“Neither shall ye use enchantment, nor observe times” – I don’t think the people in Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit would have got on awfully well with that particular injunction from the Book of Leviticus, since the culture of the Hexarchate in this book is pretty much founded on the observance of times – calendar systems and patterns of organization which influence space and time, making interstellar travel a reality, along with some exotic and appalling weapons of war.

While it’s not wholly inflexible – it used to be a Heptarchate, for instance – the Hexarchate depends on its high calendars, so much so that the use of alternative “heretical” calendars needs to be ruthlessly stamped out. When calendrical heresy takes a hold on the strategically positioned Fortress of Scattered Needles, action needs to be taken. Cheris, a young captain in the warrior Kel caste of the Hexarchate, comes up with a plan, of sorts; it involves the use of the Kel’s ultimate weapon… which is not a thing, but a person. Jedao, seconded to the Kel from the subtle and deceptive Shuos caste, was their most successful general, up until he betrayed them spectacularly; he was executed, but his consciousness was preserved for future use in crisis situations. With Jedao’s personality and abilities anchored to her own, Kel Cheris can retake the Fortress. But there are wheels within wheels in this situation, and plots and counterplots – Shuos Jedao is playing a very long game, and he’s not the only player around.

High-concept SF with a definite sense of alien cultures and alien values, Ninefox Gambit eschews any info-dumping and leaves the reader to sink or swim in a weird world of AI servitors, mathematics and numbering systems as weapons, and devious plots into which the relatively straightforward Kel Cheris has to blunder, her only help coming from Jedao – whom she knows she can’t entirely trust. There is a lot of plotting, not all of which is immediately explained – there are at least two characters that I think we’ll be seeing again in sequels – and a lot of gore when those exotic weapons systems start coming into action, which they do, and frequently. The amputation guns were bad enough (they do pretty much what it says on the tin), but when the “threshold winnowers” come into play, people start dying in a positively Lovecraftian manner.

Despite all the gore and the lack of explanations, it’s a good book and a surprisingly easy read – the world-building might not be explained, but it’s clearly been done, and Cheris’s bloody campaign takes shape according to rules that the reader can, at least, infer from what’s going on. The cultural details are fascinating, too, and the interplay of the characters – mainly Cheris and the devious but guilt-stricken Jedao – makes for good page-turning reading. This one is worth thinking about, at least, for any awards that might be going.

(Cross-posting from my LiveJournal here, it might save time or something.)

 

Just finished reading N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, sequel to (2016 Hugo winner) The Fifth Season, and middle volume in her “Broken Earth” trilogy.

Fair warning: I will try to avoid spoilers for The Obelisk Gate itself, but I don’t think I can avoid giving some stuff away about The Fifth Season, so if spoilers bother you and you haven’t read The Fifth Season yet, go away now and do something else. Ideally, go away and read The Fifth Season. It’s really good. (A bit on the bleak side, though. Well, maybe a lot on the bleak side. But still really good.)

Anyway. The Obelisk Gate picks up almost immediately where the previous book leaves off…. I didn’t re-read The Fifth Season before starting this one, but that turned out not to matter; I was comfortably re-immersed in the setting and the story within a few paragraphs, and didn’t need reminding of any important salient details. I think that, in itself, says a lot about Jemisin’s fluency and unassuming competence as a writer.

So where were we when we left off, anyway? Well, the world was ending, for a start. We’ve all had fantasies about sending a big, loud, unmistakeable up yours to a bad boss when we quit a lousy job; Alabaster Tenring’s resignation from his post as an Imperial Orogene, accompanied as it was by a blast of earth magic which destroyed the imperial capital, cracked the continent it was standing on, and generally precipitated an extinction-level global cataclysm, was probably towards the upper end of whatever scale you measure these things on. (The worst thing about it? It was, at least arguably, justified.) Even in a world where lesser cataclysms (“Fifth Seasons”) are sufficiently common that the whole of society is geared to surviving them, this one is not survivable. The book’s protagonist, Essun (we’ll just call her that, though she’s used different names) finds Alabaster, slowly dying, in the community of Castrima where she’s taken refuge. Alabaster tells her that he’s discovered at least part of the reason why the Earth is so hostile to the people living on it; did she know, he asks, that Earth used to have something called a moon…?

Castrima is an unusual community in this world, in that the earth-magic-wielding orogenes, like Essun and Alabaster, are tolerated there, rather than being hunted down and killed, or forced into slavery (or worse) as Imperial Orogenes. The Obelisk Gate has two main narrative strands, one focusing on Essun as she tries to keep Castrima going in the face of increasing adversity, while also trying to get some information from Alabaster about what’s happened, why it’s happened, and what, if anything, can be done to fix it. Meanwhile, Essun’s daughter Nassun, abducted by her father after he killed her little brother for being an orogene, winds up in another community, far to the south, where Essun’s own former Guardian, Schaffa, has a use for her and her own orogenic talents. For both Essun and Nassun, the solutions to their problems seem to lie in understanding their magical talents, and in linking them to the obelisks, the enigmatic jewel-like objects that drift through the skies of this world. The Obelisk Gate might save everyone… if they can use it right. And, it gradually transpires, prompted by their needs, their histories, and the machinations of various factions among the orogenes, the Guardians, and the enigmatic stone eaters, Essun and Nassun may both need to do the same thing… but are still working at cross purposes.

I think I described the structure of The Fifth Season as a sort of intricate dance; well, The Obelisk Gate makes it clearer what sort of dance it is – a dance of the seven veils, with the outline of the story and the background behind it gradually being revealed. There are still wisps of silk concealing the answers to important questions, but we know a lot more, by the end of The Obelisk Gate about the Guardians, and the stone eaters (living statues who, well, eat stone), and the (previously) enigmatic narrative voice who keeps calling Essun “you”. I’m usually dubious about second-person narration – it’s often just a gimmick – but we know a lot more about who that voice belongs to, now, and I’m prepared to take it on trust that there’s a good reason behind it. It’s pretty clear, though, that Jemisin still has veils to drop, and probably cards up her sleeve besides, if that’s not a mixed metaphor. On current form, the concluding volume of this trilogy will be a corker.

Which is not to say that The Obelisk Gate isn’t – it’s another bravura performance by Jemisin, absorbing, thrilling, and frequently heartbreaking. Jemisin is, I have to say, rough on her characters… it’s not so much the deaths and mutilations (though she has no trouble at all in, for example, turning a reasonably sympathetic character or two into stone and then, shortly afterwards, gravel), it’s the poignancy of the emotional relations – the interplay between Essun and Alabaster, for example, or the way Nassun remembers her mother. Despite the background of global devastation, it’s the small, human touches that really make you feel the harshness of this world.

And, on top of everything else – like its predecessor, The Obelisk Gate has a killer final paragraph. Which I will not spoil here. Go out and read it yourselves. Seriously, it’s well worth it.

(The Obelisk Gate came out this year. Which means it is eligible for next year’s Hugo awards. If I read five better books than this before the nominations close… well, I will have been very, very lucky, I suspect.)