Jedao said in astonishment, “I can’t feel the acceleration.” The station’s bulk, with its bewilderment of lights and angles and protrusions, dwindled behind them.
“Physics is for the weak,” Kujen said. [loc. 2366]
A young man named Jedao wakes up in a strange room, unable to recall how he got there. His friend Ruo isn't in evidence, and when somebody does show up, it's a beautiful man named Kujen, whose shadow is made of the shapes of fluttering moths. Jedao, apparently, is there to lead an army; he's not seventeen years old, but forty-four; and the reason he can't remember anything is that an enemy named Cheris made off with most of his memories.
Or so Kujen says. And in the absence of any other source of information ...
There is always a risk in diving straight in at the end of a trilogy. I had heard positive things about this novel, which is one of the six on this year's Hugo shortlist for Best Novel. I knew almost as little as Jedao at the start of the novel, and gradually picked up that there'd been a revolution, destroying the leaders (hexarchs) of most of the six factions; that this revolution had caused 'calendrical destabilization', which in turn meant that certain technologies no longer worked; that there are two opposing sides, the Protectorate and the Compact, and that Kujen wants him to lead a swarm of over a hundred warmoths. Though it's not clear who the enemy is.
Subsequent chapters flesh out the setting, and the situation. The calendar is something like a religion, involving sacrifices and torture and producing exotic effects that in places are queasily eldritch (for example, there's a weapon that causes eyes and mouths to appear all over the bodies of its victims). Perhaps it's the calendar which makes Jedao effectively invulnerable: he survives an assassination attempt that would surely have killed any normal human. His troops, despite the 'formation instinct' (another calendrical effect) which enforces loyalty, fear and hate him, and he is notorious for committing atrocities, which he cannot recall.
Interwoven with Jedao's narrative are others: politics and warfare between the Protectorate and the Compact, and a sentient, media-fan robot named Hemiola, formerly one-third of the residents of Kujen's secret base, follows someone who's not quite who they say they are and finds itself embroiled in an assassination plot of immense scope and ambition.
It's very hard to review this novel without spoilers for the previous books in the trilogy: suffice to say that I acquired and read those books (Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem) as soon as possible, and will be reviewing them here soon. But the key thing is this: that the characters, human and otherwise, bewitched me, and the worldbuilding -- though sometimes fuzzy, almost dreamlike, in places (or perhaps in my understanding) -- is spectacular, and scary, and sideways. Revenant Gun explores issues of consent and free will, and illustrates them in a variety of ways, some of them vividly unpleasant. I can, to be honest, take or leave the military and political stuff: but the people, and their interactions, their flawed, messy, contradictory, desperate interactions, are utterly compelling.
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