Daniel Darabos reviewed Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (The Machineries of Empire, #1)
Review of 'Ninefox Gambit' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
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 …
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!
