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Rolling into the second book in the trilogy because the first one makes me want to sign up for Fleet Commander Breq Miannai's service

Packed evenly but a little too sparsely with mythology and symbolism it feels like a book that is very proud of its own opacity.

Good art, lots of multi-mythological transitions, but isn't quite a story exactly. Reminds me of someone trying to describe their dream, which is interesting but ultimately might be a waste of time or a Prophecy and it's sort of... neither?

What a great book.

Heard there was going to be a TV series but it fell apart.

What they should do is an opera. I can't really imagine another way to express the first person anti-singular voice that the whole book uses.

Plus One Esk loves to sing

Hexarchate Stories fills in lots of hidden corners of the sexy, queer, conspiracy-driven, military space opera of the Ninefox Extended Universe.

I really enjoyed it. Lee's worldbuilding and characters have echoes of (and in some cases influence from, surely) Murderbot, Ancillary Justice, Korean — and Texan! — culture and mythology, and (it dawned on me yesterday) the Miles Vorkisigan stories from Lois McMaster Bujold.

It's this last case that really stands out to me in this story collection: many of the stories are about young Garach Jedao (later to become the supervillain antihero Shuos Jedao).

While Shuos Jedao is a deeply damaged monster with strategic (and later, tactical) superpowers, Garach Jedao and the early days of Cadet Shuos Jedao remind me a lot of the early Miles Vorkisigan books, if you swap out SF Russian aristocratic politics and obligatory heterosexuality for SF Korean assassin-clan politics and a lot of male homoerotic pansexuality.

Shuos Jedao — as an entire character — basically is a future AU version of Miles, if you took away the atrocity-proof) plot armor that Bujold gives Miles but Lee will not grant Jedao.