Ninefox Gambit

What happens if all your technology depends on everyone thinking the same and then they don't?

Kel Cheris gets drummed out of the infantry but offered a new chance if she'll take out some heretics and is given her choice of weapon to do so. She chooses the long dead and supposedly insane but preserved General Shuos Jedao. But can Cheris survive the contact with heresy?

I really enjoyed the banter between Jedao and Cheris and the ideas behind calendrical warfare and heresy. I only wish there'd been more closure in this story (understanding that it starts a trilogy but still, close off SOME of the threads before giving the To Be Continued)

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 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.

There's a reason why this is nominated for a Nebula. It's inventive, and surprises you with every chapter. It also assumes the reader is intelligent enough to understand what's happening without a lot of exposition (none of that "as you know, our current situation was caused by this event" crap). Lee isn't trying to fool you - she thinks you're smart enough to keep up with here.

I can't wait to see if this wins, and what the second book brings...

It's hard for me to come up with words other than "OH MY GOD" and "THIS WAS AMAZING," but I'll give it a shot.

Cheris, an infantry soldier, finds herself entangled in a long and twisty plot involving a dead traitor whose consciousness is kept alive in a kind of suspended animation.

A lot of things in the book reminded me of CJ Cherryh - the programmed formation instinct in the Kel warrior class is like the azi in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe and man'chi in the Foreigner universe. I don't know if Lee is also a fan of hers, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out.

Lee's blog profile lists the Vorkosigan series as a fannish interest, and I can see that influence, too.

If you like a lot of the books I like, you will probably like this book a lot.