Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee is the first book in the Machineries of Empire trilogy. This is the summary of the book at the author's website:
Kel Cheris, a disgraced captain of the hexarchate, is given the opportunity to redeem herself by recapturing the formidable Fortress of Scattered Needles from heretics. Cheris requests—and receives—a single devastating weapon to aid her in her task: the revived, near-immortal traitor, General Shuos Jedao. Feared throughout the stars and undefeated in battle, he is the perfect weapon. But Jedao is gripped by a madness that saw him massacre two armies in his first life—one of them his own. Preserved for his brilliance and tamed by his handlers, no one knows how long his good behaviour will last. Cheris must work with the mass murderer to destroy the heresy and save the hexarchate—before he destroys her…
A tale of math, madness, and massacres in outer space.
My Thoughts:
This is a science fiction book and specifically a military space opera. In many ways, it feels as much like fantasy as science fiction. Here the reader is dropped into a universe where the scientific laws that govern the universe are based on a "calendrical" mathematics system that seems more like magic. There are groups of heretics who refuse to follow the accepted mathematics systems. However, there is no attempt to explain all of this to the reader. For at least the first third of this book I had no idea what was going on.
On top of that, there were no characters that I cared about or could invest in.
At the point that I was about to give up on the book, I read a review that called this book "brain-breaking" but also said to just hang in there and it would be worth it. That reviewer was right and it was worth reading. I finally caught onto the general idea of what was going on, and was hoping that the author was going to give me a satisfactory ending. And I did get it. I was invested in the two main characters; the ending was amazing. That is good, because I already have a copy of the second book in this series, Raven Strategy.
So, if you like science fiction, you might want to try this series, or at least read a few reviews of the book to get other opinions.
Additional notes:
I have read military science fiction before; John Scalzi's Old Man's War series is an example. But those stories are remarkably easy to read compared to this one.
Apparently there are a lot of science fiction books / series that start out like this series, throwing the reader into an imaginary setting with little explanation. Readers are divided on whether they like that or not. And now I can think of mystery novels (with sort of a science fiction or fantasy flavor) that are this way too. For example, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.
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Publisher: Solaris Books, 2016
Length: 384 pages
Format: Trade paperback
Series: Machineries of Empire, #1
Setting: Outer Space
Genre: Science Fiction
Source: On my TBR since 2020.
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