Ninefox Gambit (Machineries of Empire Book 1)

There is nothing worse than discovering a new (to you) author and discovering you're head over heels in love with that author's work. I can hear you saying "But wait, that's a good thing, right? More good new stories to read." Of course that's a good thing, but the more good fiction that's available to us from more sources, the more we're likely not to run into a clunker. There's nothing worse than picking something up and wanting to throw it against the wall. If we read material from authors that we like, we're likely to always have something we appreciate reading and spending precious time on. Now the other side of the room is stating "But wait a minute, if you stay only in your comfort zone, how will you find new authors and new types of fiction to read?"Hence, the annual Hugo finalist list. I'll be the first to admit that I don't read enough during the year to be able to nominate from a wide pool of stories. My life doesn't permit that. I do, however, plunge headfirst into the Hugo finalists list every year, and nearly every year recently someone has jumped up to blow me away, at least initially. In my personal experience, in recent years we have Ann Leckie (although the luster faded quickly for me), N.K. Jemisin, and Cixin Liu. Mind you, these are all from the Best Novel category. The issue could expand exponentially if I were able to read all the short fiction too.And thus we come to this year's entry into the "I gotta start reading all of this guy's stuff too" fray: Yoon Ha Lee. I remember reading a short story of his, "The Battle of Candle Arc", in one of the David Hartwell collections a few years ago. The events of that story are referred to in Yoon Ha Lee's first novel, NINEFOX GAMBIT. I should point out that to me he's a new writer. Lo and behold I've just discovered that he's had over 40 short stories published, many of which have ended up in the collection Conservation of Shadows (and of course, the next thing I know, I buy the ebook of that collection). The sequel to NINEFOX GAMBIT, RAVEN STRATAGEM, has just been published as I write this, and it's already on my shelf waiting to be read.Can you tell that I really liked NINEFOX GAMBIT?NINEFOX GAMBIT is space opera military science fiction. I haven't read a lot of military sf recently, but I am fond of space opera. There is certainly a lot of military sf being published these days. The story here is simple - on the surface. Captain Kel Cheris is disgraced because of her use of an unorthodox and unconventional battle tactic. She will be allowed to redeem herself and her career by taking back the Fortress of Scattered Needles from the heretics. Simple, straightforward, and to the point.That, however, is as simple as it gets. Yoon Ha Lee throws in so many new and interesting ideas that the reader needs to be alert and actually pay attention to the story. There is no skimming with NINEFOX GAMBIT. Yoon Ha Lee does not coddle his readers with this book. He assumes that the reader is intelligent and can pick up things along the way, but it can take a little bit of work. Not work like reading through a dense novel which contains dozens of characters to keep track of written in flowery language over several novels. No. This is a sort of puzzle kind of novel: the reader is constantly thinking "what do they mean by that?"; "how does that fit in with what happened over there?"; "what is really going on?"; and of course, the biggie, "what exactly is 'calendrical heresy' anyway?"Going back to an earlier part of this review for a moment, I mentioned that Cheris was disgraced for the use of an unconventional battle tactic. The Kel have something instilled into them called "formation instinct". All battles are conducted using various and sundry known formations that are appropriate for what is trying to be accomplished. She steps outside of those formations, and this sends her down the path of the story the novel tells. She has to win the right to lead the expedition to take back the Fortress of Scattered Needles in a sort of contest against other military leaders by proposing a plan that is better than all the rest. She proposes using the undead warrior Shuos Jedeo as the weapon. Jedeo has never lost a battle, but the problem is that during one battle Jedeo slaughtered two armies, one of which was his own. Now he is kept in an undead state and revived when the hexarcate (the system of government) needs him. Jedeo is "attached" to Cheris; they communicate mentally most of the time, but no one else can see him. The army that Cheris commands knows of Jedeo's presence and involvement, which makes things much more interesting as unusual tactical and strategic decisions are made.So, is the Fortress retaken? That would be telling, but it's really beside the point. What is appealing to me though is the abundance of new ideas that Yoon Ha Lee presents in the book. While the formation instinct is something new to me, and attaching an undead warrior to a live soldier to go into battle must have been done sometime in the long history of science fiction, my winner of "new, interesting, and complex idea of the year" is the calendrical heresy. The calendar is not just a way to tell the passing of time. It is a way of life, a belief system, a way to hold moral fabric together. And it can be a weapon. And no, I don't understand it all. At least not yet. But combine all those ideas with political intrigue and a well written, fast paced story, in my mind this is may be the best novel of the year, a year in which there have been so many terrific novels. I hope RAVEN STRATAGEM can continue the excellence that NINEFOX GAMBIT has displayed. That would be a terrific thing indeed.

Very inventive and pretty clever. Fantasy in thin SF trappings, but well done. I've read Ann Leckie, who gets compared to, but I thought I caught a whiff of Ian Banks with the weird weapons and ship names. Amputation Gun = Lazy Gun? Even the hint at a subplot with the AI servitors.Clever backstory: totalitarian/theocracy government with rigid caste systems. Magic/science triggered by beliefs, ritual and maths. Deep plot. The few main characters are deftly handled and I just loved the rebel puppet master with a sweet tooth. Well, very well, written - this ain't your average sketchy Mil SF with big guns, hackneyed "tactics" and predictable plot. The author knows his words, likes to write and likes to surprise you. Anti-thesis of a Honor Harrington novel, as another reviewer puts it? Yes, and that's an excellent compliment in my book.But, overall it was just a bit too strange for my taste. I was left disoriented and nonplussed by the constant storm of bizarre tech/activities/deaths/social structures. The overall feel was more like they were playing war with decks of cards, if that makes any sense and the deaths mostly lacked emotional impact. A bit more pacing in the weirdness would have done wonders.I liked it, but probably won't read further. And, avoid like the plague if you're the type of reader who doesn't like to be dumped in the midst of a complex setup with little explanation and background. This one does that in spades, on purpose.4.5 for writing and cleverness. 3 for enjoyment.

The story was good and intriguing. However, the terminology of many odd words which threw me off more often than I can count. It wasn’t the only thing that made this book undesirable for me is the subplots…they become holes when the author doesn’t fill them before moving on to the main story. Like I said, this is just not for me.

I rarely review books on Amazon, but I wanted to make an exception, since this is an exceptional book. The first chapter can feel punishing and disorienting, much like the future battlefield we're dropped in feels for our main character. But there is a fantastic reward in pushing through and surviving it, for her as for us.The old Arthur C. Clarke adage about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic comes to mind here, but the author's ask is simple enough, if high concept: strict adherence to the High Calendar by the population allows, through hyper-advanced mathematics, amazing technologies to function. Any deviation threatens those technologies, and thus becomes an existential, heretical threat to the Hexarchate. Cue the political intrigue, lies, deception and deadly military battles.I love a book that trusts the reader to find their footing, peeling back layers of the universe slowly, one by one, revealing the mind-blowing and the mundane, as we dive deeper. This book delivered that on so many levels, I devoured it in record time.A lot of the technology's working is never explained, but it's effect always is. To me, that was an acceptable bargain to maintain it's alien, exotic, feel. Some readers may find it frustrating, but I feel any explanation would have either been disappointing or far too abstract. It worked for me, and I hope it will work for you. The human side of things remains the most interesting, as it indeed is central to the main plot, on both sides of the conflict.Yours in calendrical heresy.

Not an easy start for this novel, lots of unique terms and characteristics that are not immediately explained to the reader. It takes some time before most of the world building and society organisation are clear enough, and before the plot gets thick and intriguing enough to make this a pageturner. The main character is interesting and relatable, the story is mainly told from her point of view, and indeed it gets quite fascinating when she gets to experience someone else's memories. Lots of war strategies and political intrigue, made more interesting by the unique sociopolitical, biotechnological organisation of the world described.

If Aliette de Bodard and Anne Leckie joined forces to write their version of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ set in a space war imagined by Iain M Banks it might end up a bit like ‘Ninefox Gambit’. For all that, the novel is entirely original, with a sonorous, almost detached rhythm that makes it uniquely compelling.Other reviewers have made comparisons with ‘Apocalypse Now’, with the Kurtz character centre stage. In the movie, Kurtz is beyond reason and in the source novel ‘Heart of Darkness’ he’s already dead. Jedao, the rogue general in ‘Ninefox Gambit, is both. Held in stasis in the mysterious black cradle, he becomes a ghost mentor to recently promoted general Cheris when their minds are spliced in order to retake a strategically placed space fortress that has fallen to heretics.The civilisation at the heart of this story is called the hexarchate, whose five castes have different social and political functions. Cheris begins the book as a young female captain in the military Kel. During conflict, the Kel subsume their individualities in ‘formation instinct’, which makes them hard to defeat but easy to control.This hard-won condition is a correlative for the society as a whole, which does not favour disobedience. For example, Cheris is disgraced after a mission fails to secure enemy technology, despite being ordered to leave it, while in an earlier epoch before formation instinct is invented, erstwhile brilliant General Jadeo is able to slaughter millions including his own troops thanks to their almost blind loyalty.Cheris’s story overlays Jadeo’s in a number of interesting ways. Many hexarchate citizens are bred according to the strictures of their castes; however, where different talents are discovered they are not stamped out but utilised. Thus Jedao begins as a Shuros assassin (unlike the purely military Kel, the Shuros handle espionage, amongst other things), while Cheris is gifted at maths, which would normally place her in the Nirai caste.There is thus an important blurring of roles that is key to characters’ place in the story. The overlay is also important in comparing the characters’ defining military campaigns, which are both sieges. Later, this overlay becomes more literal as Cheris uses exotic technologies to explore her mentor’s past.Time is relative in both the workings of the universe and also the human mind; the titular gambit takes this duality and spins it into an intricate but viscerally effective conspiracy. Finding out who is at the centre of it all depends on understanding the deceptively simple concept of a calendar that determines everything about this complex future society.The calendar informs everything and includes grotesque details like exact dates that heretics are tortured to death, similar to Guy Fawkes night, but with real people. Heretics are those who have proposed different calendars, like one that enables a populace to have some degree of nominal choice, or ‘democracy’ as it’s quaintly known.The idea of a calendrical system determining every aspect of a society is less alien than at first appears. Whether harvesting crops, operating machinery or programming computers, technology has always been time-based because it relies on cause and effect. The novel’s calendrical system codifies a society’s entire chronology to such an extent that new technologies emerge from it. To put it another way, imagine a coloured cloth that has water poured over it that’s then twisted so the water comes out again, subtly altered.The twisting is significant. One of my issues with the novel isn’t its complexity or its deliriously inventive language, both of which are joys; rather it’s that both the hexarchate and Kel Command are such a bunch of bastards it’s hard to understand why anyone would sacrifice as much as Cheris does to defend them. Of course, there is more at play here than is initially apparent, but it’s a bold narrative that hangs together because of two elements.One is the dynamic between Cheris and Jedao, which goes from a dubious mentor relationship to something more fittingly strange. The other is the sheer science fictional poetry at work in this book.I often have issues with actual SF poetic verse as it seems to be written by people with no understanding of either poetry or SF, who don’t have the patience or ability to write a proper short story. Indeed, anyone who fancies having a go because poetry has fewer words should read ‘Ninefox Gambit’. It is a textbook example of the blend of language and idea that our best contemporary SF does so well. I mean, look at that title! The rhythm of it, the mystery. It sort of makes sense and then doesn’t (sorry, how many foxes?), but by then it’s in your mind like a BeeGees tune or, worse, the cybernetic soul of a long-dead crazy general. Meanwhile, the fortress Cheris and Jedao are trying to retake is called the Fortress of Scattered Needles. There are none of your prosaic death stars in this galaxy, sunshine.Often people who don’t read SF take exception to its tropes because they are over familiar. Here too the author’s brilliant language triumphs. Not once do we read the word ‘starship’ or even ‘ship’. No, these are ‘moths’, a name that is as bizarre as it is weirdly fitting. All you need to understand is that needlemoths are nippy and convenient, boxmoths are what you’d use to shift loads of stuff and cindermoths are seriously bad news unless you’re in command of one.What the author has grasped so well is the ability to create an impression of a wondrous technology without either going into too much laborious, irrelevant and, let’s face it, erroneous detail about how it works (because if Yoon Ha Lee knew how to actually build a cindermoth I’m willing to bet he would have done it) or glossing over the world-building and hoping we won’t notice.This novel has had terrific word of mouth for a while now. People I’ve spoken to describe it as challenging, as if Yoon Ha Lee is an SF author’s SF author. There may be some truth in that description if only for the uncompromising trust in the reader’s intelligence, but I suspect a more generous aesthetic. It feels like an appreciation of the genre’s possibilities expressed in fashion that is at once coherent and liberating. Not for nothing are the power plays at work between the main characters an exercise in long-game subversion.

Hard start, I needed to absorb the author’s concepts and create the ‘universe’ in my imagination. A wonderful exercise and experience compared to the usual tedious efforts by an author feeling the need to explain every concept ad nauseam. Definitely not a western writing style.

This is a brilliant book of far future military space opera with a twist. The key advanced science that is active in the worldbuilding and the plot is mathematics rather than physics, which gives a very distinctive speculative feel to the world built around the plot, and may lead confusingly to some readers being convinced that the book is "hard" sf, and others equally convinced that it is fantasy in sf disguise.Mathematics is central and its application by means of "consensus mechanics" allows the override of classical physical law by "exotic" effects (including faster than light travel). To maintain these exotic effects the whole social order must be organised around a particular "calendar" that is a multi-level synchronic order: all at once axiom-system, creed, political order, and psycho-physical discipline. "Doctrine" is all-important, and the worst crime is "heresy": not just dissidence but also the use of deviant technologies that rely on unorthodox axiom systems.Another central intellectual discipline is philosophy, important for its absence and also for a heretical (i.e. doctrinal, technological, and political) attempt to re-introduce it into the current ruling order, a hexarchate based on six factions (a warrior caste - the Kel, a spy/assassin caste - the Shuos, a programming/inquisitorial caste - the Rahal, a disciplinary/brainwashing cast - the Vidona, a wealthy/cultured class - the Andan, and a mathematical/technical caste - the Nirai).Previously the Liozh, the philosopher/ethicist caste, formed the seventh faction in a "heptarchate" but the whole faction was eliminated for heresy, something to do with trying to introduce democracy and to free people from compulsory ritual observance of the "remembrances".These underpinnings only emerge slowly. From the beginning we are plunged into the action of the novel, a strange battle with "heretics" making use of weird technologies and a dazzling vocabulary to describe it. The opening pages, the first battle sequence underline the theme of absolute obedience to an authoritarian and unreliable high command willing to sacrifice its soldiers and its stated objectives for inscrutable reasons.Our protagonist, heroine and viewpoint character is Captain Kel Charis, courageous, loyal, a mathematical genius, and yet full of empathy. We see this alien world through her eyes and she gives sense and value to it all, even as that sense evolves during her new mission, which leads her to discover much that she was unaware of concerning the secret history and underside of the world she knows.The ultimate stakes are the continued existence of the hexarchate itself, which she has been conditioned to serve blindly and unquestioningly. Can she avoid the omnipresent danger of "calendrical rot"? This is the ultimate menace as our very actions taken to save the calendrical order and strengthen it may change our assumptions and lead us to deviate from the Calendar and so to weaken it. Or perhaps it is desirable.Where oppression is synchronic (stasis) resistance is diachronic (rot).