pick this one up, first thing you notice is that this is a hard sf, military space opera kind of story. And that sort of thing has been done a lot in the genre. And I like that kind of sf, but yeah, it's been done before. Now actually read the first chapter and you find that it's way different from anything like that before. The world Lee's built is built off of consensus reality - the universe works the way it does because people believe it works that way. And when different groups of people believe different things, there's a clash of civilizations as each side tries to control the belief system (and inherent properties of the universe) for their own benefit.

Lee is a fantastic writer. The ideas are unique and the prose is beautiful in show more spots. His words draw from his Korean background and his characters are engaging and real, and informed by his experiences as a multicultural transgendered man. But in lesser hands this would have been a disaster of a book. I could easily see another 100 pages or so of "explaining" this universe and how it works. Instead, Lee lets the story unfold and the reader easily figures it out. He doesn't beat us up with his ideas about reality and experience, but instead lets us experience our own thinking about things.

In the end, what really struck me is that in this era of "alternative facts" and "truth" defined by Twitter feeds and false news on Facebook, maybe what we need is discussion on the idea of consensus reality and the dangers of reality bubbles we live in. show less

A reread for my book club ☺

Ninefox Gambit isn’t really sci-fi, it’s a math magic fantasy in a space opera setting. The premise of this universe is that if everyone uses and believes in the same systems, math magic happens and you can do weird things with physics etc. If someone were to use the wrong equations/calendar, everything starts to unravel. I can imagine how hard some people might bounce off all that. Besides, the first chapters hit the reader with lots of world building words to figure out. I liked the process on the first read, but this time around it was kind of nice to not have to go through the mindfuck stage ;) and just focus on the plot and the characters.

I liked following Cheris.
“In a way each battle was home: a show more wretched home, where small mistakes were punished and great virtues went unnoticed, but a home nonetheless.”
She adjusts rather nicely to having an undead general in her head. Jedao’s voice is great. Their relationship and the mind games Jedao plays are the best part of the book. I flew through it the first time, and now I realized that I wanted a lot more Cheris and Jedao and a lot less battle carnage. It’s very graphic and hit me hard.

The Hexarchate is a horrific place – with a totalitarian regime, ritual tortures and brainwashing. It becomes somewhat more bearable to read about the hexarch bastards when the wry humour makes an appearance: “He was as susceptible as the next Shuos to thinking up ways to assassinate people with unlikely objects.”

This novel is really about whether becoming a monster is worth if it if you want to bring a monstrous society down…

I have questions about some of the plot points I missed on the first read, so I am not as head over heels any more. (This will make for a nice book club discussion, anyway.) But in this case it is a matter of adjusting the rating from 4.5 to 4.0 stars. I did think that the rest of the trilogy was better than the first book, so I am curious to see what I will think of the reread – because I am rereading the rest, obviously. Hopefully, it will be this year.. ahem. show less

Dense, intense, tense, present tense milsf space opera. A weird quasi-religious empire built on some sort of powerful calendar system that exerts mathematical powers which affects weapons and technology ruthlessly crushes heretics with variant calenders - look I dunno, it has its own logic on the page, awesome logic, I should add, because it's fairly mindbending. The Kel are a fanatically military caste with preprogrammed formations that allow them to withstand attacks and launch assaults of their own. Captain Kel Cheris has a knack for mathematics and a talent for adapting Kel formations to heretical standards when calendrical rot reduces the effectiveness of hexarchate approved tactics. That sentence actually makes sense when you read show more the book.

Cheris is sent to retake a crucial fortress that has fallen to heresy, and her chosen weapon is a revived general who never lost a battle but who went mad and completely wiped out two armies, one of them his own. With the general resident in her own mind and herself elevated to the unwelcome rank of general, Cheris must take the fortress back and watch out for the other general in her head.

Reminiscent of Hannu Rajaniemi, this isn't quite as full on and disorienting - you do find your feet relatively quickly. There's lots of action and intrigue and high-level politics and low-level skullduggery packed into this volume. show less

Captain Kel Cheris is having a very bad day. A loyal soldier of the Hexarchate, she's been paired with the undead, insane, and genocidal General Jedao, imprisoned for 400 years after betraying his own command and killing one million people. Evil though Jedao may be, he's never lost a battle, and Kel Command keeps him on ice to take down major threats, like the heretical corruption of a key border fortress protected by impenetrable shields. If Cheris can keep her sanity and accomplish her mission, power and promotion await.

Lee's first novel (he has an accomplished body of shorter fiction) is a dark byzantine military adventure. The Hexarchate runs on a combination of math and belief called the high calendar, which allows its military to show more access exotic quantum effects through the right formation. Life is an endless bulwark of rituals against the madness of the Hexarchate leaders, and a multisided history of atrocity and torture. Their military makes a fetish out of loyalty and suicide, while the intelligence services see everything as a game, and lives as nothing more than tokens to be spent in pursuit of victory. The people in charge of doctrine actively demand torture to keep the whole thing working. Super bleak, super stylish, and a strong debut in the weird tradition of The Quantum Thief.

***

On a reread of all three books, Ninefox Gambit is still damn near perfect, chilling in the implications of the setting and characters, the interplay between Cheris and Jedao, and occasional interjection of other viewpoints, most of whom serve to die horribly to illustrate some point. show less

In short: I loved it, and I want more people to read it.

In long: I've heard a lot of good things about this series, but none of them prepared me for how much I was going to love this story, how invested I was going to be in how the complex strands of politics and warfare across time and space are woven together.

While the plot is good, and the characterisation is impressive, what held me in this story was the world-building, and the way that the writing slowly exposes it. Yoon Ha Lee has developed a mathematics and a magic that are one and the same, and that influence everything that happens in the story.

Difficult parts of the story: The sheer numbers of sacrificial deaths, and the fact that just to maintain the government system, show more torture is a necessity. Fortunately the torture is only referenced, but the sheer numbers of senseless deaths do happen as necessary parts of the story.

If you are someone who usually doesn't like complex political shenanigans and the logistics of war, it may still be worth reading this.

content warnings for death, war, and body horror. show less