Ninefox Gambit: 1 (The Machineries of Empire, 1)

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And Jedao gets both a body and a mathematician to compensate for his one flaw as a tactical genius: his crippling dyscalculia. Many, many, many people die over the events of the book, and Lee brings home the horror of war in both large and small scope, from showing us the personalities and individuality of the soldiers and civilians, to the powerful moment when a character realizes his team is the only group of people alive in a district that used to house thousands. Ninefox Gambit is covered in a dark blue Metallium cloth, Raven Stratagem a green Metallium cloth and Revenant Gun a light purple Metallium cloth. One thing that reading the whole set of books together really brings to light is how slowly set up the whole story arc is.

And as the siege wears on and they spend more time together, Cheris begins to wonder if all that she knows about Jedao is actually true – and if such questions are not a sign of her own, impending madness. Usual disclaimer: as I am reviewing a whole series at once, I am not going to get too heavily into the plot points of the latter two books, just the first. They’re there the whole time, but like the shark in Jaws, they mostly stay out of focus until the latter part of the story arc. This is not hand-hold-y world—all pieces of tech, social rules, and cultural details are are introduced as components of everyday life with no additional explanation.At Kel Academy, an instructor had explained to Kel Cheris’s class that the threshold winnower was a weapon of last resort, and not just for its notorious connotations.

If you’re looking for crunchy space fleet combat, crunchy small-unit tactics, light-hearted hijinks, or uncomplicated heroics, this probably isn’t the system for you. There’s a paper out there somewhere with my dead name on it if that topic sounds like your cup of tea, but we mostly came up with negative results. Some of these tactics are related to battle formations, which are computed using complex mathematical calculations, and the fact that every time one was used, Yoon Ha Lee went into a lot of detail about them, the book was slowed down immeasurably.Even for readers who are willing to let those sorts of details slide in favour of other important things will soon find themselves quickly overwhelmed by the other details of the setting. The text block is printed offset/litho on 80gsm Munken paper, an archival paper that will stand the test of time. Cheris is a military woman through and through, trained to view through the world around her, particularly the battlefield, through the lens of numbers. If you have read this book or other reviews of it, you might expect me to ask for more details about how the calendrical technology of the hexarchate works. Sure, they all said the concepts could be fiendishly difficult and that this book definitely required work to read, but that the work would be rewarding and worth it.