A week or two ago I read Yoon Ha Lee's astonishingly accomplished
Ninefox Gambit. Not the easiest of books to get started with — Lee throws the reader in a the deep end and expects them to swim — but it's well worth sticking with it because everything comes into focus beautifully.
We first meet Captain Kel Cheris and her troops engaged in a ground war against a heretical enemy. The technology is peculiar, with the enemy bombarding the Kel with storms while the Kel rely on formations with the mystical power to repel artillery. But just as as it seems like the skirmish has been won, Cheris finds her abruptly recalled to command and assigned to a committee. It seems that the Fortress of Scattered Needles, one of the keys to the Hexarchy's power, has fallen to a group of rebels and Cheris is needed to brainstorm ways to recapture the impregnable fortress.
Where her fellows on the taskforce recommend conventional weapons, Cheris opts for something a bit sneakier: she suggests using Shuos Jedao, a brilliant general long since disgraced, who has spent the last four centuries as a disembodied mind, only dusted off for key missions. Unknown to Cheris, her masters, the mysterious Hexarchs, have manipulated her, putting the idea in her head, and so she finds herself dragged off and her mind spliced with that of the traitorous-but-brilliant general.
Brevetted to the rank of general and assigned command of a powerful fleet, Cheris and Jedao are dispatched to retake the Fortress. Still struggling to integrate Jedao's sense of self with her own, Cheris experiences a number of awkward moments on the flight out, but her ships arrives Jedao quickly proves his worth by coming up with a way to pierce the supposedly impassable ice shields that surround the Fortress of Scattered Needles.
The ground offensive unfolds through a series of vignettes from those in the trenches. These are mixed with a series of snarky communications from a senior official in the rebel grouping and with Cheris and Jedao's strategy sessions. From these it becomes apparent that the two Hexarchy generals' abilities greatly complement each; not least because Cheris' brilliance with the mathematics that underlies the Hexarchy's exotic technology opens up all sorts of strategic opportunties that the almost-innumerate Jedao would have been unable to exploit for himself.
The heart of the book is the delicate balancing act between Cheris and Jedao. Cheris, a quiet introvert, is horrified to have to share her mind with someone else, especially someone whose every idea and suggestion needs to be parsed for potential treachery. Jedao, for all his apparent strength, is little more than a disembodied voice with a troubled and troubling past. A brilliant strategist and master of gaming tactics, he clearly has an agenda and is playing a long game, but it is not clear what his goal is or why, at the height of his reputation, he should have chosen to carry out the appalling massacre that has seen his soul imprisoned for the last several centuries.
While
Ninefox Gambit is undoubted a demanding book, it's one that repays the reader's dedication. The exotic technology, which depends on a consensual shared calendar for its efficacy and which in turn depends on esoteric maths, is more magic than science, as becomes clear after the first couple of chapters. The world is enjoyably murky with its six different power blocks — there were once seven but the last was scrubbed out of existence quite some time ago — and there are complex nuances of class and caste and family that only become apparent as Cheris, a member of the war-like Kel sect, interacts both with her fellow warriors and the sneaky spooks of Shuos.
On the strength of this extremely impressive showing, I'm really looking forward to Yoon Ha Lee's next book in the sequence...
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