Ninefox Gambit By Yoon Ha Lee

Ninefox Gambit

By Yoon Ha Lee 

Yoon Ha Lee was born in Houston, Texas on January 1979. His family moved back and forth between the United States and the Republic of Korea while he was growing up, and he attended high school at Seoul Foreign School, an English international school. He graduated from Cornell and earned a Master's degree in secondary math education at Stanford. In 1999 he published his first story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and additional works in Clarkesworld and Lightspeed magazine, and has since then published over forty. Mr. Lee also designs and writes games, such as the browser-based game Winterstrike. Mr. Lee, who is openly trans, currently lives in Louisiana with his husband and young daughter. Ninefox Gambit is his first full-length novel, published by Solaris books (for more information on them please see the last review) in 2016. It made quite an impression, being nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke award, and winning the Locus Award for best novel. So let's take a look at the book, shall we?

The book takes place in what I can only assume is a far future. The government known as the Hexarchate (oh I love that name) rules a large swath of space. It is a government at first split into seven factions but now six (Well duh. Otherwise it would be the Heptarchate {Yeah, it was… I mean it would be, wouldn’t it?}) with each faction adopting different duties to maintain and organize an intensely ordered society. Society is arranged to support what is called the High Calendar, a system of timekeeping that if enough people observe it allows certain technologies to work (Yas! Techno-sorcery! YAS!). Like the Hexarchate's current FTL called the Moth Drive (Is the destination called a lamp?) which is faster and has greater range then FTL technology that doesn't depend on the calendar. On top of that their communications technology is dependent on the calendar as well, so without it, the nation is at real risk of simply falling apart and being conquered by foreign powers. There are other technologies that depend on this, most of them called exotic technologies. Technology that doesn't depend on the calendar is called an “invariant” (presumably because they do not vary with population levels of calendar observance…). Most of the exotic tech we see in the novel is weapons technology, which is fair since this is a war story. A government at war against its own people. You see, because the technology that supports the Hexarchate depends on observing the High Calendar, not observing the calendar is considered a direct attack on society and is called Heresy. Being a Heretic is bad, but no worries, there's a spot for Heretics in the Calendar. That spot is as the victim in a ceremony called Remembrance where Heretics are publicly tortured to death to reinforce belief in the High Calendar. Which gives the Hexarchate a nice theocratic gloss, on top of the rest of the horror show.

This is the society that our main character Captain Kel Cheris has been born into. The member of a tolerated but suspected minority culture, Cheris had joined the Hexarchate military and for the most part, abandoned her birth culture. She didn't just join the military but the front line portion of it, which is made up entirely of the Kel faction. The Kel faction provides the combat troops and officers of the military for both ground and space operations (there is also a Kel wet water navy but it's irrelevant all things considered) with the Shuos providing intelligence officers and the Nirai providing engineers and other specialists as needed. So if you ever think the modern division into branches of service are silly and pointless take a look at a system where you need three branches just to run one damn ship! (Kafka would love this) Before I get to Cheris I should explain the Kel, because they're the faction taking center stage here and we need to understand them to really understand Cheris. The Kel often have to fight in areas where the High Calendar doesn't hold sway so they have developed formations that allow them to deploy their weapons by overwriting the calendar of a local area with their own through applied math and geometry (Ok, that’s pretty cool). The first wave of formations discovered were suicide formations because they burnt up the men and women in the formation to create the needed effect (Wait, discovered? Not devised? Did they like, experiment with this over a long period of time to optimize the solution through attrition? Like, create a best first estimate and then *iterate* it through a machine learning algorithm that used mass casualties as training data?). I'm speaking literally when I say burnt up. The Kel celebrate this, calling themselves ash hawks or suicide hawks and holding up examples of people who destroy themselves for the group good or follow orders to the death as the ideal (Oh my god they’re a geomantic death cult). Like most militaries, the Kel are very conservative and prize strong group loyalty and self-sacrifice. To the point that Kel High Command has merged itself into a single hive mind that is not so slowly losing its sanity and for the lower ranks they created a technology called formation instinct. How it is applied is kinda vague but here's what I can tell you, it creates a powerful urge to obedience to higher authorities and creates a subconscious need to conform with what is expected of the soldier by the group (Oh this is… awesome. It’s existentially horrifying, but I love the places Mr. Lee’s mind goes. That is so delightfully dark.). To say I am horrified by this is too mild, I know I keep bringing it up but I am a military veteran myself and I served in Iraq. So this isn't abstract for me, I've already seen plenty of firsthand evidence that a lot of politicians and civilians just don't value our lives or rights as fellow human beings and are perfectly happy to get us killed to prove an ideological point or ensure they can maintain a good opinion of themselves. The idea of applying such a thing to fellow Marines and Soldiers makes me physically ill (Note: my giggling above is not a contradiction of this. I just have a different horror threshold than Frigid does, and find this sort of thing fascinating in a very Nietzschean kind of way.{I’m pretty sure that if we talking about doing something like to scientists it would be immediate for you} Oh, I totally get it. I’m just a sick weirdo whose reactions to this sort of thing differ so long as it’s fictional.). You can't have loyalty under these conditions only compelled obedience and it turns thinking soldiers into pawns who cannot choose their loyalties or evaluate their orders on their own, only follow them (Thing is, this is a society that holds its entire citizenry to the observance of a system of timekeeping on pain of horrible death, so I think valuing the lives of soldiers is… well it went out the window a long bloody time ago. Like, that’s just a natural consequence of how fucked up this whole culture is). The only saving grace here is that the formation instinct doesn't impact everyone at the same strength or the same way so there are always those who can subvert it within themselves or resist it but that doesn't reduce the terror here. The Kel don't come across as a military so much as a terrifying perversion of what a good military is supposed to be, it doesn't help that I'm pretty sure that a great many governments, even liberal democratic ones would eagerly embrace such technology and its use (Probably).

Cheris is not the average Kel officer, for one thing, she's very good at math to the point that the Nirai wanted her to join up. Cheris, however, wanted to serve something bigger than herself and wanted to do it on the front lines. So she joined the Kel and beyond that became an infantry officer. However, she can't avoid the fact that she is creative and able to think outside of the box. A good example of this is her treatment of the robotic servitors, AI machines who do a lot of the grunt work in Hexarchate society (Because *of course* there are oppressed AI servitors.{The Servitors are the least oppressed group in the book actually, the human government ignores them as long as the work gets done so the servitors basically do what they want} Huh. Alright then...). Most humans simply ignore them but Cheris is polite to them and even reaches out to them. I like this trait honestly as it helps humanize her and gives us a look into who she is when not dealing with... Well, the events of this book.  Either way, her creativity and willingness to grapple with unorthodox solutions are not encouraged by Kel society (Uh Oh). When she comes up with a bold new formation to subvert an enemy's calendar and destroy their exotic weapons, she's not celebrated because her formations linger too close to the border of heresy (Wait, but… if she subverts an enemy calendar and imposes her own, how can that mathematically even get close to Heresy? {Because she exercised creative problem solving and made new formations without approval} Ah! Now the world makes sense!). However, victory covers a great many sins and it seems that the Hexarchate has better use for her then using her as a showpiece for a Remembrance. They're going to give her a command to retake a fortress (a massive deep space station that was placed to enforce and extend the effects of the High Calendar) that has gone Heretic. Not just any fortress, but the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a powerful fortress with its own fleet and a shield that has never been broken. A fortress that as often proclaimed to be immune from outside assault. A fortress she needs to take despite having never led anything bigger than an infantry company and not having enough forces under her command to just overwhelm it (Well, they do love suicide missions…). If such a place can even be overwhelmed. Cheris is afraid that she's being set up for failure (because she most definitely is) and aware that she has no margin for error decides to be creative again and grabs Shuos Jedao. Let me talk about the Shuos faction first before we talk about him specifically.

The Shuos faction are the assassins, intelligence officers, spies, and such of the Hexarchate. They're led by whoever can assassinate the current leader of their faction (as a result a faction leader is considered lucky if they last a decade [Ah, I see they operate on Necromonger Rules]). They're also known for an intense fascination with games and being rather unstable, since murdering your superior is a lauded way of asking for a promotion you can see why (Unstable institutionally, mentally, or both?{Yes.}). Jedao started out as a Shuos and was trained as an assassin but decided to switch over to the Kel, becoming one of their greatest generals. In his last campaign, he won a great battle with almost no casualties despite being outnumbered 8 to 1 (this was based somewhat on Admiral Yi Su-Shin's victory but Admiral Yi faced greater odds) and followed it up by completely destroying two armies. One of them his own, as he went mad and was found as the only survivor. His punishment wasn't death, but instead to be rendered into what I would basically have to call an undead spirit. Imprisoned in something called the Black Cradle that keeps him a state of undeath, he became a weapon for the Kel (I… I got nothin’). A weapon they only dare pull out when the stakes are high but one that always wins. However there's a problem with deploying him, he needs a physical anchor to function, a living person. So Cheris has to direct a military campaign on a much greater scale then she's ever directed before while carrying the mind of an undead general who may or may not be insane but definitely has his own hidden agenda (Weeee! Fun for the whole family!). While she's also unsure if Kel High Command actually wants her to succeed or not. She has few if any allies and an embarrassment of riches when it comes to enemies.

Mr. Lee gives us a tense story filled with intrigue and battle. It's also a story of a deeply unhealthy society being held up by an increasingly high blood price of both loyal members and rebels. I know it's easy for me to declare the Hexarchate unhealthy. That said if your society is constantly wracked with rebellions to the point that your troops spend more of their time fighting their own people then foreign forces... There is something wrong with the way your society is set up, especially when the penalty for rebellion is being tortured to death. People don't take risks like that unless they have a very compelling reason, after all. Mr. Lee, however, doesn't shy away from the implications of the system he has set up and shows us in spades that this system is deeply unhealthy and needs to change  This is also part of the story as Mr. Lee has made the consideration of military ethics a part of this story and does this without making this a black and white discussion. This mostly done through the interactions of Jadeo and Cheris but there are parts where we are given the views of troops on the front line and Mr. Lee even finds a clever way to give us the viewpoint of the people rebelling in the fortress. Honestly, I can see why Ninefox Gambit is so highly praised and was given the considerations it was. It was honestly hard for me to put the book down despite my intense distaste for the Kel. I do feel I need to put a warning on this book however. Like I said Mr. Lee doesn't try to shy away from the implications of what he's built here. So a number of dark things show up in this book, from war crimes to crimes like sexual assault. This stuff isn't ladled in for titillation but does serve as part of the character's motivations and experience. That said if this is something that is going to bother you, you might want to skip this book. That said I found the book masterfully done and compelling to read. To that end, I am giving Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee an A.

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Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen.
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.