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."

A very original sci-fi setting. Religion and science are typically fairly separate or at odds with each other. But here they have a very clever relationship. It is not just clever for the sake of offering something new, but also for posing interesting new moral questions. I will describe it in a spoiler tag, because it is best learned from the novel. But there are no plot spoilers in the tag, just setting spoilers.


You know all the stories of a dogmatic, evil empire? Armies of brainwashed soldiers. "Remembrance" days when you must ritually torture heretics. The evil guys never have an acceptable excuse. They do this to remain in power, or to keep a terrible secret, or protect the civilization from demons... But it is always kind of obvious that honesty would have worked better.

Well here the dogma and the evil are mathematical necessities. People follow this crazy religion not out of conviction, but because this is what powers everything. They have regular physics-based technology, and exotic calendar-based technology. Technology that is designed to work within the field of effect of adherence to a religious calendar. If you do not torture those heretics every month, all the exotics will fail. These exotics are basically magic. Very powerful magic. Cut-armies-into-pieces kind of magic.

Heretics then may design different calendars. Mathematicians can figure out how to achieve exotic effects in a given calendar, but this is not trivial work. I do not want to give away the plot, but it revolves around this sort of thing.

Some reviews say this is really fantasy, because of the "magic". I disagree. What keeps it sci-fi for me is that the "magic" is approached with an engineering mindset. It is not about lone spell-casters throwing fireballs at each other, but organized militaries using weapons developed by government research teams. So it is used like technology, not like magic.

In-universe it also has the deep depth of technology, as opposed to the shallow depth of magic. You do not just say a magic word to shoot a fireball; you organize a hundred people into a formation that was calculated by a team of mathematicians supported by a grid of computers. (This incidentally explains why soldiers need to be brainwashed.)


It is altogether a very wild, innovative world. Much of my reading was spent learning about the world. I enjoyed that.

A lot of minor characters are introduced in fairly great detail (down to their favorite jokes or dishes). Together with the major characters, there is a generally interesting, diverse, and likeable cast. A lot of that cast gets graphically killed, to support a strong war-is-bad message. There is not all that much novelty in this message, but it has a strong connection to the plot at least. The plot is all about war. So I guess this is a book for people that like war in the abstract, but not in the concrete.

I think this paragraph is a good cross-section of the overall writing:

Now Sereset was dying of a stray Kel bullet, pure stupid luck. The bullet was a tunneler, and Sereset’s amputation failsafe had reacted too slowly. All Cheris could think of, looking at the crusts of drying blood, at the messy hardened foam that partly staunched the leg’s stump and the perforations, was how little she knew the other man. At Shuos Academy Sereset had had a habit of keeping his head down and smiling a lot, but he had reasonably good marks and liked working with finicky equipment. None of this told Cheris what Sereset thought about the Liozh heptarch’s rhetoric, or what music he hummed when no one else was listening, or whether he thought the bitter wine served at the Shuos table was better than Andan rose liqueur.

Minor character introduced in detail, graphic illustration for why war is bad, cool technology, casual world-building everywhere, and bad prose. I thought it was all the translator's fault, but the author is actually American. (Sorry I made assumptions based on the name.) I am not a native speaker, so my opinion should not carry much weight. But to me the sentences often felt strange. Like this one on page 6:

Cheris was unable to organize her first heart-stop impressions of what had been the rest of the battalion.

Sounds like something that might sound perfectly normal in another language, but falls apart when translated to English. Well anyway, this does not detract from the cool setting, the innovative sci-fi technology all around, and the twisting plot. Another cool thing about the plot:

(minor setting spoiler)

The story takes place not too long after service robots have become sentient. People know this, but they still mostly treat them as appliances, and they mostly act as appliances.


There is enough closure at the end of the novel that I could stop here, but I think I will go on to book two when it comes out!

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.