skygiants

Well now I have read Revenant Gun, the third in Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire books, and boy, I'm not even gonna try to do this one without spoilers.

( SPOILERS UNDER HERE )

I'd been putting off reading Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit for a fair bit now because I wasn't at all sure it would be my cup of tea -- I'm not a military sf person and I'm not a math person, and one of the main things I knew about this book was that it centered on a space military campaign involving a lot of underlying math.

However, it turned out that even though I still do not understand math OR tactics very well, and if you asked me to describe the underlying science fictional technology I would wave my hands in despair, the central dynamic of the book was more than enough to keep me SUPER INVESTED even as factions and double-crosses and important tactical decisions whizzed past me into the ether.

The premise: our heroine, Captain Kel Chris, is part of an intergalactic empire that bases most of its technology on ... a complicated calendar and the number six? People all over the empire appear to be constantly rebelling and setting up rebel calendar systems and have to be put down, because if the calendar goes wrong then nothing works, and also because, you know, empire.

Because Cheris is a.) good with numbers and b.) disposable, she gets tapped to put down a major rebellion, with the 'help' of a tactical genius who won a bunch of unwinnable battles centuries ago, then for unknown reasons turned around and slaughtered a bunch of his own troops, then was executed and had his brain/ghost/something kept on ice to be resuscitated whenever an unwinnable battle scenario showed up.

It turns out that this 'help' takes the form of having the tactical genius installed in her own head as a weird undead tagalong who can give her unwelcome advice all the time!

CUE THE WACKY BUDDY COMEDY MUSIC.

I ... love it? I'm very invested in Cheris doing her damnedest to maintain some level of Lawful Good while constantly fielding diabolically brilliant suggestions from Undead General Chaotic [Alignment Unknown]. I don't remember anybody else's names, but, also, I don't really care, the personality tug-of-war between Cheris-Jedao is blazingly compelling all by itself and I am super excited for the next one.

(Also, the prose is lovely and the worldbuilding is neat and unusual, and clearly well thought-out even though I still don't fully understand it.)

...lest I give the wrong impression, it is also for the record, a very grim book and many many MANY people die, but life has been somewhat unexpectedly stressful of late and I have been finding it weirdly soothing to read about people who were always, very definitely, having a worse day than I was.