Scott's Reviews > Ninefox Gambit

Ninefox Gambit begins with a desperate battle.

I’m not talking about the battle that Kel Cheris fights in the first chapter of the story. That’s a pretty serious fight, but it pales next to the backs-to-the wall combat that you, the reader, will face. Prepare for full scale bombardment with a vast arsenal of factions, the screaming howl of incoming volleys of neologisms and massed assaults of odd and confusing names supported by an armored division of incomprehensible techno-magic. I only just made it through – I nearly threw down my arms and raised the white flag twenty pages in – and I’m glad I persevered. Lee’s novel is well worth the initial struggle.

The story focuses on Cheris, who lives in a far future interstellar civilisation that is run by six factions- The Hexarchate. Cheris’ faction is the suicidal, charge-into-battle warrior segment of society, and she is a talented, if unorthodox soldier in a society where being unorthodox gets you killed.

OK, that’s the easy stuff. Beyond this, the Hexarchate runs on technology that relies on a shared calendar- it is temporally dependent, and requires a consistent consensus on the calendar from its subjects in order to function. When the calendar is working as it should the forces of the Hexarchy can create weapons by forming certain military formations, and they have a vast arsenal of strange weapons (fungus bombs, bombs that turn people into crystalized memories, etc.) they can deploy, all of which are underpinned by arcane, savant-level calendrical math. If the calendar is altered -something known as ‘calendrical heresy’ - then many weapons no longer work or are unpredictable.

This is sold as tech, but really, it’s complicated magic way beyond the ken of the average person, much like the magic in Lev Grossman's The Magicians. You’ll need to suspend your disbelief a bit while reading Ninefox Gambit as there isn't a great deal of science in here. One particular weapon- A ‘Threshold Winnower’ was discussed twice (and used, too) but I still had no real idea how it worked or what it really did, other than weirdly kill everyone around it, like some sort of d&d magic spell.

Anyway, some heretics take over one of the Hexarchates most important, near impenetrable fortresses, spreading their corruption out into the rest of the Hexarchy. Cheris is roped into leading the assault on the stronghold, and the spirit/ghost of Shuos Jedao, the hexarchates most legendary general, a man who is also the civilisation’s worst traitor and a mass murderer of his own men, is loaded into her brain to advise her. With Jedao in her head Cheris begins her assault, and begins a journey where she discovers a great deal about the darker side of her world, and the man she is now sharing her body with.

Ninefox Gambit is a damned entertaining novel full of interesting ideas. Just don’t expect your hand to be held (at all) or for anything much to be explained. I firmly believe that good SF should make the reader work a bit, and that this effort can be rewarding, but Lee isn’t spotting you while you’re on the bench press- he’s piling up the weights, waiting until you’re straining to lift them, and then ducking out for a coffee. Anyway, once I got used to the paucity of explanation and just rolled with things I really enjoyed this novel.

The story races along. The weird ‘tech’, Cheris’ characterisation, her strange and cautious relationship with the genius mass murderer who she shares her head with, and the slow reveal of the history of their civilisation all add up to a really interesting story. Jedao himself is also a genuinely interesting character, whose motives are never clear, and whose history is dark, bloody and surprising.

I got totally sucked in to all of this, and I raced through this book, enjoying it much more than I thought I would. I’m looking forward to the sequel.