Ninefox Gambit: 1 (The Machineries of Empire, 1)

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By not explaining any of the rules of calendars, or how technology works, it feels both like: a) Lee is deliberately keeping information back for no reason other than to be obscure, and b) as if Lee is doing it so he doesn't have to live by any rules, and can make up whatever he likes. Women characters are distinctive: they have different motivations, are good and evil and brave and cowardly, and are given just as much screentime as male characters. There are moments, small but significant ones, where Cheris notices something about Jedao: a sense of human feeling shining through – more than that, a sense of vulnerability. His Machineries of Empire trilogy kept blowing my mind over and over again (my review) and I don’t even really care what his next book is about. I like the confusion if I feel it is going somewhere and I felt right away the pay off could be worth it; and it was!

Still I was racing through the last couple chapters and I sincerely want to read the sequel to see what happens next in the world of the hexarchate. The first few chapters are confusing as hell and you may break your brain trying to understand what the hell is going on.

His first chapter has gorgeous prose and lets me develop a good sense of Cheris as a character, all the while dropping unexplained world-specific terms. I’ve been wanting to read some of Yoon Ha Lee’s work, and from the sound of it, this might be a great place to start. I’m not a math-y person, and I’m even less of a games person, and all of the above world-building I had to accept as true without having any understanding of how these components led to various outcomes in the story. And understanding those motivations and goals is key to understanding the themes that underlie this novel. At the start of Ninefox Gambit, we are introduced to Kel Cheris: an army captain who commits a close heresy to keep her company alive.

To make it worse, it sounded like the narrator recorded the attributives separately from the dialog and then they were inserted where needed because every single "she said" has exactly the same tone and reflection. To accomplish her mission, Cheris chooses to access the mind of the renowned general and tactician Shuos Jedeo. As Yoon Ha Lee is of Korean descent, he decided that rather than drawing on western societies for inspiration, he’d prefer to use more Asian ones.Cheris and Jedao make an excellent team, even though Cheris can never be sure if Jedao is manipulating her for his own purposes – whatever those might be. This is a 'PC' inscribed copy of the lettered edition binding of Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire Trilogy. I listened to the whole book because I really wanted to give it a chance, but I just couldn't enjoy it. Oh, to be sure, it might be that humanity will invent lightsabers, or that we will one day encounter an alien race that will give us the technology and perhaps teach us how to unleash our innate Force abilities, but those have always struck me as more fantastical than realistic. The boards of these lettered copies are 3000gsm, a thicker, denser board compared to the numbered copies.

It’s military SciFi so plenty of action, reasonably short (in comparison to the past 3 monster size times I read) 🙄.

A living soldier named Cheris with an unlikely facility for mathematics, and Jedao, the centuries-old ghost of a brilliant general and known mass-murderer who lives in her shadow and in her head. Because Cheris cannot get Jedao out of her head, literally, she walks a knife-edge path navigating her own decisions alongside Jedao’s suggestions and battle plans that only reveal themselves fully to Cheris once he implements them.