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A review by princessrobotiv
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
3.0
I've struggled with my review for Ninefox Gambit for a few days now, and ultimately I think the three-star stands. Though it seems low compared to those I've seen for the novel, it doesn't actually mean I disliked the book. On the contrary, I had a good time reading and was very intrigued throughout. I just didn't find it to be as mind-bendingly impactful as some others.
There were a lot of great things about this book. Perhaps the strongest selling point is the novelty of the magic system, which is reliant upon a "high calendar" set by the current regime, the hexarchate. Large-scale adherence to the calendar results in the ability to create new technology or exotic effects that look closer to the reader's standard conception of "magic." Those who create or follow different calendars are therefore deemed immediate threats not only to the hexarchate but - presumably - to the universe entire. Thus the society is one plagued by seemingly constant "calendrical warfare," within which both of our protagonists - Kel Cheris and Shuos Jedao - are forced to sacrifice the lives of thousands (and in Jedao's case, millions).
Honestly, this framework is super interesting and deserves the props it receives. I would hazard to claim that using different calendars as the basis of a magic system isn't something that would occur to most Western-European or American authors, which is yet another great example of why diverse authorship is critical to every genre. Likewise, the relationship between Cheris and Jedao, and particularly the crisis point at which was handled in a way that I think would be very difficult for a cisgender author to pull off.
So why three stars? To begin, I think that there was frustratingly narrow world building where the universe's cultures were concerned. We received really tantalizing slivers of information about Cheris's homeworld, and Jedao's, but such glimpses were fleeting and surface-level. There was never much of an examination of the civilians existing outside of the hexarchate's classes. As a result, I never felt the full impact of the lives that were being lost because they didn't feel real to me. I couldn't place them on a specific geographical landscape or even conceptualize their lives within the Fortress of Scattered Needles. And while I really liked the factions of the hexarchate, I found the abstract generalizations about them (Shuos = sneaky, loving games; Kel = soldiers, sacrificial, not that bright) wearing on me after a while, mostly because I kept waiting for the narrative to go beyond those abstractions and it never really did.
Finally, I think that while the magic system overall worked really well, one of the weaknesses was the jargon-heavy and ultimately meaningless faux-mathematical language that bogged down pretty much every scene in which it made an appearance. My thoughts were mostly that if you're going to admit - as Yoon Ha Lee easily admits - that your magic is a magic system and not a science system, then why fixate on the math part at all? It frustrated me because it felt entirely made up, equally word-salad-esque as when I was a five-year-old pretending to teach my cousin long division. Which isn't in any way meant as a slight against Yoon Ha Lee's education but rather to pose the question: why force your readers to struggle through make-believe math when that energy (and that page-time) could have been better spent elsewhere?
Regardless of these qualms, I am eager to move on to the next installment. Whenever I'm rating the first novel of a series it's always with a degree of reservation considering the entire point of a series is that the entire deck isn't shown right at the beginning. We'll see if some of these issues are rectified in later installments!
There were a lot of great things about this book. Perhaps the strongest selling point is the novelty of the magic system, which is reliant upon a "high calendar" set by the current regime, the hexarchate. Large-scale adherence to the calendar results in the ability to create new technology or exotic effects that look closer to the reader's standard conception of "magic." Those who create or follow different calendars are therefore deemed immediate threats not only to the hexarchate but - presumably - to the universe entire. Thus the society is one plagued by seemingly constant "calendrical warfare," within which both of our protagonists - Kel Cheris and Shuos Jedao - are forced to sacrifice the lives of thousands (and in Jedao's case, millions).
Honestly, this framework is super interesting and deserves the props it receives. I would hazard to claim that using different calendars as the basis of a magic system isn't something that would occur to most Western-European or American authors, which is yet another great example of why diverse authorship is critical to every genre. Likewise, the relationship between Cheris and Jedao, and particularly the crisis point at which
Spoiler
Cheris and Jedao (or what is left of him) mergeSo why three stars? To begin, I think that there was frustratingly narrow world building where the universe's cultures were concerned. We received really tantalizing slivers of information about Cheris's homeworld, and Jedao's, but such glimpses were fleeting and surface-level. There was never much of an examination of the civilians existing outside of the hexarchate's classes. As a result, I never felt the full impact of the lives that were being lost because they didn't feel real to me. I couldn't place them on a specific geographical landscape or even conceptualize their lives within the Fortress of Scattered Needles. And while I really liked the factions of the hexarchate, I found the abstract generalizations about them (Shuos = sneaky, loving games; Kel = soldiers, sacrificial, not that bright) wearing on me after a while, mostly because I kept waiting for the narrative to go beyond those abstractions and it never really did.
Finally, I think that while the magic system overall worked really well, one of the weaknesses was the jargon-heavy and ultimately meaningless faux-mathematical language that bogged down pretty much every scene in which it made an appearance. My thoughts were mostly that if you're going to admit - as Yoon Ha Lee easily admits - that your magic is a magic system and not a science system, then why fixate on the math part at all? It frustrated me because it felt entirely made up, equally word-salad-esque as when I was a five-year-old pretending to teach my cousin long division. Which isn't in any way meant as a slight against Yoon Ha Lee's education but rather to pose the question: why force your readers to struggle through make-believe math when that energy (and that page-time) could have been better spent elsewhere?
Regardless of these qualms, I am eager to move on to the next installment. Whenever I'm rating the first novel of a series it's always with a degree of reservation considering the entire point of a series is that the entire deck isn't shown right at the beginning. We'll see if some of these issues are rectified in later installments!