Ninefox Gambit

I went into this book hoping to like it, of course, but not expecting to like it quite as much as I did: I wouldn't have thought military sci-fi was quite my thing, especially when it's for the most part pushing the perspective of a fascist space empire from someone so thoroughly ingrained in it that everything it does seems reasonable and fair. But I really, really like this book.

The worldbuilding: really cool. The prose: both beautiful and immersive. The aesthetic: not what you'd first expect when you hear "military sci-fi". It may be window dressing, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to read about birdform servitors than it would be to read about avian-style robots, or voidmoths rather than spaceships. It's that sort of thing that carries through the prose: there's more of an eye to elegance than grittiness, and even the highly detailed descriptions of gore are pretty. I mean, they're disturbing, obviously; they're no less real for their prettiness; but the effect is more to fascinate the reader than to repulse them.

But it's the characters that are really this book's strong point. Kel Cheris is an immersive and relateable protagonist. Shuos Jedao, the second-most important character, is... well. He can't be quickly summed up, but he's incredibly fascinating and damnably likeable, despite being demonstrably a manipulative fuck who will not allow scruples to get in the way of his goals. As to what those goals actually are, that's a question that will keep Cheris - and the reader - guessing throughout much of the book. And even minor characters are well-drawn; a few times, the perspective switches to what could be considered throwaway characters, but for all that they feel complex and real.

(Aside: there are some really cool things done with perspective near the end of the book. It must be read to be known, but it's very well done and a really cool effect.)

The worldbuilding, as I've said, is really cool. It's complex and detailed and lends itself really well to nerdy analyses, but better to read it yourself than to watch me infodump a befuddled summary. A few notes on it, though: 1: the mechanics of exotic technology provide a concrete reason for the evil fascist empire to be as cruel and exacting as it is; 2: most aspects of the worldbuilding are not only cool or fun or interesting but also thematically relevant; 3: although the entire society is built up on mathematics, few actual numbers are included, and it never gets lost in detailed technological specs.

Overall: Very good, very worth reading; personally I loved this book and am very much looking forwards to reading the other two books in the trilogy.

Selling points: really cool worldbuilding; Jedao; approaches the well-worn concept of an evil fascist space empire from a novel angle; casually queer; hugely successful character with dyscalculia, even in a math-based society; non-white cast; neat (or, well, dystopian) transhumanist stuff; space ghosts; even when large swathes of people are killed as a "necessary sacrifice" (military tactics book!), their lives and deaths are treated as real and important by the narrative.

Warnings: statutory rape (once, fairly brief; on-screen, but through a layer of abstraction and treated as neither trauma porn nor regular porn, without the actual trauma associated with it being minimised); suicidal ideation, usually (but not always) abstracted from the narration; a general devaluing of life, autonomy, and selfhood, not by the book as a whole, but by specific narration and certainly by the society it depicts; very detailed descriptions of gore; casual use of "crazy" and "sociopath", the latter of which has a tropey sociopathic villain thing going on.

Positives

I absolutely loved the world-building. The almost kind of pre-Warhammer 40k kind of society where religion and technology are extremely intertwined is fascinating. The idea that new discoveries in science will lead to bordering on ludicrous and superstitious requirements for new technology to work is fantastic.

I also really, really appreciate the author's obvious appreciation for his readers' intelligence by not over-explaining the mysteries of a future with, to begin with, an almost incomprehensible technology and society. The story is so much told from the inside of the characters for whom it is obvious what a box moth or a calendrical sword is.

Negatives

I felt too much of the book was military sci fi, my own reaction surprising me a bit (I thought I liked that more). Too much time was spent in the details of battle encounters, and too little in the arch plot of the Hexarchet political play.

I also would have appreciated a more parallel-lines approach to the storytelling. The correspondence from VH was great and very tounge-in-cheek, but I think the book would have benefitted from more viewpoints/subjects.

Overall: a fresh take on sci fi, great world-building and super-imaginative tech. 4/5.

I want stories, where, when the enemy is using human shields, the protagonists goes “No, i won’t attack. That would be a war crime, too.” This is not a story like that. Is it really too much to expect stories where the protagonists don’t commit mass murder? Oh, but she feels so conflicted about it. Spare me that.

Oh, also, space reefs! Here the “take stories from Earth and transfer them to space” idea does not work. At all. Many of the fight senes would technically work fine with ships and star forts, city walls &c. Instead we get space ships, star fortresses and shields.
Why do star forts work? Because you can’t really go around them. Why do star fortresses work? … ??? Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Not here tho. Here “you could be forgiven for thinking, (…) that the entire (space ship) – the entire (fleet) – was in danger of crashing into some kind of space reef.”

What a book! It's the first one of the Machineries of Empire series. I'm not typically one for military stories but damn is this an enthralling story. The single most enrapturing aspect of the storytelling is just how intensely delicate all the imagery feels. The description of weapons and battles is consistently beautiful, and conveys a sense of it all being incredibly fragile. The characters all get to be real people as well, who have hobbies in their down time and their own individual reasons for being soldiers.

In addition I'm always a sucker for interesting world building, and this is my favorite one in quite some time. The physics bending magical powers that armies wield is all powered by mathematical calculations based around a shared universal calendar. The army that we follow in this novel is chiefly occupied by putting down heretics who would veer away from the imperial calendar and thus tangibly disrupt the power of the empire.

If you like sci-fi, this book should definitely be on your list.

The worldbuilding in NINEFOX GAMBIT is deep and immersive and very detailed in a way that sometimes was a little overwhelming, but the dynamic between the MC and her shadowy guide help to make sure that the importance of something was explained even if the details or dizzying and arcane and fantastic, the characters weren’t worried about making sure I would know what was going on, but the structure of the book itself and the setup for the main characters combined to make sure that even if I didn’t know what a word or detail meant in this world, I knew why it mattered. “Hard sci-fi“ is a phrase that almost feels appropriate here, but is wholly inadequate to summarize the way the little details makes this book shine. It’s hard sci-fi from a different universe, with all the precision and technical jargon from a world where the way someone stands in a formation aligns with their calendar to create devastating beauty and destruction in a battle, where manipulating holy days can change everything.

My favorite thing in this book is I now get to add “calendrical rot” to my vocabulary, I don’t know how I will use it after this but I’m very glad to have it now. My second favorite thing is the way that behavioral manipulation and mind games are shown in such a subtle and empathetic way. I was so immersed in the MC‘s perspective that while I trusted her as a narrator, my understanding of what was going on was very tied to how much she did or did not figure out about what her shadowy companion was doing, since we never get his perspective. Their conversations are fascinating, the way they jointly and separately have to navigate the MC’s ability to have conversations with other people led to some great moments, and it meant that wow there were times that had pretty straightforward delivery of a lot of information, they only technically fell in the category of info dump because they were things that naturally needed to be explained. Even the little moments where the companion comments on the way something has changed was used artfully so that the reader could care more about what it Is even though the MC needed to learn what it Was. 

I’m a big fan of interstitial chapters and the ones here are fantastic examples of world-building and subtle character development. They’re funny and add up to be very informative but the story will still make sense if you don’t pay attention to them. They’re a window into a perspective that’s very different from the MC, and this is used in a combination of explicit and implicit world-building to show literally what someone says about their actions and to demonstrate other ways of thinking about events shown in the main chapters.

I had no idea what to expect when I went into Ninefox Gambit, and it was extraordinarily confusing for the first... 100 pages or so. The book begins in media res during a big future/magic infantry battle except the magic might be high-level mathematics? In the first 20 pages alone are going to be puzzling your way through deliberately alien concepts like "calendrical rot" and "linearizable force multiplier formations" and "threshold winnowers". These aren't presented a friendly, "here's a new word, we will explain it now, or at least provide some context way." They are presented as things everyone takes for granted, and if you're lucky, in the next 20 or 50 pages you will gather enough contextual knowledge to piece together what they actually mean in the world of the book.

That could all be a really bad thing, but ultimately it ended up being kind of like a fun puzzle.

Ninefox Gambit (and the following two books in the Machineries of Empire trilogy) ultimately pays off all the weird math/magic stuff. It ends up being an extremely powerful metaphor for the systems that underlay all imperial powers. It's kind of like LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", but writ large as a space opera. I give this book four stars, though I would give the series as a whole five? The series as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and I like the first book more in retrospect having read the next two books in the series.

Ninefox Gambit hat das Setting eines military-scifi, versucht anspruchsvoll seine Themen (Disziplin, Technik, ihr Zusammenspiel in der Gesellschaft ) zu behandeln und ausgiebig seine (Haupt-)Figuren zu motivieren.

Kern der entworfenen Welt ist der Kalender, eine die gesamte Gesellschaft durchdringende und formende Technologie sowie die Herrschaft durch die Spitzen der sechs funktional unterschiedenen Fraktionen (Soldaten, Techniker, Assassinen, usw.). Der Kalender ermöglicht Raumfahrt, Unsterblichkeit, aber auch quasi-magische Effekte, was in Kämpfen genutzt wird.

Durchweg hat mit der Stil gut gefallen, manche Kampf-Szenen oder Erzählungen mit einer doppelten Personenperspektiven sind richtig gut gelungen.

Kritisieren würde ich das Übermaß an Motivation: im letzten Drittel gibt es eine Unzahl an Rückblenden, die keine neuen Informationen geben, sondern immer wieder denselben Punkt veranschaulichen. Erzählerisch verlieren dadurch für mich auch die Nebenfiguren; abgesehen davon, das sie der Mode folgend am Ende des Bandes praktisch alle tot sind.

Unsicher bin ich mir bei der Ausgestaltung der Welt: der Kalender selbst und seine Folgen werden nur zögerlich erklärt, das macht es spannend. Andererseits sind gelegentlich die Setzung von "Spielregeln" und ihre Umgehung oder Bruch zu nah beieinander, deus ex machina.

Deshalb gebe ich dem Band drei (bis dreineinhalb) Sterne und lese auch den nächsten Teil.

Ninefox dumps you right into the action, and it is a trip because from the beginning it is apparent that the rules of things like reality work very differently in this universe, and things are never really explained, so much as left to the reader to work out. I enjoy working out these things out, so Imma spoiler-cut these details, but in this universe, math is not so much descriptive, as effective, that is, doing math produces an effect. And doing math does not mean doing calculations, but rather doing math as a cultural practice, things like agreeing on a number system, and the geometry of streets. The Hexarchate maintains its military power by imposing a calendar system on its peoples, and where that calendar is practiced, the Hexarchate's military weapons work. Rebels begin by practicing calendrical heresy, destabilizing the Hexarchate's terrain.

The area of space in which the action takes place is ruled by the Hexarchate, a kind of terrible governing body. Each hexarch rules one of six factions, and faction membership is not necessarily hereditary. The Kel faction is the foot-soldiers' faction, and the Kel virtue is loyalty: unquestioning, and involuntary. Cheris is a Kel Captain, dangerously free-thinking by Kel standards because she sometimes does her own math.

Then Cheris is called up to deal with heretics, and given one of the Hexarchate's most effective and little-understood weapons; the ghost of mad, undead general, anchored to the living world by her mind. The general turns out to be more or less as advertised, and not a great roommate.

You guys, I really love this book and think everyone should read it. If you've been put off because I mentioned math, don't worry, there's no actual math contained in the text. It's alien in a way that real cultures are and few fictional cultures manage to be. Cheris and Jedao, the ghost-general, have a great dynamic, and it's one of my favourites, which is "I can't trust this person, but for now, we have to work together."

Reminded me of The Traitor Baru Cormorant in themes, but while I enjoyed that one greatly, I mostly wanted this one to be over except for a little bit at the end. So perhaps I'll enjoy the sequel more?

The math stuff didn't quite work for me. Seemed it could have gone in a more sapir-whorf direction and been about different mathematical systems influencing how people think, or perhaps that was really the case and I missed it? Instead it often felt like magic/numerology for its own sake.

(One explanation for the calinderical math stuff could be super far-future computer systems, but then there was a bit where the 67 snake crypto was seeded by "the irregular time between keystrokes" and a network time server, which while plausible for the crypto of some decrepit empire, makes it less sophisticated than current-day cryptosystems.)

Despite all that, I can't see rating it less than 3 stars, and since I still find myself thinking about it, 4 seems best.