{"id":2232,"date":"2018-01-15T22:52:03","date_gmt":"2018-01-16T03:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/?p=2232"},"modified":"2024-01-21T11:29:40","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T16:29:40","slug":"lee-yoon-ha-01-ninefox-gambit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2018\/01\/lee-yoon-ha-01-ninefox-gambit\/","title":{"rendered":"Lee, Yoon Ha: (01) Ninefox Gambit<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was talking about\u00a0Yoon Ha Lee’s first novel,\u00a0Ninefox Gambit<\/em><\/strong>, at Arisia today, which gives me a handy way of writing it up: just try to recreate what I said.<\/p>\n

It took me forever to read this book because it had such a reputation of being difficult to start, and as you may have inferred from the status of this booklog, I haven’t had a lot of time or brain for difficult novels lately. But I finally sat down with it, and honestly I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as people say\u2014if you’re approaching it with SF reading protocols. That is to say: if you’re comfortable with understanding the effect and emotional importance of a technobabble in an SF work, without necessarily being able to envision the nuts and bolts of said technobabble, then you’ll do just fine with\u00a0Ninefox<\/em>. And it has two awesome central ideas.<\/p>\n

The first is that it’s set in an empire that brutally enforces a high calendar, which is a consensus reality, because particular calendars enable particular exotic technologies\u2014magic, effectively. In other words, this empire is maintained by modes of thought, only instead of the\u00a0kyriarchy, it’s the high calendar.<\/p>\n

The second is that our principal POV character, Cheris, is a soldier who becomes host to an undead general, “Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer.” I love the way this is implemented. She and Jedao talk inside her head, but they can’t read each other’s thoughts, and he can’t speak to others or control her body; but when Cheris looks in the mirror, she sees him. And then there’s her shadow:<\/p>\n

The shadow wouldn\u2019t have looked like her own even if it weren\u2019t for the eyes. Not only were proportions wrong, there were nine eyes, unblinking and candle-yellow, arranged in three triangles. As she watched, the eyes moved to form a perfect line bisecting the shadow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I just think that image is amazing.<\/p>\n

There’s a lot else of interest about this book: it has great robots; it uses short hops into the viewpoints of secondary characters to good effect; and it has a killer ending. But really, the takeway from this entry is that if those two main things sound interesting, don’t let the book’s reputation stop you.<\/p>\n

Nb.: this book would read considerably differently if one had read a related short story first, as it’s from Jedao’s POV; I’m not sure I have an opinion about that, I just wanted to note it for the record. (The story is “The Battle of Candle Arc”<\/a> at\u00a0Clarkesworld<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Disclaimer: Yoon is a friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was talking about\u00a0Yoon Ha Lee’s first novel,\u00a0Ninefox Gambit, at Arisia today, which gives me a handy way of writing it up: just try to recreate what I said. It took me forever to read this book because it had such a reputation of being difficult to start, and as you may have inferred from … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Lee, Yoon Ha: (01) Ninefox Gambit<\/cite>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,98],"tags":[288],"class_list":["post-2232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-machineries-of-empire","tag-lee-yoon-ha"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2427,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions\/2427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}