Ninefox Gambit

This book might be part of the The Machineries of Empire series.

When Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for her unconventional tactics, Kel Command gives her a chance to redeem herself, by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles from the heretics. Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake: if the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next.

Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress. The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own.

As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao – because she might be his next victim.

4 editions

eBook, 383 pages

English language

Published June 14, 2016 by Solaris.

ISBN:: 978-1-84997-992-4
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Reviews

DThoris reviewed Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Mixed bag

3.0 stars

I enjoyed this one overall. It was a fascinating dive into consciousness, magic, prejudice, rigidity, and also slices of life at times, all set in the simple framework of military scifi. You are dumped into the magic with no exposition. The author trusts that you'll follow along. And I loved that - being trusted that I could handle a foundational difference in the universe without needing my hand held was pretty cool. Unfortunately, there were some left turns in the narrative that could have used a little more hand-holding. I kept thinking I'd skipped a paragraph or so. I found this distracting enough that it detracted from the narrative. Still, it was quite a good effort by Lee, and I'd read more by him.

DThoris reviewed Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Somme bad, more good

3.0 stars

I have mixed feelings about this one. Lee does not conform to the usual spoon-feeding of background info through long swathes of explanation or dialogue. In fact, he assumes you can figure it out and marches on with the story without explaining how the magic works. Kudos to him for skipping exposition. He also does a masterful job of presenting his factions as what they are. Additionally, there were lovely slice of life moments.

However, there are times when he jumos POV, and it's very difficult to keep up with what's going on during those jumps. I kept feeling like I had missed a paragraph or two.

Overall, the book is enjoyable, interesting, and has a solid universe. I could have wished for a tiny bit more hand-holding from Lee, as that's really where the book fell down, but it was definitely worth my time.

Darius Kazemi reviewed Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1) by Yoon Ha Lee (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

A good book in a great series

4.0 stars

I had no idea what to expect when I went into Ninefox Gambit, and it was extraordinarily confusing for the first... 100 pages or so. The book begins in media res during a big future/magic infantry battle except the magic might be high-level mathematics? In the first 20 pages alone are going to be puzzling your way through deliberately alien concepts like "calendrical rot" and "linearizable force multiplier formations" and "threshold winnowers". These aren't presented a friendly, "here's a new word, we will explain it now, or at least provide some context way." They are presented as things everyone takes for granted, and if you're lucky, in the next 20 or 50 pages you will gather enough contextual knowledge to piece together what they actually mean in the world of the book.

That could all be a really bad thing, but ultimately it ended up being kind of like …

That could all be a really bad thing, but ultimately it ended up being kind of like a fun puzzle.

Ninefox Gambit (and the following two books in the Machineries of Empire trilogy) ultimately pays off all the weird math/magic stuff. It ends up being an extremely powerful metaphor for the systems that underlay all imperial powers. It's kind of like LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", but writ large as a space opera. I give this book four stars, though I would give the series as a whole five? The series as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and I like the first book more in retrospect having read the next two books in the series.