Friday, October 11, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir




Gideon the Ninth got as much hype and promotion in advance of release of nearly any SciFi/Fantasy book I've been likely to read this year.  From advertisements to glowing endorsements from reviewers/writers I pay attention to, it's hard to think of a book I had on my "to read" list longer that wasn't from a series or writer I already knew and loved.  And well, it had a hell of a simple description: Lesbian Necromancers in Space!  Hard to resist that tagline.

And the result is very very good and nearly worth all the hype.  The story is incredibly fun, essentially a SF/F locked room mystery of sorts with all of the characters either being necromancers of various flavors or swordsmen/swordswomen bodyguards.  And the main character, our narrator Gideon Nav, is really fun to read - a wisecracking lesbian swordsman way out of her depth amongst people far more powerful and more comfortable than she is, with some serious issues.  The book's only serious issue is a setting that isn't quite sketched out well enough to give certain plot points the oomph they need, but otherwise the magic system, the characters, and the plot provide a really great ride for a reader.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Gideon Nav has had enough.  As a baby, she was dropped on the Ninth House, who decided the task of raising her cost enough to forever indenture her to the Ninth's service.  Even worse, nearly all of her generation of young people of the Ninth was killed by a plague, leaving alive basically only Gideon, and Harrowhark, the heir to the Ninth House.....and Harrowhark seems to find no pleasure greater than using her authority, and her powerful necromancy, to drive Gideon crazy without end.  And so she resolves, for the eighty-seventh time to run away and take her talented swords skills to the Cohort.

But when the escape goes awry, it looks like Gideon will be left to suffer in misery....until Harrowhark comes to her with an offer.  The Emperor, aka Necrolord Prime, the master of the First House, has put out a summons to the heirs of each of the eight Houses of necromancers, to come forth into a property of the First and face a test to become the next Immortal Lyctors, the beings of great power who serve the Emperor.  But each heir needs a Cavalier - a talented swordsman - to come with them, and the Ninth has no other besides Gideon.  If Gideon will pretend to be a Cavalier, Harrow promises, a different life of freedom is on the table.

Yet what Gideon doesn't realize, and could not possibly have realized, is that the test will be deadly serious, featuring eight other Necromancers of various specialties and eight other talented swordsmen, all with their own agendas and personal feelings.  And when something goes wrong, and Necromancers and Cavaliers begin dying, it soon becomes clear that Gideon is locked in this place with something far more lethal than simple necromancers....and she will find what she knew about the world....and the people in it...is far less than she may have thought.

Or her wisecracking nature might just lead someone to kill her out of habit.  One of the two.
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Gideon the Ninth features a setting that sounds incredibly out there and incredibly hard to make work: a scifi world run by actual necromancers in space, with the necromancers squabbling over types of necromancy, to say nothing of their fighting forces frequently comprised of elite swordsmen instead of gun-wielders (although guns seem to still exist).  Hell, the leader of them all is a dude who goes by the name - among many others - of Necrolord Prime!  It'd be incredibly easy for this to either be a mess or hilariously cheesy, which is not a bad thing per se, but limits how great the book could be.

Except Muir manages to avoid both of those scenarios.  It's not done perfectly - more on that later - but Muir manages to show off the setting by generally not explaining how things work, and trusting the reader - and Gideon, who's just as new to some of the things the other necromancers can do - to figure it out from there.  The book features essentially eight different flavors of Necromancers, and while we don't really get a perfect picture of how each of the Houses those necros come from work, we really get to see the different personalities and magics they're able to bring forth.  And Muir does a pretty great job for the most part distinguishing between the eight in really interesting and fascinating ways.

Showing us this whole setup and everything is Gideon, who's not only our lead character, but our point of view character (from third person).  Gideon is....well she's hilarious, a backtalking (and thinking) heroine who just wants the freedom to be an irreverent swordswoman beholden either to no one...or at least no one who will try to humiliate her regularly.  But as the story goes onwards, and Gideon meets the other houses, and even has to spend more time actually working together with Harrow instead of just being under her command, Gideon finds herself actually learning to like some of the others involved....and having feelings about more than just "freedom" and more "right and wrong" and the like.  Also, she's a kickass swordswoman who is sweet on women and is utterly irreverent and spouts some of the best lines.  The rest of the cast - particularly Harrow - is pretty solid too, but Gideon is definitely a show stealer.

As for the actual plot - this is basically a locked box mystery at its heart - only with a science fiction, necromancery twist.  So you have the main cast locked in a castle/fortress by themselves and with a few custodians, there supposedly to study a way to achieve a power that comes with immortality, only for people to start dying: and the only possible suspects are traps left in the fortress on purpose by the Emperor, or one of the cast members themselves.  It's really well done honestly - the book contains a number of solid twists and a generally satisfying ending, and manages to hide some of the more obvious twists in a clever way - by acknowledging how obvious they are and then finding reasons to dismiss them (and of course some of these obvious twists then turn out to happen despite the fact).  It keeps you guessing throughout till an explosive but very logical conclusion.

The only real issue I had with this book, as I hinted above, is that its exploration of the setting is very good at explaining how each of the characters work, but is very poor at explaining how this universe works.  So there are references on occasion to the political situation, especially in the final reveal/twist, but since I had no clue about how that situation worked - how do the houses work?  who is the cohort (military) fighting?  why is the Emperor absent?  etc. - it didn't quite have a meaningful impact and didn't quite land.  I'm hoping the sequel will fix this - although the summary description of it suggests it might not.

We'll see: I'll definitely be on board, because you won't find many more fun scifi stories that feature bones and skeletons aplenty like this one.  Or any.  You know.
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