Contemporary Authors

A Korean-American sf/f writer who received a B.A. in math from Cornell University and an M.A. in math education from Stanford University, Yoon finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas. Yoon’s fiction has appeared in publications such as F&SF, Tor.com, and Clarkesworld Magazine, as well as several year’s best anthologies.

For a behind-the-scenes look at Yoon’s writing, check out the interviews conducted for these works: Conservation of Shadows (the collection), “The Book of Locked Doors,” “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain,” “Swanwatch,” and, in full circle, “Conservation of Shadows” (the short story).

Locus Online has excerpts from an interview with Yoon from their September 2014 issue.

You can find Yoon on Dreamwidth and on Twitter as @motomaratai, or by email at yoon@yoonhalee.com. Here’s the RSS feed for books.

Yoon is represented by Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.

Yoon Ha Lee (born January 26, 1979 in Houston, Texas) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer,[1] known for his Machineries of Empire space opera novels and his short fiction. His first novel, Ninefox Gambit, received the 2017 Locus Award for Best First Novel.

Life[edit]
When he was young, Lee's Korean American family lived in both Texas and South Korea, where he attended high school at Seoul Foreign School, an English-language international school. He went to college at Cornell University, majoring in mathematics, and earned a master's degree in secondary mathematics education at Stanford University. He has worked as an analyst for an energy market intelligence company, done web design, and taught mathematics.[2]

Lee is a trans man and describes himself as queer.[3] He lives in Louisiana with his husband and daughter.[2]

Career[edit]
Since his first sale in 1999, Lee has published short fiction in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed magazine and elsewhere. Three of his stories have been reprinted in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies. Dozois wrote that Lee is "one of those helping to move science fiction into the twenty-first century".[4]

Aliette de Bodard wrote the introduction for Conservation of Shadows and has twice recommended one of Lee's stories in her best of year round-ups: she selected "Ghostweight" as a favorite of 2011[5] and "The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars" was chosen in her 2013 eligibility and recommendations post as "the one that most blew me away this year".[6] "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" and "Ghostweight" were both nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and Locus Award and were both reprinted in two "Year's Best" anthologies. "The Pirate Captain's Daughter" was nominated for the WSFA Small Press Award.[7]

His debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, received the 2017 Locus Award for Best First Novel.[8] It was also nominated for the 2016 Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel and the 2017 Clarke award.[9][10][11]

Bibliography[edit]
Novels[edit]
Machineries of Empire trilogy
Ninefox Gambit, Solaris, 14 June 2016, ISBN 978-1781084496
Raven Stratagem, Solaris, 13 June 2017, ISBN 978-1781085370
Revenant Gun, forthcoming
Collection[edit]
Conservation of Shadows, Prime Books, 16 April 2013, ISBN 978-1-60701-387-7
Short fiction[edit]
Lee has written over forty short stories, many of which are collected in his first book, Conservation of Shadows.

Machineries of Empire prequels
"Extracurricular Activities" – Tor.com (February 2017)
"The Battle of Candle Arc" – Clarkesworld Magazine #73 (October 2012). Selected by David G. Hartwell for Year's Best SF 18, reprinted in Conservation of Shadows. An audio version read by Kate Baker is also available.
"Gamer's End" – "Press Start to Play" (August 2015)
"How the Andan Court", self-published flashfic
"The Robots Math Lessons", self-published
"The Chameleon’s Gloves" – Cosmic Powers (April 18, 2017)
Assorted flash fiction
Other short fiction
"The Cold Inequalities" – "Meeting Infinity" (December 2015)
"Interlingua" – "Uncanny Magazine" (December 2015)
"Variations on an Apple" – "Tor.com" (October 2015)
"The Old Road" – "Not One of Us" #54 (October 2015)
"Snakes" – "Clarkesworld Magazine" (July 2015)
"Apocalypse Foxes" – "Daily Science Fiction" (June 2015)
"Two to Leave" – "Beneath Ceaseless Skies" (May 2015)
"The Graphology of Hemorrhage" – Operation Arcana (March 2015)
"The Queen's Aviary" – Daily Science Fiction (January 2015)
"Distinguishing Characteristics" – Dangerous Games (December 2014)
"Always the Harvest" – Upgraded (September 2014)
"Warhosts" – War Stories (September 2014)
"The Contemporary Foxwife" – Clarkesworld Magazine #94 (July 2014). An audio version read by Kate Baker is also available.
"Combustion Hour" – Tor.com (June 2014)
"The Bonedrake's Penance" – Beneath Ceaseless Skies #143 (March 2014)
"Wine" – Clarkesworld Magazine #88 (January 2014). An audio version read by Kate Baker is also available.
"The Coin of Heart's Desire" – Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales (October 2013)
"The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars" – Lightspeed #39 (August 2013)
"Iseul's Lexicon" – Conservation of Shadows (April 2013)
"Effigy Nights" – Clarkesworld Magazine #76 (January 2013). Reprinted in Conservation of Shadows. An audio version read by Kate Baker is also available.
"The Book of Locked Doors" – Beneath Ceaseless Skies #91 (March 2012). Reprinted in Conservation of Shadows. An audio version is also available.
"A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" – Tor.com (August 2011). Selected by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer for Year's Best SF 17 and by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden for Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, reprinted in Conservation of Shadows.
"Conservation of Shadows" – Clarkesworld Magazine #59 (August 2011). Reprinted in Conservation of Shadows. An audio version read by Kate Baker is also available.
"Ghostweight" – Clarkesworld Magazine #52 (January 2011).
"The Winged City" – Giganotosaurus #2 (December 2010)
"Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" – Lightspeed #4 (September 2010). Selected by Gardner Dozois for The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection, reprinted in Conservation of Shadows.
"The Territorialist" – Beneath Ceaseless Skies #47 (July 2010)
"Between Two Dragons" – Clarkesworld Magazine #43 (April 2010). Reprinted in Conservation of Shadows. An audio version read by Kate Baker is also available.
"The Pirate Captain's Daughter" – Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (October 2009). An audio version is also available.
"Dragon Logic" – Japanese Dreams: Fantasies, Fictions & Fairytales (August 2009)
"The Bones of Giants" – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol 117, no 1&2 (August 2009). Reprinted in Conservation of Shadows.
"Swanwatch" – Federations (April 2009). Reprinted in Conservation of Shadows.
"The Unstrung Zither" – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol 116, no 3 (March 2009). Selected by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer for Year's Best SF 15, reprinted in Conservation of Shadows.
"The Fourth Horseman" – Electric Velocipede #17/18 (Spring 2009)
"Architectural Constants" – Beneath Ceaseless Skies #2 (October 2008). An audio version is also available.
"Blue Ink" – Clarkesworld Magazine #23 (August 2008). Reprinted in Conservation of Shadows. An audio version read by Cat Rambo is also available.
"Behind the Mirror" – Coyote Wild, vol 1, no 1 (Winter 2007)
"Notes on the Necromantic Symphony" – Farrago's Wainscot Part IV (October 2007)
"The Inferno" – Behind the Wainscot: The Five Senses (September 2007)
"The Shadow Postulates" – Helix SF #5 (July 2007). Reprinted in Conservation of Shadows.
"Screamers" – Ideomancer, vol 6, no 2 (June 2007)
"Hopscotch" – Twenty Epics (August 2006)
"Unstringing the Bow" – Ideomancer, vol 5, no 2 (June 2006)
"So that Her High-Born Kinsmen Came" – Sybil's Garage #3 (March 2006)
"Nine Tails, Hundred Hearts" – Fantasy Magazine #2 (January 2006)
"The Sun's Kiss" – Ideomancer, vol 4, no 3 (September 2005)
"Words Written in Fire" – Shadows of Saturn #3 (August 2005)
"Moon, Paper, Scissors" – Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #16 (July 2005)
"Eating Hearts" – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol 108, no 6 (June 2005). Selected by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer for Year's Best Fantasy 6 and Sean Wallace for Best New Fantasy, reprinted in Conservation of Shadows. An audio version read by Ann Leckie is available at Podcastle
"The Third Song" – Lenox Avenue #4 (January 2005)
"The Black Abacus" – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol 102, no 6 (June 2002). Selected by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber for Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, reprinted in Conservation of Shadows.
"Counting the Shapes" – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol 100, no 6 (June 2001). Reprinted in Conservation of Shadows.
"Alas, Lirette" – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol 100, no 1 (January 2001)
"Echoes Down an Endless Hall" – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol 98, no 4 (April 2000)
"The Hundredth Question" – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol 96, no 2 (February 1999)

SFF in Conversation is a new monthly feature on The Book Smugglers in which we invite guests to talk about a variety of topics important to speculative fiction fans, authors, and readers. Our vision is to create a safe (moderated) space for thoughtful conversation about the genre, with a special focus on inclusivity and diversity in SFF. Anyone can participate and we are welcoming emailed topic submissions from authors, bloggers, readers, and fans of all categories, age ranges, and subgenres beneath the speculative fiction umbrella.

Today, it’s is our pleasure to host Yoon Ha Lee with a deeply personal essay on writing Ninefox Gambit and being trans.

When I set out to write Ninefox Gambit, I thought I was going to write something purely for fun, even though the setting was grimdark as all get-out: big space battles, nasty technomagical weapons, and a centuries-long plot against a horrible police state. Nothing personal, right? Just another larger-than-life military space opera. Certainly, I didn’t expect to write about anything that would leave me feeling personally exposed.

I didn’t reckon with my characters.

In Ninefox Gambit, Captain Kel Cheris (female) has to work with General Shuos Jedao (male) in order to retake a fortress captured by heretics. What complicates matters is that Jedao is (a) a four-hundred-year-old ghost with no body of his own, so (b) he is stuck directly inside Cheris’s head. Jedao is a genius tactician, but that’s not the part that’s difficult for Cheris. Rather, the complication is that Jedao is also a mass murderer, and she has to keep him from manipulating her or driving her insane while making use of his military advice.

What I had in mind when I set this up was a fun if high-body-count story involving a long game of cat-and-mouse between two very different personalities. I didn’t reckon on it turning autobiographical. I didn’t even realize that it had turned autobiographical until some time after one of the revised drafts. The mind is a funny thing.

To be clear, I am not and have never been a soldier. I’m not a ghost. And I’m not a mass murderer. I strongly disapprove of mass murder! (I hope that goes without saying, but you never know…)

I had decided for years that I hated writing trans characters and intended to do it as little as possible. And this wasn’t because I hated trans people. It was because I’m trans myself; I identify as male. Writing about being trans feels like I’m being asked to slit my wrists onto the page for the entertainment of complete strangers. It’s not fun. I’ve attempted suicide more than once (I also have bipolar disorder, because what is life without complications) and writing about suicide is easier than writing about being trans.

So I went into Ninefox Gambit determined not to write any trans people, because I thought, I do not have the energy to deal with this for a piece of entertainment fiction, and it spilled out onto the page anyway. There isn’t a single trans character, but Cheris (body) and Jedao (mind) ended up being a trans system, metaphorically anyway. Now, Cheris has a mind of her own and Jedao also used to have a body of his own, so the metaphor wasn’t exact. But if it had been more exact, I wouldn’t have been able to endure writing about it.

I was around twelve when I realized I was trans. It took me years to realize just how thoroughly screwed I was. I made the mistake of writing a fantasy story about a character who changed sex in a story in middle school–not for class, just something for myself. But my English teacher noticed me writing all the time and asked to see the story, and like an idiot, I showed it to her. This was in Texas in the early ’90s. My teacher called a conference with my mom. I remember asking my mom what the conference was about, and my mom said that my teacher liked my writing. I was too young to realize this was bullshit. I’ve been a teacher, and while there are exceptions, teachers are far more likely to call conferences with a parent or guardian when something’s gone wrong.

The something gone wrong was my deviance. And I’m pretty sure that was what they discussed because from then on, my mom suddenly became very interested in making me behave in proper feminine ways. I was told not to stomp around so much when I walked. To stop talking so loudly. I especially remember the day she sat me down with makeup and told me that I was going to learn how to apply makeup, and I just sat there in mute refusal. She couldn’t do anything further without my cooperation, so I won that round.

Years later I came out to some of my family and friends, and a while after that, eventually started submitting “about the author” bios with he/him pronouns. I actually didn’t want to be out to the sf/f community at large. I didn’t want to discuss my personal life. But my name kept turning up on lists that promoted female sf/f writers. I felt trapped–outing myself felt unsafe but not outing myself felt like perpetuating a lie. I eventually decided that I would have to live with the former.

Writing about Cheris and Jedao may in some sense have been a massive exercise in self-delusion, but it also came as a relief. I discovered that the topic of transness was not, in fact, too radioactive for me to touch. Part of writing Jedao was the experience of being trapped and having no way out–and yet, even though there’s no magic fairytale solution for me in real life, the experience was freeing as well. Jedao finds a way out, and he does it with his most dangerous weapon, words. That will have to be my way out too.

Yoon Ha Lee is a writer from Houston, Texas, whose work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He has published over forty short stories, and his critically acclaimed collection Conservation of Shadows was released in 2013. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Ninefox Gambit is out now.

Yoon Ha Lee is a writer and mathematician from Houston, Texas, whose work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and The Magazine Of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He has published over forty short stories, and his critically acclaimed collection, Conservation of Shadows, was released in 2013. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

• • • •

The Machineries of Empire series is your very first. Tell us what the experience has been like writing Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem.

Kind of a rollercoaster! I almost quit so many times when I was originally writing the first book, Ninefox Gambit. I have bipolar disorder and struggle a lot with depression, and I often questioned whether it was worth sinking the time into writing a novel as opposed to more short stories. I knew by then that I could sell short stories. I had no guarantee that I could write a novel that made any sense. Raven Stratagem went more easily, in the sense that I had one completed novel behind me, even if it hadn’t yet sold at the time, and I was eager to tackle its plot.

The original impetus for creating the world of these novels was wanting to tackle a big space opera plot with more room for characterization than I typically got in a short story. It was hard at first: I’m not used to spending so long in the same world, and at times it felt claustrophobic. On the other hand, after a certain point it was nice to be working in a familiar setting, rather than having to create everything from scratch like I do with short stories!

When did you notice or feel you had honed your voice? Was it before or after you made short story and poetry sales?

I think it developed during the process of learning to write. Early on, I aimed for a very clear, very transparent style in imitation of writers like Piers Anthony. Then I discovered Patricia McKillip and Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny, and they blew my head open in terms of how language can be used. Part of it was also subject matter. After reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game for the first time, I realized that what I wanted to write about, most of all, was military ethics. That was sometime in high school, and my writing shaped itself accordingly after that.

How has the overall reaction to Ninefox Gambit been from readers?

Very bimodal! From what I can tell, most people either love it or hate it. There were some narrative decisions I made that I knew would not be popular with some readers. For example, because the two main characters, Cheris and Jedao, are making command decisions from the very top, I chose to use throwaway viewpoint characters to depict the “boots on the ground” perspective and show the consequences of decisions that are abstract from a general’s perspective. Some readers really like to tunnel into a smaller number of characters and get close to them, and I knew that I would be losing people who like to read that way. For another, I used minimal exposition. I remember really enjoying C.J. Cherryh’s Faded Sun books because they’re told in a similar way, leading to this great sense of immersion, but some readers prefer to have the world spelled out for them. On the other hand, other readers liked those very things. There are always trade-offs.

General Shuos Jedao is a compelling and charismatic trickster figure. That goes for Captain Kel Cheris as well. Why did you want to put trickster characters at the center of space-faring battles and governmental intrigue?

Jedao’s situation by the time we meet him in Ninefox Gambit is that he’s literally nothing but a voice, and he has an agenda that amounts to high treason. The success of his mission depends on him being able to lie convincingly. One of the things he teaches Cheris in the course of that book is guile.

It’s funny—ordinarily trickster characters drive me up the wall and I frequently find them annoying. But in this case I found them necessary. I reread Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (the translation by Lionel Giles) as part of the research for this series, and it seemed to me that the way I’d stacked up the odds against both Cheris and Jedao made it impossible for a head-on approach to succeed for them in pursuing their goals of revolution. So they’d have to fight smart—fight tricky, and dirty—rather than doing the Charge of the Light Brigade thing.

Many of your characters are motivated by redemption. In Raven Stratagem, General Jedao—if we are to believe him—wants to right the wrongs he committed in Ninefox Gambit. Is redemption a theme that’s important to you, even outside of the military setting of these novels?

I think it’s a theme that’s hard for me to escape. Even though there are cockamamie Asians in the setting of these books, I attended a Christian high school, and I took a couple of Bible classes. (I’m agnostic now, though.) The way redemption is presented here really owes more to that background than to anything specifically Asian.

In Raven Stratagem, you also seem preoccupied with the idea of the double. Shuos Mikodez hires his sibling Istradez to act as his double at governmental meetings. Captain Cheris becomes General Jedao’s double when he possesses her. Where does that come from?

For me, it’s just a more efficient way of making use of characters. I feel that major characters should either be wildly different from each other so that they are easy to tell apart, or that they should be doubled or otherwise connected so that readers can see how they refract each other. Cheris and Jedao would be good examples of the former: They’re almost polar opposites. For the latter, I am personally fond of the Jungian idea of the animus/anima.

Your exploration of the double is also connected to the way you envision immortality. Immortality entails being turned into a ghost and then being anchored to someone who’s alive. The ghost, though, is kept in what you call a black cradle. Jedao escapes the confines of his black cradle by possessing Cheris. Do you think immortality would be as dreadful as the governmental officials in your series make it out to be?

I will own that immortality sounds to me like hell on Earth. If you offered it to me, I would turn it down. So that’s my personal philosophy coming through. I don’t want an afterlife either. I will be content to wink out into nonexistence when I die. My feeling is that we live, we die, we make space for those who follow us, and so the cycle continues.

The technology in Machineries of Empire is based on calendars. The government, called the hexarchate, enforces strict timekeeping, because as long as everyone uses the same calendar, it enables one set of technologies. You’ve mentioned you got the idea from reading Marcia Ascher’s ethnomathematics book Mathematics Elsewhere and Harlan Ellison’s “Paladin of the Lost Hour.” I was wondering if you could tell us more about the ideas you took from Ascher and Ellison to come up with this system.

I don’t own Ascher’s book anymore (it was a flood casualty from last year), but from what I recall, she spends a section of the book talking about different ways that different cultures construct time and keep track of the year. One of the coolest ones, although I didn’t use it, involves a society that uses the yearly cycle of bioluminescent sea critters to let them know when to reset their year, or something like that. It made me think about how timekeeping relies on a set of agreed social conventions.

I last read “Paladin of the Lost Hour” in high school, so it’s been a while, but if I recall correctly, it concerns the guardian of an hour that was “lost” during all the shenanigans in converting between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. It just struck me as incredibly interesting that something that I had took for granted until then, timekeeping, could be something that people had fought over.

As an SF/F writer who majored in math, you’ve stated that math isn’t just about arithmetic and computation; it’s also about argumentation. What can you tell us about the math you use in this series?

To be honest, the actual math in Ninefox Gambit is pretty minimal. I was going to come up with the equivalent of an applied algebra game engine for the calendrical warfare, but my husband talked me out of it on the grounds that none of my readers was going to sit still for that much math. (To be clear, my husband is not afraid of math; he has a doctorate in astrophysics from MIT, and he actually uses math on a daily basis. But he is also a science fiction reader.) While perhaps not one hundred percent true, he was correct to the extent that my agent and I almost couldn’t find a publisher for Ninefox—even with the minimal actual math in it, several publishers turned it down for having “too much math.” There’s honestly more security engineering than math. (I read Ross Anderson’s Security Engineering twice for inspiration.)

That being said, one of the battles in Raven Stratagem uses a bit of watered down information theory, plus my memory of working with codecs back when I made fanvids. And the third book, Revenant Gun, will have a brief discussion of prime factorization and cryptology (thanks especially to Andrew Plotkin and Helen Keeble for their thoughts on the matter!).

How did you get interested in mathematics?

I hated math until ninth grade, when I had geometry. Up until then it looked like a bunch of arbitrary and tedious memorization and computation. Geometry introduced me to proofs, and then I understood that math didn’t just fall out of the sky, it came from somewhere. I am more of a mathematical Platonist, so I have this weird conviction that math is uncovered rather than invented, but still.

I also liked to read nonfiction about science, so I naturally wound up in the math section of the library. There I would read books about fractals, chaos theory, fuzzy (multivalent) logic, artificial intelligence, cryptology, and so on. I became hooked on the beauty of math and how it expresses the structures of the universe.

Linguistics forms an active part of the worldbuilding. What I like most is that the languages your characters speak are clearly not derived from English or other Western languages. You can tell by the details: animate and inanimate forms of words, suffix honorifics, social hierarchy indicated through conjugations. What language or languages is your future linguistics based on?

Korean, mostly, although Korean does not (to my knowledge) have an animate-inanimate distinction. I thought it would be interesting to have noun classes (or grammatical genders) that weren’t the familiar Western masculine, feminine, (sometimes) neuter. (I’ve taken some French, a little German, and a little Latin, although I am by no means fluent in any of them.) Like Japanese, which is more familiar to most Westerners (yay, anime?), Korean has suffix honorifics and different formality levels encoded on the verb.

I haven’t bothered doing much of a conlang (constructed language) sketch for the high language, because it would be an enormous timesuck, but besides the above, I know it’s written with a featural code not unlike the Korean alphabet, although probably not organized in syllabic blocks, because the high language doesn’t have as neat a syllable structure. And the alphabet is written vertically, not horizontally. It doesn’t generally inflect for number, so when Hexarch Kel Tsoro always refers to herself as “we,” because she’s speaking for the Kel hivemind, she’s actually using an archaic form of the first person pronoun from an earlier version of the language that did inflect for number.

You return many times to flower imagery throughout Raven Stratagem. During one spectacular battle scene, the invading enemy, the Hafn, create flower formations with their battle crafts. Some hexarchate ships have names such as Beneath the Orchid. Would you like to say anything about that?

The longer version of that story is that the Andan emblem is flower-based (the kniferose) and they are the ones who use a lot of flower imagery. Beneath the Orchid has a flower name because it’s an Andan ship. The Kel currently have an antipathy for the Andan. Basically, the Kel are the military and are in the business of fighting heretics, and they tend to be xenophobic fascists. The Andan are responsible for the hexarchate’s finance, first contact, culture, and diplomacy, so they’re the ones who deal with foreigners, and they’re the ones most likely to be xenophilic. The Kel find this very suspicious and don’t trust the Andan: A Kel thinks that a foreigner is basically the same thing as a heretic, so people who deal with foreigners aren’t much better. The Hafn formations are given flower names by the Kel sort of as a gesture of contempt, because flowers have that negative connotation for the Kel.

(If you’re thinking that the Kel aren’t nice people, that’s correct, although given that the Andan superpower is mind control, they’re not exactly saints, either.)

Seeing how changing gender is commonplace in your far-future setting, what appears to be absent is gender performance—at least in Judith Butler’s definition of the term in her book Gender Trouble. For example, while General Jedao possesses Captain Cheris, he’s recognizable in her body not because of his maleness but because of his Jedao-ness. Similarly, Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan, though male, presents physically as female. Another character, Shuos Zehun, goes by the singular they pronoun and has no discernible gender at all. Is this a statement of how far-future military culture neutralizes gender, or are you perhaps foreseeing a future gender-neutral society?

I honestly wasn’t trying to make a statement as such. Rather, it seemed to me that it shouldn’t be automatic that even a dystopia as horrible as the hexarchate—and I mean, as far as I’m concerned, the hexarchate is up there in terms of horrible places where I would never want to live—wouldn’t necessarily be equally evil on all axes. So my thought was that gender was one area where they would be relatively egalitarian, not because the society is a good society to live in, but because it’s just not something they culturally care about.

In the hexarchate, advanced handwaved genetic technology plus the “crèches” (artificial wombs) means that women, or anyone else for that matter, can have children without undergoing the pregnancy themselves. The fact that there’s robot slave labor—the servitors—means that there is help with childcare. So, see, this doesn’t come without a cost. The servitors are sentient and most of them are patient with human shenanigans, but the fact remains that human freedom from this kind of labor is built on slavery. Genetic tinkering plus the ability to “mod,” or sculpt your body beyond what you’re born with, minimizes physiological differences between males and females, if one so desires. Basically, all of this is in the background, because I was adamantly not interested in writing a story where gender is a big deal. That’s not to say that stories about gender and sexuality aren’t important—they are—but it wasn’t what I wanted to focus on personally. I was here to blow up spaceships.

When did you decide that you wanted to address issues of gender in your work? Your exploration of gender seems to be a way of acknowledging your trans identity.

It’s funny—I didn’t even see it as an exploration of gender. I wanted to represent different possibilities, yes, so you have characters like Brezan or Tseya or Zehun, but I didn’t, for the most part, want to talk about gender, or make it a plot point. I guess for the longest time I wasn’t even comfortable having trans characters in my own fiction because it cut too close too home. The first time I did that was a story I wrote in sixth grade, and I got into trouble because my teacher saw the story and called my mom and she started trying to get me to be “feminine.” So I’ve been wary ever since, I guess.

You’ve mentioned that when you read works by Jack L. Chalker and Piers Anthony as a teenager, you found their trans representations deeply problematic. Could you tell us what you found problematic?

Well, let me clarify that “trans representation” is maybe a bit misleading. I’m not even sure what the correct technical term is for what they were doing. (I guess I don’t hang out enough on Tumblr?) Chalker wrote, more than once, stories in which characters underwent various transformations, including men being transformed into (usually) very highly sexed, very attractive women. One example is The Identity Matrix. It’s actually a little frustrating, because the more thoughtful aspects of his works (he has a preoccupation with historical processes—he was a history teacher once—that I find fascinating) tend to get swamped by a very exploitative portrayal of female sexuality and subjugation, to say nothing of the misogyny. And I say “trans representation” is maybe not what’s going on here because, generally, the men characters don’t think of themselves as being women before their transformations. Rather, they’re transformed and stuck and have to adjust, possibly with various forms of mind control or brainwashing involved. So I don’t know if that’s exactly what I’d call a depiction of an actual trans person. That being said, what I did find valuable in these books, even if they were far from ideal, was that they depicted worlds in which characters’ physical sex could be changed. It might have been an impossible daydream, but it was one that I found comforting as a teenager when I encountered these books.

In And Eternity, Piers Anthony had a depiction of a woman changed into a man. Again, the woman didn’t think of herself as a man before the transformation, so I wouldn’t really call her a trans person—and taking on stereotypically male personality characteristics due to the magic involved, including being so overcome with lust that he/she/they (???) attempted to rape a friend. Besides the problem with “men can’t help raping women,” the general gender essentialism here bothers me.

Do you have any favorite examples of fiction featuring trans protagonists? And if so, what makes them your favorites?

To be honest, I generally avoid fiction with trans protagonists. Either it’s too close to home, or it’s poorly done, or it’s well done and happy, and the happy ending and/or character just reminds me that I’m not in a good position.

Another one of my favorite aspects of the worldbuilding is the recurring reference to dramas about assassins and killers. Your characters often compare what happens in the dramas to what’s happening to them. What tickles me is the fact that we the readers are technically reading a drama. Is this meta-commentary on space opera and military science fiction?

It’s not just meta-commentary on space opera and military science fiction; it’s meta-commentary on K-dramas and anime. (Ironically, it was my white boyfriend-now-husband who introduced me to anime . . .) It also seemed to me that the characters in the world would have their own forms of cracky entertainment and pop/fannish culture. Cheris likes watching bad dueling shows; a character in the third book, Revenant Gun, likes making fan videos. (I was briefly a vidder, mostly of the Buffyverse, before my computer died and I had to give it up.)

On one level, the dramas seem similar to TV shows or soap operas. On another level, your characters’ familiarity with them makes the dramas seem like mythology that informs their outlook.

Well, perhaps pop culture serves as modern mythology? My husband and I were once deeply involved in a collectible card game with an ongoing storyline called Legend of the Five Rings (L5R). To this day, we can often explain other stories to each other by making references to L5R—perhaps this character in a TV show reminds me of an L5R character or Clan, etc. I’m sure any group of fans with a common knowledge of a narrative could do the same. And that narrative doesn’t have to be fictional. Just listen to any group of sports fans talking together!

Speaking of mythology, in one scene, your Andan character Tseya says this about Jedao: “He’s more of a storybook figure come to life than a threat.” She talks about him as though he’s a character in the dramas.

Historically, the people who have worked with Jedao are Kel and occasionally Shuos. So for Tseya, who hasn’t, he really is more of a drama character than a real person. There actually are (not very accurate) dramas about Jedao’s life, and most of her impressions of Jedao would have been formed from those. (We get to see a snippet of one such drama in book three.)

You’ve spoken a few times about the third book, Revenant Gun. What’s coming up next for Cheris and company?

In book three, Cheris and friends will be going up against the trilogy’s big bad, Nirai Kujen himself, and finding out why Kujen has made the hexarchate the way it is—and even worse, Kujen has his own copy of Jedao for his general. Sleep tight!

Are there any other writing projects you’re working on that you can tell us about?

My current project is a middle grade novel for Disney-Hyperion, Dragon Pearl, which will be one of the books in the forthcoming Rick Riordan Presents line. It’s fantasy space opera with Korean mythology sprinkled in (although I play fast and loose—I mean, it’s already in space, there’s only so much authenticity that’s possible). My heroine is a fox spirit girl searching for her brother, who allegedly deserted from the Space Forces to quest after a magical pearl with the power to terraform worlds and revitalize their dying colony.

After that, I’ll be working on a collection of hexarchate short stories for Solaris (provisionally titled Hexarchate Stories, but that may change). About half the material will be new, and there will probably be a mini-gamebook in which YOU get to play Jedao! Assuming that playing Jedao’s role is something that might entertain you. (Don’t worry. I won’t take offense if you cheat your way through. I used to cheat all the time when I played gamebooks!) And after that, we’ll see.

A meeting of brilliant minds and their battle strategies—in tandem, and against each other—lie at the heart of Ninefox Gambit, the Locus Award-winning debut novel of Yoon Ha Lee. When Captain Kel Cheris, a soldier and brilliant mathematician, decides to link her fate with a long-dead general to win against overwhelming odds, she faces not only a monstrous war. There is also the fact that her ally, General Jedao, is a traitor.

An adrenaline-packed tale of space battles and carnage, Ninefox Gambit is also intricate with intrigue, shot through with glittering humor, and raw with emotional intensity. Lee explores a multiplicity of questions and dilemmas with a light touch, never preaching or heavy-handed. Scenes of devastation are all the more powerful for their restraint, and the sly wit simply delightful. The gut-punch of a conclusion resonates on multiple levels—intellectual and emotional—and signifies a thrilling emergent talent in science fiction.

I caught up with Yoon Ha Lee to talk about the series, which continues with Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun.

Your book is noteworthy for dropping the reader in the middle of an unfamiliar world order without explanation and trusting them to be smart. What are your thoughts about this approach?

A couple things—first, sometimes I really enjoy books that do it this way, which is why I wanted to give it a try. One of my favorite examples in written sf is C.J. Cherryh’s Faded Sun books, where we learn about alien (mri) culture as we go, and there’s a lot of terminology whose rules you can figure out if you pay attention—it’s not explained explicitly.

The other thing is that I tried to give the reader cues in the names themselves. Ninefox Gambit has a one-time mention of something called a “weather-eater”—I don’t explicitly explain what this does, but it’s mentioned in the context of, well, local weather conditions, and you can probably guess that it has something to do with artificially controlling weather. I didn’t feel the need to waste words spelling that out. That was my policy throughout. Another example is the amputation gun. It has that name, and when it shows up, people literally suffer amputations when it’s fired. Saying anything more would be redundant—it would be like explaining that a fantasy fireball is a ball of fire.

The incredibly compelling character of Jedao seems to me to be at the heart of the novel. Does that sound fair to say?

Yes, that’s pretty accurate. Jedao was the first character I came up with, and the one who ended up being the driving force. When I was brainstorming for the novel, I wanted to create a traitor figure who used his betrayal as a massive manipulative gamble. I was inspired by the TV Tropes pages on Chessmasters, but I missed the mark—Jedao’s game isn’t chess, it’s poker. Cheris came about as a complement, sort of a yin-yang dynamic—in a novel where the main interpersonal conflict is a battle of wits, I felt it would be really dull to have two scheming, manipulative characters going up against each other, so Cheris is pretty much Jedao’s opposite in almost every way.

Jedao ends up being the central figure of the trilogy, but Cheris definitely has contributions to make. I’ll leave it at that!

The colorful, personality-driven hexarchate structure with its devoted Kels, scheming Shuos, and luxurious Andan feels so fully realized. How did this world take shape?

The short version is that once upon a time I was writing a space opera alternate universe fanfic of the samurai fantasy roleplaying game and collectible card game Legend of the Five Rings. I had to scupper that when I joined the official Story Team for L5R for a year, but I still wanted to write space opera. After I left, I decided to take the plunge. There are some nods to the world of L5R, especially the factions. I saw how people really loved to sort themselves into Clans and stayed loyal to them (like how people sort themselves into Hogwarts Houses, same phenomenon) and I thought it would work well with a dystopian police state.

Without getting into spoilers, Ninefox raises fascinating questions about AI and ethics, such as have been explored in popular media like Battlestar Galactica, Westworld, and many more. I’m interested in your angle on that conversation.

I regret that I haven’t seen Westworld and never finished Battlestar Galactica, although I was liking it! (I am behind on TV as well as books as well as...you get the idea.) My probably unpopular stance on AI is that creating actual sentient artificial intelligence and then enslaving it is morally wrong. I’m not sure this is a practical issue; I can’t remember which AI/computer scientist made this observation but someone said that there’s no reason for computers to inherently *want* to conquer the world unless we program it into them, in which case we have other problems.

It’s not explicitly stated, but the servitors are the slave underclass of the hexarchate. They do the scut work. If they all swanned off somewhere or did a strike, the hexarchate’s economy would collapse.

The servitors (sentient robots) do have a role to play in Raven Stratagem, and we’ll get a servitor POV character in the third book, Revenant Gun.

Ninefox feels like a cross between military SF and Greek tragedy, especially given the intensity of its moral dilemmas and central relationship. What is some of the literature that has inspired you?

I do not agree with his political views, but when I was in high school, I read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, and it was the book that convinced me to switch from writing high fantasy to military-flavored sf (or science fantasy, as the case may be). Specifically, I was interested in military ethics, and I wanted to know why Ender’s instructors weren’t court-martialed.

If you count a computer roleplaying game as literature, there’s also Planescape: Torment, which introduced me to how consensus reality can play out in worldbuilding, and has a fabulously realized plot centered around an amnesiac immortal and the question, “What can change the nature of a man?”

And finally, while I don’t actually recommend these books, there’s Jack L. Chalker’s Soul Rider series. The caveat is that there are a lot of magical body transformations, including really skeevy objectifying portrayals of people being turned into gorgeous submissive bimbos, but along with the hinky sex-related stuff are some interesting magical tactics and an obsessive interest in historical processes and how they relate to the rise and fall of tyranny.

What’s next for you?

I’m currently working on Dragon Pearl, a middle grade space opera based on Korean mythology! I figured when I pitched it that Korean mythology space opera was an underserved niche. I was right. I would have been happy to be wrong, though! My heroine is a fox girl who goes hunting for her brother, whose desertion may be connected to the reappearance of the Dragon Pearl, an artifact that can terraform worlds.

After that, I’ll be working on a collection of short stories set in the world of Ninefox Gambit. I’m hoping to include a mini-gamebook in which YOU can play Jedao flailing around meeting his very first anchor!

Yoon Ha Lee’s first novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards. His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other venues. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Risingshadow has had the honour of interviewing Yoon Ha Lee about Raven Stratagem (Solaris Books, June 2017), which is the sequel to Ninefox Gambit (Solaris Books, June 2016).

Information about Yoon Ha Lee:

Yoon Ha Lee is a writer from Houston, Texas, whose work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He has published over forty short stories, and his critically acclaimed collection Conservation of Shadows was released in 2013. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Click here to visit his official website.

Links:

Ninefox Gambit:

Amazon UK | Amazon US | www.rebellionstore.com/products/ninefox_gambit

Raven Stratagem:

Amazon UK | Amazon US | www.rebellionstore.com/products/raven_stratagem

Publisher:

www.rebellionpublishing.co.uk
facebook.com/rebellionpublishing
@rebellionpub

AN INTERVIEW WITH YOON HA LEE

- You're the author of the critically acclaimed Ninefox Gambit, which is the first novel in The Machineries of Empire series. Has the success of Ninefox Gambit been a surprise to you?

It has! I think many writers daydream about some measure of success, especially after the amount of work it takes to write a novel (or anyway, the amount of work it took me--maybe it's easier for other writers?). But this is honestly beyond anything I could have hoped for, and I'm very humbled and grateful.

- Your new novel, Raven Stratagem, is a sequel to Ninefox Gambit. Is there anything that you can tell us about it?

Raven Stratagem picks up just after the end of Ninefox Gambit. The heroine from Ninefox has been possessed by the mad genius and mass murderer General Jedao, and Jedao takes over a fleet exactly at a moment when the hexarchate is being invaded by foreigners. He claims he's going to protect the hexarchate, but no one knows what his real agenda is--and no one trusts him. We see the action from the viewpoints of a soldier who escaped the takeover and is trying to warn his people about Jedao's plans, a general whom Jedao is holding captive, and the hexarch of the Shuos faction as he races to figure out Jedao's game. And, of course, there are also big space battles, assassinations, and descriptions of food!

- Are there any major differences between Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem?

Two big ones. The first is that the viewpoint switches from Kel Cheris in Ninefox Gambit to the three aforementioned viewpoints in Raven Stratagem, mainly because Jedao-in-Cheris's-body is now the antagonist. The second is scope. Ninefox was very tightly focused on the siege that takes up most of the action, and we didn't see much outside Cheris and her fleet. In Raven Stratagem, we get a broader picture of life in the hexarchate and the stakes at hand--it's one of the reasons I wanted to go with more viewpoints. I especially liked being able to use the Shuos hexarch as a secondary viewpoint because he has the security clearance to know a ton of stuff that poor Cheris was never told!

- Can Raven Stratagem be read as a standalone novel or is it important to read Ninefox Gambit first?

I'm afraid it's not going to make a lick of sense if you haven't read Ninefox Gambit first! Not that I would stop anyone from trying if they felt like it. Back in the day, I used to read sf/f novels in series out of sequence all the time because the libraries or bookstores didn't have the first books--and I spent half my childhood in South Korea, so my reading options were limited.

- Do you have anything to say to readers who haven't yet discovered your novels?

You might enjoy these books if you like immersion that throws you in the deep end, with minimal exposition (it's a technique I enjoy myself), cracky science fantasy based in consensus reality, handwavy magic powers in space, and military action.

These books may not be for you if you like exposition and overt explanations, or science fiction with a clear basis in real science and engineering. And if you dislike violence, swear words, and disturbing themes, maybe give them a miss. There are plenty of different books for everyone!

- What are you currently working on? What can readers expect next from you?

My current project is Dragon Pearl, a middle grade Korean mythology space opera for Disney-Hyperion's forthcoming Rick Riordan Presents imprint. When I wrote the proposal, I said to myself, "I bet Korean mythology space opera is an underserved niche," and I suspect I'm right. (That being said, I would love to be proved wrong.) It features a teen fox spirit girl who goes after her brother after he allegedly deserts to quest for a powerful magical artifact, the Pearl of the title.

After that, I'll be working on a collection of short stories set in the hexarchate setting, half reprints and half new stuff, and after that, science fiction about a space station, their friend the neat freak fox spirit, and a mystery that's been dumped in their laps. Should be fun!

- Is there anything you'd like to add?

Thank you to all the readers for their support, and thank you for having me!

Yoon Ha Lee’s debut, Ninefox Gambit, made history last year when it joined a small handful of novels to earn prestigious nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. Ann Leckie’s tour-de-force, Ancillary Justice, did the same in 2014, winning all three awards, which puts Lee’s accomplishment into perspective. (And that’s not the only similarity between the trilogies, but we’ll get to that later.) Lee was already well known for his terrific short fiction, including his 2013 collection, Conservation of Shadows, but Ninefox Gambit put him on the map in a big way. Fitting nicely into the vacuum left by Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, which concluded with Ancillary Mercy in 2015, Ninefox Gambit was a skilled mix of “military SF with blood, guts, math, and heart.”

Ninefox Gambit is a book everyone seems to love, yet it’s also dense at times, and difficult to get into. In my review, I complained about the novel’s early chapters, which I struggled to get through, let alone enjoy. “I found the world confusing, the action gruesome,” I said, “and the pace difficult to keep up with. I could recognize that novel’s quality, and the originality that Lee is known for, but other books beckoned, and there was an easy, lazy whisper at the back of my head.” But I did push on, and was rewarded by one of 2016’s richest novels. The complexity of Lee’s story, both from a worldbuilding and plotting perspective, rivals rocket science, but the intricacy of the relationship between the novel’s two central characters—Kel Cheris, a soldier and genius mathematician, and Shuos Jedao, a psychotic undead general—was masterful.

Its sequel, Raven Stratagem, arrives with a lot of hype, but that also brings baggage. After Ninefox Gambit, could Lee repeat his success? Thankfully, Raven Stratagem not only meets the expectations set by its prequel, but, in many ways, exceeds them, and is a more well-rounded novel.

Unlike its predecessor, Raven Stratagem requires no warming up period. Very little of the narrative in Raven Stratagem is bogged-down by incomprehensible infodumps about “calendrical rot.” In comparison, it feels open and airy. Through Cheris and Jedao, Lee proved his ability to create complex and interesting characters, and this time around he throws the doors open by introducing several new point-of-view characters, all of whom are engaging in their own way. From the crashhawk Brezan, who’s on a mission to take Jedao down, to General Kel Khiruev, who is reluctantly beholden to the undead general after he commandeers her swarm, to Shuos Mikodez, leader of a faction of assassins, each of the major players has their own well-defined and compelling part to play in Raven Stratagem‘s overall narrative. They’re all damaged and dangerous, full of regrets, but they are also vulnerable and likeable in a way that allows readers to connect with them on the right emotional level.

Most surprising, perhaps, is being afforded a peek into the mind of Mikodez, who is full of witticisms:

“Very flattering,” Mikodez said demurely, “but while Jedao has demonstrated that his solution to a man with a gun is to shoot it out of his hand—the kind of idiot stunt I tell my operatives to avoid attempting—my solution is not to be in the same damn room to begin with.”

Amidst all the complex worldbuilding, blood, and guts, one of Ninefox Gambit’s most surprising assets was its sense of humour. It’s even more prevalent in Raven Stratagem. Lee knows just when to diffuse a situation with a dark joke, but he also uses humour as a window into the personalities of his characters. It’s not so much belly laughs, but sly side-eye smirks.

Brezan functioned indifferently as part of a composite, one of the reasons he had expected to land at a boring desk dirtside instead of here, but he conceded that that sense of utter humming conviction, of belonging, was addictive. At least things weren’t likely to get worse.

As it turned out, things were about to get worse.

He can make you laugh, but, god damn, he can also make you cry.

Mother Ekesra let go. The corpse-paper remnant of her husband drifted to the floor with a horrible crackling nose. But she wasn’t done; she believed in neatness. She knelt to pick up the sheet and began folding it. It was also one of the few arts that the Andan faction, who otherwise prided themselves on their dominance of the hexarchate’s culture, disdained.

When Mother Ekesra was done folding the two entangled swans—remarkable work, worth of admiration if you didn’t realize who it had once been—she put the horrible thing down, went into Mother Allu’s arms, and began to cry in earnest.

Lee is able to tap into humanity’s full spectrum, pulling out its most heart-wrenching sadness, its most wicked humour, its most sadistic greed. The way he juggles these facets of humanity, portraying them in the least expected places, from the mouths or actions of the least expected people, is one of the reasons I fall so deeply in love with his novels, despite so many other elements being anathema to what I normally enjoy reading. He is writing stories that no one else is writing, that no one else could write.

Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem are queer-friendly, and very liberal in the handling of their characters gender and sexuality. Lee is never on the nose about it, but, for instance, characters will refer to other people by a gender-neutral pronoun if they do not know that person’s gender with certainty. This is just how it is in Lee’s vision of far-future humanity. Characters range from asexual, to bisexual, to straight, but there is never a big deal made about this. Consider this conversation between Mikodez and Jedao (who is “anchored” to a woman’s body at the time):

“At some point when you’re done walloping the Hafn, you ought to take some time off and try sex with someone who isn’t a Kel. I hear some people find it fulfilling.” Istradez always laughed whenever he heard Mikodez giving this particular advice. But Jedao’s discomfited expression made the whole conversation worth it. “Unless you have some archaic problem with being a womanform?”

“Shuhos-sho,” Jedao said patiently, “I haven’t had a dick in four hundred years. I got over it fast, promise.”

Sex is important to some characters’ plots, completely irrelevant to others’. It’s as mature, forward-thinking, and delicate a handling of gender and sexuality as I’ve seen in science fiction, and other writers would do well to study how Lee accomplishes it so effortlessly.

Even as Lee’s worldbuilding becomes less complicated, the scope of the story continues to expand in Raven Stratagem. War is looming, big battles are fought, Jedao’s strategic brilliance is on display. But, while this is happening, many of the novel’s most interesting conflicts are tight and personal, especially those that explore Jedao’s lost humanity, his myriad contradictions, and his murky morals.

“Shuos-zho,” Jedao said, in a voice so pleasant it was poisonous, “it’s no secret that I’m one of the hexarchate’s greatest monsters, but I draw the line at rape.

“That’s fucking hilarious considering whose body you’re walking around in,” Mikodez observed.

Jedao’s face was recovering some of its colour. “Kel Cheris had already died,” he said. “I didn’t see any harm in wringing some final use out of her carcass. The dead aren’t around to care.”

“You’re one of us, all right.”

…

“Tell me,” Mikodez said in exasperation, “what the hell would you do if there wasn’t a war on?”

Jedao faltered. For a moment, his eyes were wrenchingly young. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Which meant, although there was no way that Jedao was ready to admit it to himself, that he’d start a war just to have something to do.”

Like Leckie, Lee is most interested in examining the way people act during times of war, in exposing the depths of humanity and revealing it on the table for all to see. Raven Stratagem—like Ninefox Gambit before it, and Leckie’s Ancillary Justice—is full of mind-melting SFnal ideas, a humanity among the stars that is at once familiar and nearly alien, but never forgets what makes us tick.

Raven Stratagem certainly shows symptoms of Middle Book Syndrome—with the bulk of the novel made of of political maneuvering required to set up the following novel—and some readers might find its shift from Ninefox Gambit’s more frenetic and action-packed plot to something slower and more philosophical a tad disappointing. It worked for me, however, and I thought that Lee found a nice sense of balance between big SF and personal conflict, which was rather precarious during Ninefox Gambit. As any good sequel does, Raven Stratagem doubles down on what made Ninefox Gambit so great, and polishes away its imperfections.

Without a doubt, Raven Stratagem is proof that Yoon Ha Lee sits next to Ann Leckie atop the podium for thoughtful, intricate, and complexly human science fiction.

Yoon Ha Lee blew up like a supernova last year with the release of his debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, earning a double fistful of award nominations (among them the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards) for a brainy, intricate space opera as much about identity, the politics of empire, and grief, as it is about flashy space battles and a revolution within a mathematically constructed super-empire known as the Hexarchate. The story follows a military officer in a culture powered by calendrical mathematics—literally drawing energy and order from numbers, holidays, remembrances, and more. Lieutenant Kel Cheris, a brilliant mathematician and an adequate solider, is paired with the digitized mind of an insane, undead general named Shuos Jedao, whose brilliance in battle earned him a stay in the Black Cradle, his consciousness on ice forever. His madness, and the subsequent murder of millions, put him in this eternal prison—unless his skills were needed again.

Ninefox Gambit brought Cheris and Jedao together to combat heretics looking to impose their own calendar into existence, and it ended with Kel Command working to dispatch Jedao and Cheris once the two had done the government’s dirty work. Leaving his madness and her skills unchecked was a danger no one could afford.

Raven Stratagem picks up in the debris of Ninefox Gambit, with the mind of Shuos Jedao seizing control of Cheris’ body and taking command of a military ship and a whole swarm of soldiers. Cheris’ mind seems to have died in the attempt on their lives that ended the first book. To avenge her, Jedao takes control of the Swanknot Swarm and dictates his intent to start a war. There are still heretics out there, but where their plans end, and Jedao’s begin, no one knows. Only a rogue Kel officer, whose formation instinct (the ingrained ability to be commanded) has failed, can hope to stop him. If this sounds like a lot, than buckle up: Yoon Ha Lee is only getting started, and he’s not slowing down for stragglers.

Lee’s ability to balance high science fiction concepts—worlds, cultures, and weapons—with a deep examination of character—tragic flaws, noble purpose, and societal ideas—is nigh unprecedented in space opera. Introducing to a host of new characters, Raven Stratagem takes an even deeper dive into the cruel mechanisms of the Hexarchate—the demands it places on its people, soldier and civilian alike. As fascinating as the newcomers are, it is still Jedao who takes center stage. Inscrutable as ever, irascible as all hell, a man who can terrify with a single glance, he is as fearsome and fascinating as ever. Rather than spend more time in the mind of a madman, Lee does something risky—this time, we only ever see Jedao through the lens of those around him, others must contend with his legacy, remaining calm in the presence of a resurrected ghost. Seeing his contradictions, flaws, and icy intelligence through the eyes of those who have grown up fearing the legend is a brilliant move for a sequel, and it lights a fire under the narrative as the novel races toward another shocking conclusion.

But let’s not ignore the worldbuilding. As bad as the Hexarchate can be, it is not totally dismal. This is a society where gender reassignment happens on a whim, where identity shifts with the wind and no one blinks, where people are free to love whom they will, when they will, how they will. There is good medicine, good education, and good people. The stigmas present in many analogue empires have no purchase here, and amid a chaos-free social strata, there is also art, and music, and fine cuisine. Lee makes sure never to paint the citizens of the Hexarchate as flatly evil. He knows that the trouble with governments are governments, not people—the system, and who runs it, and who it exploits, and how it can be changed for the better.

Raven Stratagem more than lives up to the promise of its predecessor, continuing the intriguing double-sided story of Shuos Jedao, the enigmatic tactician reborn and looking to make things right once and for all. It is a challenging read, but it’s not all philosophizing and waxing poetically about scattering of stars in the Hexarchate. There’s a ton of action, and when it hits, it hits hard. There’s literally a climactic battle in which two space fleets just throw math at each other, and it’s spectacular. Only a mad genius could pull off that maneuver in style—and that madman’s name is Yoon Ha Lee.

How do you follow-up a breathtaking, multiple award-nominated debut that combined world-changing technologies, interesting reality-altering mathematics and awesome characters?

You change perspective. Then add a plot to change the world. And then twist everything around half way through.

Raven Stratagem is the sequel to Yoon Ha Lee’s phenomenal Ninefox Gambit, a sequel that is as mind-blowing as its predecessor but in a completely different way. Talk about reinventing a successful work!

The Hafn have been trying to invade Hexarchate territory, and all that stands between them and ruin is the suicidal Kel, as well as the Hexarchate’s weapon of mass destruction (which was deployed in Ninefox Gambit): the resurrected General Jedao. Jedao was inserted into the mind of Kel captain Cheris, a mathematical genius who struggled with Kel formation instinct, the groupthink conformity strategy that the Hexarchate and the Kel rely on to keep things going. Cheris always wondered whether the Hexarchate was even a good thing, and those who read Ninefox Gambit will know the answer is a resounding no. But the Hafn are no good either – and our heroes find themselves in a position of having to fight off an outside enemy that needs to be destroyed while simutaneously planning a revolution from the inside.

I was super curious to see where the story would go. Enter Raven Stratagem: opening with Kel General Khiruev, who is about to go fight the Hafn when her vessel is boarded by Cheris/Jedao. Since everybody knows that Jedao is inside Cheris – the assumption being that he took over completely – and Jedao is a senior general, formation instinct kicks in and Jedao takes over, sending away anyone who would try to resist him. He goes off to do his own thing, to the dismay of everybody in command.

Here is the thing: for over more than half of Raven Stratagem, the viewpoint narrative is exclusively not-Cheris/Jedao. It changes between several characters who all believe Cheris is gone. But we the readers know different – or at least we hope we do – and part of the fun of the novel is the wait to see not only the coin drop but how. This could have easily backfired (I came here for Cheris and Jedao) but this turned out to be not only a clever narrative choice but one that allowed for other characters and viewpoints to come through. It’s a novel that balances the deeply personal and the wider world. It also prompts big questions about genocide, the idea of what immortality and everlasting power does to people, and whether anything is excusable in pursuit of the greater good.

With all that in mind, the ending felt shortchanged and perhaps too easy – but possibly I felt this way because I was reading from the wrong perspective. I can only hope that the next book changes things up again and we get a whole novel from the servitors’ viewpoint. How fun would that be?

I adored Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel Ninefox Gambit (2016), and it garnered a well-deserved Hugo Award nomination this year, so clearly other people adored it too. There’s always the question with sequels of whether they will live up to the first book in the trilogy. Happily, Raven Stratagem delivers more of Lee’s signature mixture of military matters and mathematics in spades.

Ninefox Gambit introduced us to Kel Cheris, an infantry captain with a genius for advanced mathematics whose unconventional thinking unfortunately attracted the attention of Kel Command, which takes a very dim view of that sort of thing within the military faction. Cheris wound up playing corporeal host to the disembodied revenant of Shuos Jedao, the four hundred years undead general who was one of the hexarchate’s greatest military geniuses and also one of its greatest mass murderers. They were taxed with stamping out a particularly pernicious group of heretics, a matter of vital importance in an interstellar empire where mass belief in the calendar (and the ceremonial torture sessions and remembrances of the same that keep it running) literally powers the exotic technologies on which society depends. The most significant of these is the mothdrive that makes faster than light travel possible, but the term also encompasses much of the hexarchate’s advanced technology, including its military formations and weaponry.

Needless to say, things didn’t exactly work out as Kel Command or the hexarchate envisioned, and the Hafn, a rival interstellar polity, are now keen to take advantage of the hexarchate’s perpetual frailty and of the convenient fact that their own exotics work under the hexarchate’s calendar. The book opens with Kel General Khiruev about to take her swarm to the border to deal with the Hafn threat; Khiruev herself is noted for a borderline dangerous level of flexibility, but it’s her subordinate Colonel Brezan whose lack of formation instinct plays a crucial part in the book’s opening scenes. “Formation instinct” is the term for the groupthink installed into cadets’ minds at Kel Academy, allowing them to execute the military formations that create exotic effects in battle but also inexorably subordinating their individual wills to the hierarchy of command. Shuos Jedao’s commission as a Kel General was never revoked, and Jedao is able to use formation instinct to essentially take over Khiruev’s swarm once he makes contact with it: after all, he has about four centuries’ seniority on every other officer in the service.

The military aspects of the story are well-matched to Lee’s prose, which pairs the occasional and memorably poetic turn of phrase with the blunt, fatalistic attitude of military personnel and their jokes. Here, for example, is Khiruev’s reflection on the eve of a certain battle: “There was no such thing as a routine battle, something Khiruev had figured out as a lieutenant decades ago. Even so, certain rituals made the chaos manageable. More accurately, they gave you the comforting illusion that the plan would have any relationship to reality when reality decided to stab you in the eye.”

Raven Stratagem deepens and expands the universe of the hexarchate laid out in Ninefox Gambit, as military manoeuvres recede into the background and senior Kel officers—unlike Cheris, who was an infantry captain breveted to general for the sake of the hierarchy—with different perspectives on Jedao, the Kel, and the hexarchate itself come to the fore. Thanks to the hexarchate’s unimaginative attempts at intimidating Jedao, we also get a glimpse of Cheris’ birth world and her doomed ethnic minority community, the Mwennin, with their own unique language and customs and stories, including that of “the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds to assault the heavens.” There’s more about families too, from Cheris’ parents to Mikodez’s surgically altered lookalike brother Istradez and Brezen’s bedeviling older Kel sister.

There’s a way in which the book works as a kind of puzzle: the reader is presented with a series of situations in which they know different things than the characters, and as the book unfolds we are challenged to use our knowledge to try to work out just what is going on: what has happened to Cheris? Whose estimation of what Jedao is trying to do is correct, ours or the hexarchs’? What does Shuos Mikodez think he is doing, and what is he actually doing? In the first book, working out much of the worldbuilding felt like this, particularly if readers were not previously familiar with the hexarchate from several of Lee’s earlier short stories, including those in the collection Conservation of Shadows. In Raven Stratagem, much of the calendrical warfare takes a back seat to other questions, specifically the warfare of hearts and minds: the hexarchate adopts various strategies, including genocide, to try to bring pressure to bear on Jedao, while Jedao proves to be disconcertingly willing to fight the Hafn and thereby protect the hexarchate, presumably to convert the hexarchate’s denizens to his banner.

One thing that is clear to just about everyone in the book is that the hexarchate is a terrible place to live and an even worse polity to serve. I found myself thinking of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch more than a few times. Both trilogies feature unapologetically imperialist interstellar regimes powered by an extremely casual attitude towards human life (for the Radchaai, it’s auxiliaries; for the hexarchate, it’s institutionalized ritual torture and executions, and the casual attitude towards life in general that they breed). Both feature protagonists who are trying to bring down the system, or at least create enough of a chink in its armor to allow for the possibility of positive change: the hexarchate, after all, used to be the heptarchate, but the general consensus is that everything has only gotten worse since Jedao’s day. There’s also questions of functional immortality at play in both trilogies—Anaander Mianaai has it; the hexarchs as a group want it—and a certain amount of questioning the gender binary: Radchaai imperialism extends to imposing female pronouns on everyone in their society, while in Raven Stratagem the default seems to be people switching gender and their biological sex at will, with pronouns left to their own choice accordingly. Brezan, for reasons which seem to be related to class or status, has elected to retain his “womanform” body despite his male gender. Artificial intelligence—the ships of the Radch, the servitors ubiquitous throughout the hexarchate—is also a key shared theme.

If the problems of empire are clear in both universes, the solutions characters come up with are ultimately different. One of the key characters in Raven Stratagem is the Shuos hexarch Mikodez, whose disdain for the prospect of achieving immortality was a throwaway line in Ninefox Gambit but takes center stage in this book. Through Mikodez, we learn that in the interval the sinister, near-immortal Nirai hexarch Kujen has vacated the scene and his successor has implemented plans to give herself and the other hexarchs eternal life. Mikodez isn’t wild about the hexarchate on the best of days, and he’s convinced—with good reason—that giving the hexarchs immortality will cause more trouble than it’s worth. Given the fact that Nirai Kujen, the hexarchate’s premier calendrical mathematician (and sometime co-conspirator to Shuos Jedao), seems to have been manipulating the calendar to keep himself alive for nine hundred years, Mikodez appears to have a valid point. Moreover, Kujen agrees with him: “Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster,” he reflects towards the end of the book. “It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were. He could have warned his fellow hexarchs, but it was going to be more fun to watch them discover it for themselves.”

In any revolution the question at some point must be asked about what comes after—and is it possible that it might just be worse than the status quo? Jedao and Cheris faced this question in the last book, and it’s their unwelcome gift to the people they encounter in this one. Kel Brezan, for one, is eventually given the choice of whether or not he wants to fight for a system in which he can’t fully participate due to his status as a crashhawk, a Kel who lacks formation instinct. As with many terrible and momentous choices in life, Brezan keeps having to make his again over the course of the novel, particularly after he learns about Khiruev’s choice to serve Jedao of her own free will, despite it being a physiological death sentence thanks to formation instinct. Throughout, the humans’ choices play against those of the servitors, the mostly ignored but fatefully omnipresent sentient robots whose perspective on their masters increasingly seems key to the hexarchate’s fate. As Khiruev realizes, they have the facts and have drawn their own conclusions independent of human interference or oversight: “Most people gave servitors less thought than the wallpaper. If they had wanted to slaughter humans in their sleep, they could have managed it forever ago. It spoke better of them than the humans.”

Like the solution to the best puzzles, there is a certain inevitable logic to how the whole thing plays out, both against and with our expectations. Lee’s writing has some of this same quality, which is part of what makes the mathematics and the characters whose lives depend on the mathematics so compelling; his crisp prose helps the reader to grasp the ramifications of the calculations even when the underlying equations remain obscure. Ramifications look to be on tap for the final book in the trilogy: as one character observes, “ … people didn’t stop being people because they had choices.” I for one can’t wait to see what final scenario those choices generate.

2017’s Raven Stratagem is the second novel in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series. The first novel in the series, Ninefox Gambit, was reviewed here. Readers are well advised to read Ninefox Gambit before reading Raven Stratagem.

The Hexarchate is far too sensible to rely on the obedience of soldiers with free will. Instead, every soldier of the Kel has no choice in the matter, thanks to formation instinct conditioning. To see a superior officer is to be compelled to obey them. It’s a system designed to make mutiny impossible. For the person wearing senior officer Cheris’ body, it means that taking control of the Swanknot shipswarm is merely a matter of establishing that they are the undead General Shuos Jedao. Once they believe they are confronted with a general with three centuries of seniority, the hapless soldiers have no choice but to obey.

By the time the Hexarchate’s rulers discover what Jedao has done, he and his little fleet are long gone.

The system isn’t perfect. A minority of the soldiers are crashhawks, who are immune to Kel conditioning. Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan is (to his own horror) one such. His attempt to stop Jedao from hijacking the Swanknot shipswarm fails, but he never stops trying to relay info to the Hexarchate. Alas for poor Brezan, not only are there layers of obstructive bureaucrats between him and the people he needs to reach, but … the Hexarchate didn’t get where it is by trusting people who risk their lives to serve it out of mere free will. One standard treatment for self-confessed crashhawks is prophylactic execution.

Luckily for Brezan, his superiors spare him. But only because they plan to send him out to deal with Jedao. Even if he succeeds, there is every chance his reward will be a swift death (for the crimes of competence and autonomy).

Oddly enough, Jedao’s rebellion takes him out to challenge the Hexarchate’s bitter enemies, the Hafn. You think that the Hexarchate would be willing to forgive and forget. Nah. They try to kill Jedao and everyone he has contaminated with rebellion. While they are at it, they plan to exterminate an entire ethnic group as well (the Mwenning, Cheris’ group). That should teach her not to be possessed by undead generals.

But the Hexarchate is right to be suspicious. Jedao’s campaign against the Hafn is an element in an epic act of prestidigitation … but what grand scheme does this slight of hand serve?

~oOo~

Readers may notice parallels between this series and Legends of Galactic Heroes. That’s because the Empire in LGH was modelled on Prussian history, while the Hexarchate was modelled on Korea’s Joseon dynasty. Both polities were rigid, autocratic, and cruel … though I would argue that the Joseon dynasty (and thus the Hexarchate) would edge out the Prussians for the Nasty Empire prize.

Though the Hexarchate does have an excuse that the Joseon didn’t. Their technology depends on belief: the shared worldview of the mass of their subjects. Conformity is crucial; without it, technology fails. When competing worldviews (known as “calendars”) overlap, chaos and technological collapse ensue. Every faction in the Hexarchate has good reason to force their worldview on as many people as possible, thus making possible some powerful tech1.

Of course, the Hexarchate also engages in cruelty pour encourager les autres. The Mwenning genocide serves no real purpose except to demonstrate the state’s willingness to unleash monumental cruelty at the smallest provocation. Not everyone can be brainwashed into formation instinct, but everyone can know fear. It’s a fearsome logic encountered across human history, from GermanSchrecklichkeit to American Shock and Awe to Japan’s Sankō Sakusen.

The Hafn, BTW, aren’t any better. Their tech is powered by the hearts of forsaken children.

This does not seem like a setting that would allow of any hope. Do you want to be trampled by the boots of the Hexarchate or the boots of the Hafn? Scylla and Charybdis. But there is hope, because the rulers have settled on one stupid strategy (everything is a nail that needs a hammer) and are blind to any alternatives. Any resistance will be able to dance rings around them.

Yoon Ha Lee’s characters are not mere automatons, defined by their conditioning and culture. Perhaps they will die heroically, brought down by overwhelming force. Perhaps they will defeat the autocrats and be left with the enormous task of reform. Perhaps the Hafn will smash Hexarchate and resistance alike.

If you want to know what happens, you will have to read the book. Raven Stratagem is available here (Amazon) and here (Chapters-Indigo).

Feel free to comment here.

Please address corrections to jdnicoll at panix dot com

1: The Hafn are in the same boat:

“If they’re like us,” Khiruev said, “they’re locked into their existing calendar for exotic technologies they can’t bear to give up, and that means they’re stuck with some bloody awful options in other areas.”
I was reminded of the long-term influence of legacy computer code. Design choices that made sense early in the history of a code lineage can constrain available choices down the road. Constitutional law ditto.

Criticism is a funny old thing. The critic is late to the party: the book is published, printed, often already in shops and on people’s nightstands by the time the review comes out so any criticism offered is at best parenthetical. As a novelist myself I’ve read critical reviews of my books and thought, ‘Okay, so the reviewer thinks W doesn’t work, X should’ve done Y and Z should’ve been longer. What do they think I can do about it now?’ While some writers occasionally get the chance to go back and re-edit older works, the best an author can usually do is to take relevant criticism on board and keep it in mind for the next novel.

This dichotomy was at the front of my mind while reading Raven Stratagem, the second part of Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, which began with Ninefox Gambit. I am a big fan of Lee’s writing and thoroughly enjoyed Ninefox Gambit, but I never felt quite satisfied. My main beef was the complexity. Lee has created a deeply complex universe, one that in the most fundamental ways is completely alien to us. Not quite parallel, more parabolic. It reminds me, in a good way, of Iain M Banks’s Culture in its scope, its pleasing disfunction and the humorous uses Lee makes of the technological and social quirks that rise emergent from the system. But for a lot of Ninefox Gambit, it wasn’t particularly clear what was going on beyond the immediate action.

Lee, much to his credit, never info-dumps and never engages in a Telladonna (to steal a phrase from the West Wing Weekly podcast) by having one character explain everything to another. The book would’ve been immensely weakened by either of those techniques, and a writer should never give more information than is strictly necessarily, but I couldn’t help coming out of Ninefox Gambit feeling a little lost. The critic in me wanted Lee to slow down, to let his creation breathe.

Raven Stratagem, in this sense, is a huge leap forward.

In the first book 400-year-old mass murderer Shuos Jedao was grafted onto the mind of Kel Cheris, creating a deadly duo easily capable of defeating the heretics at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Raven Stratagem picks things up almost immediately. Cheris’s mind is dead and Jedao has hijacked her body, using it to take control of a Kel ship in which he goes haring across the galaxy repelling Hafn invaders and antagonising the ruling Hexarchate, all the while clearly up to something. Jedao is a wonderful fictional creation, a total psychotic bastard you can’t help but root for. The sense of pleasure Lee clearly takes in writing about Jedao’s villainy again puts me in mind of Iain M Banks. If you like your universes with a dark sense of humour and a wonky moral compass, Lee may be the best thing to happen to Space Opera since Banks’s untimely passing.

The novel opens the Hexarchate out, following multiple strands that expand and delineate our understanding while complicating the plot and adding levels that will undoubtedly be explored in later volumes. (Lee’s website says ‘trilogy’ – I hope it’s a trilogy in the Douglas Adams sense of the word).

Raven Stratagem is that rare thing – a sequel that betters the original – and is also the most frustrating thing for a reviewer: a book with a plot that cannot be discussed without massive spoilers. But like all great novels, it starts at the end of things. The ruling order that has controlled the galaxy for centuries is on its way out, and something is going to replace it. It could be freedom. It could be chaos. It could be a disaster. From Shoreline of Infinity’s base in Scotland, we ask what could be more timely?

This stunning sequel to the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated Ninefox Gambit contains a satisfying mixture of interstellar battles, politics, intrigue, and arcane technology. The Hafn have invaded Hexarchate territory, and the Hexarchate military Kel Command have resorted to deploying a human weapon to take control of the response force. He is the resurrected General Shuos Jedao, and he has possessed the body of Kel infantry captain Ajewen Cheris. After subduing and releasing Lieutenant Colonel Brezan, who tries to resist him, Jedao goes rogue, still fighting the Hafn but also pursuing his own agenda. Brezan is promoted to the rank of high general and sent back to retake control of the fleet with the assassin Tseya, a member of the diplomatic Andan faction. In the background, Hexarch Shuos Mikodez maneuvers his faction’s intelligence-gathering forces; meanwhile, the leader of another faction has disappeared, and his replacement offers immortality to her peers. With multiple characters skilled in deception, Lee is able to keep readers guessing at Jedao’s goals until the end. He never explains the Hexarchate’s “calendrical technology,” but readers who don’t mind being dropped in the deep end will savor this brilliantly imagined tale.

Kel Cheris, half-possessed by the ghost of notorious General Shuos Jedao, survived an assassination attempt that wiped out her entire fleet. Or did she? Physical appearances aside, it appears to be Jedao who usurps command aboard the Hierarchy of Feasts. Formation instinct compels the Kel to follow Jedao – but will he really defend the Hexarchate from the Hafn? Or will he betray them to their deaths?

Ninefox Gambit was one of my favourite books last year, although not all reviewers shared my enthusiasm for its unapologetically oblique world-building and its obsession with the ethics of war. In Raven Stratagem, the core dilemma is much the same – can the ghost of the mass-murdering general be trusted? – but this time we see the action strictly through outside eyes.

Enter General Kel Khiruev, tormented by her enforced loyalties to both the Hexarchate and – unwillingly – to Jedao as her superior officer. Haunted by childhood memories of her mother executing her father for heresy, it’s only Kel formation instinct that suppresses her doubts about the Hexarchate. When Jedao arrives, she can’t resist the urge to obey him even knowing Kel Command wants him dead.

By contrast, Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan has weak formation instinct, giving him the freedom to rebel – albeit at the cost of his career, as the Kel hate and fear a free-thinking ‘crashhawk’ almost as much as they do Jedao himself. Ejected from the Hierarchy of Feasts as Jedao tightens his grip on the fleet, Brezan must try to make contact with Kel Command to apprise them of the situation – if he can persuade them to listen to a crashhawk.

With half the story set amongst the Kel and circling around the question of Jedao’s intentions, this could have felt awfully similar to Ninefox. Instead, Yoon Ha Lee breaks new ground, focusing tightly on questions of free will as Jedao relentlessly pushes Khiruev to make her own choices. Formation instinct – ironically, designed as a tool to control Jedao – can drive a doubting Kel to suicide to prevent disobedience. It’s heart breaking to watch Khiruev wrestle with its irresistible demands as well as those of her conscience, all the while followed by the mistrustful eyes of her officers, as torn between duty and desire as Khiruev herself.

Along the way, we get glimpses of the monstrously innovative Hafn and of the fault lines within the Hexarchate as stations respond to Jedao’s presence: some desperate for the protection of the man who has never lost a battle; others desperate to kill the traitor who once slaughtered his entire command for reasons known only to himself. In the middle of it all, Jedao remains an enigma (and as a reader this extends to whether it is in fact Jedao, regardless of the assumptions made by the Kel), his cards kept close to his chest, a blend of sympathetic charm and remorseless authority.

To my joy, Yoon Ha Lee also takes a step back to give us a wider view of his dystopian empire – not just through Brezan’s eyes, but from the perspective of the Shuos Hexarch. Gleefully capricious, famous for murdering children, forgetful of his physical needs, Mikodez is a complex antagonist. He’s also utterly respectful of his non-binary administrative aide and devoted to his family (which hasn’t stopped him from asking his birth sister to transition to manform to become one of his many doppelgangers, deployed to distract assassins and attend meetings on his behalf). And as the Hexarchs debate ways to bring Jedao back into line, it’s Mikodez – the man who leads the spies and assassins – who is their unexpected (and unsuccessful) conscience.

Through Mikodez, we get to see the machinations of the Hexarchs first hand as they juggle their fear of an unfettered Jedao with their need to stop the Hafn – whilst proceeding with their own self-serving agenda to become immortal. If Ninefox explored the ethics of war, Raven is unflinching in its criticism of the ethics of power. We’re not meant to admire the Hexarchate or the Hexarchs, but I defy anyone not to like Shuos Mikodez in spite of themselves (for many of the same reasons I like Jedao himself, not least his wicked sense of humour).

Where Ninefox casually assumed technology and world-building, leaving the reader to flounder or fly with it, Raven casually fills in the background: the nature of the factions; the horror of the ritual torture that underpins the calendars (and by extension the technologies); the back-biting and jockeying for influence between the hexarchs; and the constant fear of rebellion that underpins it all. The Hexarchate persists by brutally suppressing all resistance; but almost every character we meet wavers in their loyalty to it.

…which brings us back to the motif of choice. The entire novel acts as a strident call to arms: to reject inhumane government; to resist wherever possible; to believe in a better world – and to be willing to make sacrifices to secure it. Or even just to improve on the status quo.

“I wanted to die having seen that someone believed in a better world enough to fight for it”

It’s equally determined in its gender politics. The Hexarchate may be a dystopia, but it is resolutely open-minded in its assumptions around gender and sexuality, with polygamy routine, at least three prominent trans characters, and an aromantic asexual (who isn’t as much of a monster as he initially seems). It’s singing straight to the choir as far as I’m concerned.

Liberal values aside, I love that this is a series dedicated to shades of red (blood) and grey (morality). In spite of the lack of nuance in the Hexarchs’ villainy and no matter how much you have come to despise them (there’s little chance of sympathising with them, even as you wonder whether Mikodez is right in his assessment of Jedao) – even they have the ability to surprise in their attitudes to their families and immortality.

Raven unlocks the plot that was revealed at the end of Ninefox, but I’m on the edge of my seat for the final instalment of the trilogy. It remains to be seen how the Hexarchate (and their enemies) will respond – and it’s not lost on me that while we’ve been given a teasing glimpse of mad genius Nirai Kujen, we still have no idea what he is actually up to (or whose side he’s on).

All in all, Raven is a triumphant continuation of a vibrant new space opera. I expected intrigue and entertainment; I wasn’t prepared for all the feelings. I can’t wait to see where Yoon Ha Lee takes this rollercoaster next.

Looking back at my review of the first book in this series, Ninefox Gambit, I wrote a pretty crappy review. I remember when I finished that book, my mind was absolutely blown, and I had absolutely no idea how the heck to talk about what I’d just read. So I wrote a passable review and then ordered the 2nd book in the series, Raven Stratagem.

I had a similar experience with Raven Stratagem. My mind was utterly blown, and I knew I had no idea how to discuss what I just read.

So I read Raven Stratagem again, paid closer attention, and took more notes. You guys. I don’t even like military scifi. And I loved the living shit out of this book. I never thought I’d say that some military science fiction books had become my comfort reads, but 2017 is a weird place.

Ninefox Gambit was on a comparatively small scale. It mostly took place on one ship, with Jedao manipulating the shit out of Cheris, and then showing her how powerful a skilled manipulator can be and how easy their society is to manipulate. All Kel cadets learn about the madman General Jedao who slaughtered his own troops, but they have no idea who he was as a person. Cheris gets to learn who he is as a person. It changes her mind.

Raven Stratagem is manipulation on a much, much larger scale.Yes, Jedeo is running around in Cheris’s body (is there anything of her left in there? Who knows), but in this novel we also get a look at the Hexarchates and how they run their factions. Running a faction mostly means manipulating your fellow leaders so that you can get what you want, and right now, they all want immortality. All this political manipulation would be sick if it wasn’t so darn entertaining!

If the first book was algebra, then this second book is trigonometry – with a focus on the study of angles.

Raven Stratagem has addictive plot lines, characters seeking revenge, backstabbing, brainwashing, people questioning societal norms, characters that leap off the page, and secret seeds that grow into forests of plans within plans. Everyone in this book wants something, the hard part is ensuring no one know what you want or what you care about. Because if they know, they can destroy it.

the book is written so beautifully that even if it didn’t have any of those things, if it didn’t have any plot whatsoever, it would still be a damn gorgeous book. My brain is still happily fried on this book, so I’m just going to rattle off everything I loved and hope I don’t forget something:

The language and the lexicon – it’s a hexarchate, lots of the slang involves increments of six. People say they will be there in six or 12 minutes, someone is running 6 minutes early. When it was a heptarchate, did everyday conversations involve increments of 7? Is using increments of six a way of saying “hexarchate forever, what is this heptarchate garbage I keep seeing in history books?” There is this wonderful conversation early in the novel about concepts their language has no words for, making it difficult for people to discuss certain topics, because they literally have no language for it.

Mikodez!! Oh, I adore Mikodez! He is an absolutely fucked up individual and a total asshole, but I love him so much. His relationship with his brother makes me cry. Definitely one of my favorite characters I have come across this year. Everytime I got to another chapter, I hoped it was a Mikodez chapter. I would love for there to be a movie of this book just so I can see Mikodez in the flesh and ooh and ahh over his super cool wardrobe.

The food! Everyone in this book has a true appreciate for food, enjoying meals, and insisting that their local cuisine is the best. Yep, I’m a foodie, so I loved reading about the food. Mikodez’s obsession with sweets was adorable, especially since everyone else seems to eat rather sensibly.

The relationship between Jedao and Khiruev. They both deserve some kind of happiness in their life. I am very much shipping those two. Just going to leave that there.

Jedao’s response to seeing what’s inside that coffin and realizing the Hafn are even more fucked up than the Kel. It’s one thing to build up an unstoppable military, remove choice and agency from your troops, and then send them on suicide missions. But the Hafn? These people take it to a whole new level. Maybe because they are terrified, desperate, and have nothing left to lose? The Hafn are absolutely fucked up and need their own book.

The subtle conversations about what the job of the military is. Is the military’s job to be a weapon that can be pointed at an enemy? Or is their job to help foster peace and a less violent world? Should the military industry work to perpetuate itself, or make itself obsolete?

Really, everything about Raven Stratagem is a giant YES.

Should I be worried that I got a lot of management and leadership advice out of this book?

Even better news it that there are a bunch of Hexarchate short stories on Yoon Ha Lee’s webpage! Squeee!

You can also take the “what faction are you!” quiz. The “which is the best Starship” question just about killed me. How am I supposed to choose between the Enterprise and Serenity? And the Nostromo isn’t an option? What?

Apparently I am a Rahal.

Like its predecessor, Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee’s Raven Stratagem didn’t grab me immediately. However, whereas Ninefox Gambit’s initial obstacle was the very strange universe of calendars, heresy and reality manipulation, with Raven Stratagem I found the obstacle was a new set of characters. With Cheris, the central character of Ninefox Gambit, apparently missing and the maybe-mad General Jedao in charge of her body, the point-of-view characters split three ways. Firstly on a Kel battle fleet hijacked by General Jedao, General Khiruev has to battle the conflicting demands of her Kel formation instinct (that demands strict loyalty to her superiors), her own tendencies for independent thought and her ambiguous feelings to Jedao’s objectives. Meanwhile, Colonel Brezan is a Kel whose formation instinct has never properly taken hold: a “crashhawk”. Ironically this makes Brezan one of the few Kel who can act against Jedao. Finally, Shuos Mikodez is the leader of the espionage/assassination faction of the Hexarchate busily engaged in machinations, betrayals and schemes involving the future of the empire, immortality and trying to work out what Jedao is up to.

Despite the wider spread of characters, I didn’t feel the universe of Hexarchate opened up much more and I also found Mikodez and Brezan unrelatable. Brezan’s plotline, in particular, felt to me somewhat pointless and ended up much where I thought it would (yes – there is a twist but I shan’t discuss that).

However, as it progresses the story increasingly pulls you in. Like Ninefox Gambit, it has a rhythm to it that is initially hard to synch with but which as the novel progresses feels natural and compelling. So by the final chapters, I’m back into “This is SO great! Why didn’t I get how great it was before!” mode – to the extent that I begin to suspect Yoon Ha Lee of some calendrical trick or manipulating my fannish formation instinct.

Comparison with Ann Leckie’s Radch books are obvious but having said that, the books aren’t very like them. I’m sort of reminded of Le Carre’s Smiley books – characters caught up in their own machinations but also sort of trying to do the right thing in a world that requires both loyalty and betrayal. The story suffers from a lack of Cheris to pull it forward and side events whose significance isn’t always clear. Yet it rewards the reader who sticks with it, which is why it inspires a degree of missionary zeal in its fans.

This is the second novel in the Machineries of Empire series, following Ninefox Gambit. It was published in 2017 by Solaris and runs about 400 pages.

Picking up from the rubble left at the end of the previous book, Cheris/Jedeo uses her rank to invoke the Kel formation instinct and take over a fleet of ships on the way to defend against the Hafn. She/he overcomes the commanding General Kel Khiruev, and then continues the battle and pursuit of the Hafn fleet. Because Cheris/Jedeo has Jedeo’s mannerisms, everyone assumes he is in control of Cheris’ body, and responds accordingly. Cheris/Jedeo also mounts a propaganda campaign against the Hexarcate, planning a radical challenge to the reigning system. Will she/he be able to carry it off?

This novel is much more conventional than Ninefox Gambit. It assumes you’re familiar with the themes, the calendar and doctrine system the Hexarchate runs on and the concept of formation instinct, so the author doesn’t spend much time reviewing these. Instead, we get character development for the major characters, including General Khiruev, the instinct-resistant Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan and Hexarch Mikodez. There is nothing from Cheris/Jedeo’s point of view, and we see her/him only through the eyes of others.

On the positive side, I think some readers may like this book better because it offers fewer challenges and more intimate personal views of the decadence within the empire. Cheris/Jedeo is attempting to replace this system, which means he/she is working against slavery and torture. To the degree she/he is successful, we’re gratified.

On the negative side, I miss the blazing pace, action and drama in the first book—I liked those challenges. Having correctly interpreted the ending of Ninefox Gambit, I wasn’t led astray by the avoidance of Cheris/Jedeo’s viewpoint, which meant there wasn’t any drama in the attempt at a twist ending here. I suspect the author has made a mistake in revealing too many plot elements too soon in this series. The result is that nothing much happened in this book; most of it is taken up by gloomy ruminations from the various characters.

I’m also wondering how Cheris/Jedeo’s propaganda campaign was carried out. I had formed the impression that many of the citizens of this empire were isolated and unaware of what the ruling class and the military were up to. Are they actually connected on social media somehow?

Three stars.