Ninefox Gambit; Makinelerin Imparatorlugu Serisi 1. Kitap

Hokay, I've sat on this review long enough. I finished the audiobook for this book yesterday, and I've been sitting here ever since trying to figure out how to rate this book. I feel like this is a book that you'll either find intriguing enough to want to continue, or you'll bounce off hard before you get started. This is a long review, so buckle in.

We meet the book's protagonist, Captain Kel Cheris, neck deep in keeping her troops alive capturing some point of interest for her command. The Kel as a whole (for "Kel" in Cheris' name indicates the society in which she was born, raised, and developed under) are very regimented, very militaristic, conditioned to react instantly to formation changes (orders, for lack of a better word) that were developed generations ago. Cheris herself is an incredible mathematician, something valued in this universe where math and mathematical calculations basically rules everything. Without getting too far into the weeds as to what calendrical society is, math governs the laws of nature, and the main struggle of this book is against a heretical order bent on pushing their own calendrical society and, essentially, rewriting the fabric of the universe as a result.

Still with me?

So Kel Cheris, by merit of being an incredibly good mathematician, gets an infamous strategist kept in cold storage (again, simplified) for hundreds of years implanted in her brain by Kel scientists and given a promotion allowing her to command several ships worth of people/servitors in order to combat this heresy. This infamous strategist is known for some evil things he did when he was alive, and they implanted him in Cheris' brain to augment her natural abilities with his. There's a bit of Cheris x Jedao tension there if you're looking for it, and Jedao himself shows some bisexual tendencies as well, which I thought was a nice touch.

This was a challenging book to read, not because of the topic necessarily, but the way things were integrated to carry the reader along. There's not a lot of hand-holding with respect to questions of "what does ______ mean?", and often I found myself shrugging my shoulders, assigning some arbitrary "x does y" meaning to it, and moving on. The ship names, the abilities, the station names, are very much "word salad", in that aside from being pretty and poetic, mean very little. I'm kind of in love with the pictures words and names like "Fortress of Scattered Needles", "Fortress of Spinshot Coins", "invariant ice", and ship names like "Unspoken Law" and "Sincere Greeting" conjured in my head while reading. I also recognize that this isn't everyone's cup of tea, and if you get hung up on what exactly some terminology means without explicit descriptions, you might have a bad time.

I struggled in the beginning until I basically just let the book happen, and then I enjoyed it immensely. This strikes me as one of those series where things make more sense the further in you get, and then if you go back and re-read, you'll get even more out of it. Really glad to have stuck with this, and I look forward to reading more in this series.

This story takes place far in the future, in the Hexarchate a human empire divided into 7 factions - oh no 6 ... one turned out to be heretics and was annihilated a while back. Each faction is equivalent with a choice of profession. The Kel for example are the soldiers who guided by their formation instinct are super-humanly loyal. The Shuos are the spies, the Nurai the mathematicians and so on.

The defining element of the world however is the so-called high calendar which provides the empire with "exotic" technologies. Now here's the part that nearly made me put down the book at the start. Because the whole calendar thing is never quite explained, it is so self-evident for the people living in this world, that they never bother to explain it to the reader. In this aspect of "not explaining a thing and hoping the reader will still make sense of the world" it reminded me a lot of [b: Ancillary Justice|17333324|Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)|Ann Leckie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397215917s/17333324.jpg|24064628] ... ultimately in a good way. At the end of the book I seem to understand a little bit more about what this is. Here's my take (Note: this is not a plot spoiler more of a world-building spoiler:) in this universe beyond our standard physics which is called the "invariant" there appear to be several mutually exclusive branches of physics and the high-calendar defines which branch is currently active in a given region of space. The calendar itself seems to depend on a mathematically guided system of concentrated belief via so-called "remembrances" that the citizens of the empire are forced to observe. So it is a case of weird science religion. In a fantasy novel I'd call the exotics magic ...

The main protagonist is Cheris, a Kel officer, who in her last battle used heretical formations to take an objective. As her squad is taken away for re-education, she is given a chance to redeem herself. Heretics have taken an important nexus fortress and she has to propose a plan on how to retake the fortress.

Once I got used to the generous helping of math terminology ("if you find a topological solution let me know") and ignored any possible deeper meanings, once I stopped thinking this might end up being some kind of matrix clone, and once I accepted that I wouldn't immediately understand the high calendar ... this book turned out to have delightful protagonists yes, both Cheris and Jedao right from the start and an incredibly intricate and interesting plot. I could not put the book down, and look forward very much to reading the sequel.

The end was good, a little surprising, and yet I still grieve for Jedao and Cheris, neither of which can be who they were now. Their interaction, which I enjoyed very much, is sure to change for the next book.

Interesting (and fun) read. The calendrical systems are basically magic, but who cares. Ninefox captured a wonderful weirdness and alien feeling to the technology and society while retaining the relatable human (?) characters. Some things could have been a bit better - the 3 chapters of consecutive Jedao flashbacks was a narrative gambit that might have been better spread out, and the siege of the fortress lacked some sense of urgency, but overall a great experience. Eagerly awaiting more from Yoon Ha Lee and the Ninefox. I think this is the book I wanted Ancillary Justice to be.

The book also reminded me a lot of some Morrowind apocrypha, which is always a good thing.

Some Mirror Logicians of the Altmer fight it still in chrysalis shells that phase in and out of Tamrielic Prime, and their brethren know nothing of their purpose unless they stare too long and break their own possipoints.

In 1E2757, he circumvented the bureaucracy of his own throne, including all county courtships and trans-provincial authorities, to make plans to colonize Tamriel’s twin moons. He commissioned the nachronachs of the Immaterial Harmonics Institute of Incongruitech and Extrinsic Travels to begin work on the first genegineered Megalomoth vessel-fortresses