He couldn't have justified this conviction, but he would have said that the numbers were numbers that mattered. Birthdays and festival days. A child's shoe size. The number of times a soldier visited a crippled comrade. The specific gravity of a favorite wine. The number of bullets left in a pistol. The distance from this siege to a childhood home, remembered but never visited. [loc. 3789]
Kel Cheris is a disgraced infantry captain whose mathematical prowess has attracted the attention of her superiors: she is offered the opportunity to compete for an opportunity to defeat a heretical rebellion. The heresy is calendrical, and the calendar is a system of beliefs and rituals, some unpleasantly bloody, which maintain reality and its applicable physical laws. Put simply, if a heresy becomes too strong, too popular, then voidmoths -- the hexarchate's name for interstellar vessels -- will cease to operate.
Cheris comes up with a winning solution: the Kel's greatest weapon, who is also a person, an undead general with an appalling reputation. Shuos Jedao has never lost a battle, before or after his death: he also slaughtered his own army and executed his staff in an inexplicable fit of insanity. His consciousness has been imprisoned in the black cradle for nearly four centuries, with occasional excursions -- attached to a living human anchor, possessing that human but unable to take control -- to win a war against the hexarchate's foes.
His next anchor is Cheris.
Ninefox Gambit is immediately confusing, with its heresies and factions and formation instincts and space moths, and I think I read the first chapter a while ago and didn't engage. Now, having read Revenant Gun (the third in the trilogy which opens with Ninefox Gambit), I found it much easier: I knew and liked the protagonists, I had some comprehension of calendrical rot, and I was aware of the long game that Jedao is playing.
Jedao reminds me, in some respects, of Mycroft Canner, the antihero of Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning and subsequent novels: an individual with a revolutionary plan who will commit atrocities to bring about reform. Jedao is flawed, lonely and brilliant, and he likes to play games. Cheris is initially more of a cipher, but she comes into focus as a sharp contrast to Jedao, and a vital part of a long-term plan. I found Cheris and Jedao, and their difficult, non-consensual relationship -- which evolves over the course of the novel, at least on Cheris' side, from revulsion to something like affection -- compelling and very human.
(Also, hurrah for a novel that does not feel it necessary to include romance and sex! Ninefox Gambit does some interesting things with gender and sexuality -- for instance, Cheris is a queer woman hosting the consciousness of a queer man -- but, aside from a flashback to one of Jedao's formative moments, sexual relationships are simply not relevant.)
Yoon Ha Lee's writing is slithery and evocative and full of seemingly-casual references that expose the horrors and wonders of the hexarchate. I like this book a lot.
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