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The Machineries of Empire #3
Revenant Gun
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Science Fiction (2018)Machineries Of Empire, the most exciting science fiction trilogy of the decade, reaches its astonishing conclusion!
When Shuos Jedao wakes up for the first time, several things go wrong. His few memories tell him that he's a seventeen-year-old cadet--but his body belongs to a man decades older. Hexarch Nirai Kujen orders Jedao to reconquer the fractured hexarchate on his behalf even though Jedao has no memory of ever being a soldier, let alone a general. Surely a knack for video games doesn't qualify you to take charge of an army?
Soon Jedao learns the situation is even worse. The Kel soldiers under his command may be compelled to obey him, but they hate him thanks to a massacre he can't remember committing. Kujen's friendliness can't hide the fact that he's a tyrant. And what's worse, Jedao and Kujen are being hunted by an enemy who knows more about Jedao and his crimes than he does himself...
When Shuos Jedao wakes up for the first time, several things go wrong. His few memories tell him that he's a seventeen-year-old cadet--but his body belongs to a man decades older. Hexarch Nirai Kujen orders Jedao to reconquer the fractured hexarchate on his behalf even though Jedao has no memory of ever being a soldier, let alone a general. Surely a knack for video games doesn't qualify you to take charge of an army?
Soon Jedao learns the situation is even worse. The Kel soldiers under his command may be compelled to obey him, but they hate him thanks to a massacre he can't remember committing. Kujen's friendliness can't hide the fact that he's a tyrant. And what's worse, Jedao and Kujen are being hunted by an enemy who knows more about Jedao and his crimes than he does himself...
427 pages, Paperback
First published June 12, 2018
About the author
Yoon Ha Lee
183 books2,018 followersYoon Ha Lee is an American science fiction writer born on January 26, 1979 in Houston, Texas. His first published story, “The Hundredth Question,” appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1999; since then, over two dozen further stories have appeared. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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July 17, 2018
Full disclosure: after we read each others' first books, Yoon and I became friends.
REVENANT GUN is the end. It's about death and rebirth, who deserves to survive and who gets to survive (unfortunately two very different things). GUN is the end and it's structured like an ending, in that it is about the last players on the board coming to their inevitable collision. What makes this book so satisfying is that inevitability - it is the last calculation of the Machinery set in motion back in NINEFOX GAMBIT. If you walk in expecting the rolling crisis of RAVEN STRATAGEM (book 2), where the entire setting seemed to be melting down and reforming, you'll be put off by the pacing of the first half of this book, which follows a few characters carefully laying out their endgames. But the incredible collision and detonation at the climax makes it all worth it; not just a good ending to a book, but a spectacular climax to a trilogy about the deep-laid millennial plans of scheming immortals, and the ordinary, achingly heartfelt people who mess those plans up.
"I'm your gun," Shuos Jedao tells his new-old master, swearing to carry out a mission he despises. Jedao is the cipher at the heart of the trilogy; we saw him and his memories from the outside in NINEFOX, saw his legacy in action in REVENANT, but only now do we get his full perspective...but it's a Jedao who is literally a revenant, a salvaged construct built of old memories, young and vulnerable and wearing a body he doesn't quite understand. Jedao is the REVENANT GUN of the title, and he's been engineered in order to reconquer (most of) known space in the name of his master, tormentor, and deeply fucked up lover Nirai Kujen. Armed with an experimental spacecraft and an army that's obliged to obey his every word even as they loathe his existence, Jedao really only faces one obstacle: he remembers himself as a student, not an infamous centuries-old general. And he's not at all sure he wants to do what he's sworn to do.
Here are some things REVENANT GUN says, maybe louder than they've been said before in this trilogy:
What matters most about people is the way they exist in their homes and with their family. Spymasters, immortal technocrats, generals and assassins - you get to know them by their taste in food and entertainment as much as their tactics in battle. Who would've expected such light-touch intimacy in a military SF space opera?
Immortality is a really bad idea, because it extends the horizon of self-interest, the span of 'things I care about because they will affect me', to the entire universe. Immortals have an incentive to fuck up entire civilizations in the name of their own prosperity. And they bring all their baggage along when they do it.
Math is very beautiful and powerful, and a lot of people can't do it, and that can be really frustrating.
The relationship between commander and commanded is maybe the hardest relationship in the world to negotiate, especially when you care very deeply for those who have no choice but to obey you.
What is most amazing to me (and I'm gonna get personal here, sorry Yoon) about the Machineries of Empire trilogy is that it's perfect. I don't mean flawless, or well-suited to every reader, or without a billion things the author would probably change; I mean that it sets out to say something and it says it, clearly and beautifully, with characters you'll remember and action scenes defined by Yoon's playfully personable touch contrasted against gorgeous math-sharp devastation. I've spoken to Yoon over the course of his work on these books, and he's been as uncertain, unhappy, and vocally displeased with himself as any writer. But he fuckin' did it! He made this complete intermeshed thing, this beautiful clockwork with a lot of raw people meat stuck in the gears trying to change their shape, this world that is at once abominable (the hexarchate maintains physics itself through human sacrifice) and tender (by the end we know the pain that drives every admiral, every functionary, even the archvillain Kujen himself). There's awful waste and ruin. There's genuine hope. It is really an awesome thing to see a mortal man doubt himself and then go on and make art like this anyway.
Anyway, magazine-sized verdict, in the weapon sense rather than the publication:
-It's the final battle for the fate of the Machineries universe, so you'll wonder, at first, why it seems so deliberately paced;
-By the end you won't wonder any more, because the climax is agonizingly tense and there's just enough time spent on the consequences and the fate of the characters;
-If you think NINEFOX + sequels are confusing or poorly explained, I am frustrated with you; your confusion is probably because you feel like you should be figuring out deeper laws or rules, but the book will tell you everything you need to know right on the page, and you don't need to memorize or deduce anything. Just trust the story;
-I was so happy (I know! I'm sorry!) to see Yoon's ruthlessness on full display. He does not show mercy or grant freedom from consequence and ugly collateral. At the same time, there is always humanity, always people trying to be better and to spare those in their power from pain, and there is full dynamic range between torment and happiness on display;
-I am always struck by Yoon's laser-precise focus on the subaltern and ordinary people in the context of this massive and purposefully callous interstellar empire. 100% of the good done in these books can be attributed to 'paying attention to those who aren't supposed to matter';
-I think there's something powerful here about the responsibility to remain good even when you're handed a shitty situation. Everyone in this book has been given an awful status quo and asked to hold it together, and all of them are in pain; some people react to that responsibility and that pain much more selfishly than others, taking it as an excuse or a permit to act selfishly, to stop caring;
-This book is a lot like a gun: compact, mean, loud at the end, and willing to leave you with a lot of debris and wounds to examine after it's all over. I highly recommend it.
REVENANT GUN is the end. It's about death and rebirth, who deserves to survive and who gets to survive (unfortunately two very different things). GUN is the end and it's structured like an ending, in that it is about the last players on the board coming to their inevitable collision. What makes this book so satisfying is that inevitability - it is the last calculation of the Machinery set in motion back in NINEFOX GAMBIT. If you walk in expecting the rolling crisis of RAVEN STRATAGEM (book 2), where the entire setting seemed to be melting down and reforming, you'll be put off by the pacing of the first half of this book, which follows a few characters carefully laying out their endgames. But the incredible collision and detonation at the climax makes it all worth it; not just a good ending to a book, but a spectacular climax to a trilogy about the deep-laid millennial plans of scheming immortals, and the ordinary, achingly heartfelt people who mess those plans up.
"I'm your gun," Shuos Jedao tells his new-old master, swearing to carry out a mission he despises. Jedao is the cipher at the heart of the trilogy; we saw him and his memories from the outside in NINEFOX, saw his legacy in action in REVENANT, but only now do we get his full perspective...but it's a Jedao who is literally a revenant, a salvaged construct built of old memories, young and vulnerable and wearing a body he doesn't quite understand. Jedao is the REVENANT GUN of the title, and he's been engineered in order to reconquer (most of) known space in the name of his master, tormentor, and deeply fucked up lover Nirai Kujen. Armed with an experimental spacecraft and an army that's obliged to obey his every word even as they loathe his existence, Jedao really only faces one obstacle: he remembers himself as a student, not an infamous centuries-old general. And he's not at all sure he wants to do what he's sworn to do.
Here are some things REVENANT GUN says, maybe louder than they've been said before in this trilogy:
What matters most about people is the way they exist in their homes and with their family. Spymasters, immortal technocrats, generals and assassins - you get to know them by their taste in food and entertainment as much as their tactics in battle. Who would've expected such light-touch intimacy in a military SF space opera?
Immortality is a really bad idea, because it extends the horizon of self-interest, the span of 'things I care about because they will affect me', to the entire universe. Immortals have an incentive to fuck up entire civilizations in the name of their own prosperity. And they bring all their baggage along when they do it.
Math is very beautiful and powerful, and a lot of people can't do it, and that can be really frustrating.
The relationship between commander and commanded is maybe the hardest relationship in the world to negotiate, especially when you care very deeply for those who have no choice but to obey you.
What is most amazing to me (and I'm gonna get personal here, sorry Yoon) about the Machineries of Empire trilogy is that it's perfect. I don't mean flawless, or well-suited to every reader, or without a billion things the author would probably change; I mean that it sets out to say something and it says it, clearly and beautifully, with characters you'll remember and action scenes defined by Yoon's playfully personable touch contrasted against gorgeous math-sharp devastation. I've spoken to Yoon over the course of his work on these books, and he's been as uncertain, unhappy, and vocally displeased with himself as any writer. But he fuckin' did it! He made this complete intermeshed thing, this beautiful clockwork with a lot of raw people meat stuck in the gears trying to change their shape, this world that is at once abominable (the hexarchate maintains physics itself through human sacrifice) and tender (by the end we know the pain that drives every admiral, every functionary, even the archvillain Kujen himself). There's awful waste and ruin. There's genuine hope. It is really an awesome thing to see a mortal man doubt himself and then go on and make art like this anyway.
Anyway, magazine-sized verdict, in the weapon sense rather than the publication:
-It's the final battle for the fate of the Machineries universe, so you'll wonder, at first, why it seems so deliberately paced;
-By the end you won't wonder any more, because the climax is agonizingly tense and there's just enough time spent on the consequences and the fate of the characters;
-If you think NINEFOX + sequels are confusing or poorly explained, I am frustrated with you; your confusion is probably because you feel like you should be figuring out deeper laws or rules, but the book will tell you everything you need to know right on the page, and you don't need to memorize or deduce anything. Just trust the story;
-I was so happy (I know! I'm sorry!) to see Yoon's ruthlessness on full display. He does not show mercy or grant freedom from consequence and ugly collateral. At the same time, there is always humanity, always people trying to be better and to spare those in their power from pain, and there is full dynamic range between torment and happiness on display;
-I am always struck by Yoon's laser-precise focus on the subaltern and ordinary people in the context of this massive and purposefully callous interstellar empire. 100% of the good done in these books can be attributed to 'paying attention to those who aren't supposed to matter';
-I think there's something powerful here about the responsibility to remain good even when you're handed a shitty situation. Everyone in this book has been given an awful status quo and asked to hold it together, and all of them are in pain; some people react to that responsibility and that pain much more selfishly than others, taking it as an excuse or a permit to act selfishly, to stop caring;
-This book is a lot like a gun: compact, mean, loud at the end, and willing to leave you with a lot of debris and wounds to examine after it's all over. I highly recommend it.
June 12, 2018
I read this in April, but I'd be remiss in not squeeing on the actual publication date! IT'S HERE!!!
Oh! For all you fanboys and fangirls, I have the author's own words about his writing experience for the trilogy! Link to my blog
Original Review:
This series continues to be one of the most unique trilogies I've ever had the pleasure to read, and that's saying a lot.
It took me a little bit to get into the new direction this novel takes, but if any of you folk were creeped out by Kujen in the previous novel with all his psychosurgery and inventions, you're going to love this book. You might say that this last book in the trilogy is all his.
Jedao has yet another large role again, and believe me, it's not what I had expected. He's a 400-year-old immortal general who has a talent for getting things done, but in the first book, being uploaded into Cheris's mind took a rather odd turn and despite the fact he's known everywhere for being a mass murderer and a psychopath, he sacrifices himself to let Cheris have his memories. The second book has Cheris playing a long game pretending to be the general that everyone is deathly afraid of and she manages to set off a fractured calendar. (Consensual reality math-magic that can perform some super-powerful stuff.)
This book picks up after that. A decade later. And now two sets of fractured Jedao memories in two different bodies are running wild.
I love the mirroring and the way this particular novel feels like an inversion of the first. It also feels like Jedao is a puzzle piece, two halves of his soul, his memories, are fighting each other in an epic battle that reflects just how morally and ethically GRAY this entire series is. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who knows?
But the fact is, it's brilliant. I love the vast worldbuilding, the magic maths, the alien species that are subjugated by the humans, the servitors (AI robots), the sheer number of people, and the social building throughout.
I won't say this is an easy read, but it is easily one of the most rewarding. I've read the first two books two times and this one a single time, and I keep discovering new things in each. I'm also more invested. I recommend this very highly for any of you true fans of original and fearless SF. :)
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC, too!
Oh! For all you fanboys and fangirls, I have the author's own words about his writing experience for the trilogy! Link to my blog
Original Review:
This series continues to be one of the most unique trilogies I've ever had the pleasure to read, and that's saying a lot.
It took me a little bit to get into the new direction this novel takes, but if any of you folk were creeped out by Kujen in the previous novel with all his psychosurgery and inventions, you're going to love this book. You might say that this last book in the trilogy is all his.
Jedao has yet another large role again, and believe me, it's not what I had expected. He's a 400-year-old immortal general who has a talent for getting things done, but in the first book, being uploaded into Cheris's mind took a rather odd turn and despite the fact he's known everywhere for being a mass murderer and a psychopath, he sacrifices himself to let Cheris have his memories. The second book has Cheris playing a long game pretending to be the general that everyone is deathly afraid of and she manages to set off a fractured calendar. (Consensual reality math-magic that can perform some super-powerful stuff.)
This book picks up after that. A decade later. And now two sets of fractured Jedao memories in two different bodies are running wild.
I love the mirroring and the way this particular novel feels like an inversion of the first. It also feels like Jedao is a puzzle piece, two halves of his soul, his memories, are fighting each other in an epic battle that reflects just how morally and ethically GRAY this entire series is. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who knows?
But the fact is, it's brilliant. I love the vast worldbuilding, the magic maths, the alien species that are subjugated by the humans, the servitors (AI robots), the sheer number of people, and the social building throughout.
I won't say this is an easy read, but it is easily one of the most rewarding. I've read the first two books two times and this one a single time, and I keep discovering new things in each. I'm also more invested. I recommend this very highly for any of you true fans of original and fearless SF. :)
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC, too!
June 19, 2018
Check out my Q&A with Yoon Ha Lee for the Revenant Gun Blog Tour https://1000yearplan.com/2018/06/13/r...
Revenant Gun, the final book in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy, opens with its most infamous character displaced in time. Garach Jedao Shkan’s most recent memory is as a first year Shuos cadet serving the Heptarchate – yet here he is 400 years later, with the now-Hexarchate in complete disarray, and Nirai Kujen, the sole remaining Hexarch, explaining to him that he is suddenly a general tasked with leading a fleet against two different successor states: the rebellious Compact, and the presumptuous Protectorate. Kujen’s ultimate goal is to restore the Hexarchate to its pre-rebellion state and stabilize the high calendar, and while this young resurrected Jedao construct has no memory of the battles he later won or the genocide his older self is famous for, Kujen is betting that enough of Jedao the brilliant strategist had been formed by this point, while he also hopes to capitalize on the terror struck by the very mention of Jedao’s name.
Of course, all the scary bits of Jedao’s memory and personality are housed in the mind of the rebel instigator Kel Cheris. To wipe out the Hexarchate once and for all, Cheris must find a way to kill the unkillable Kujen, while her ally, Compact High General Kel Brezen jockeys for strategic territory against his counterpart, Protector General Kel Inesser. At this point in the overall narrative of the trilogy, Lee has already untethered the wrecking ball and smashed this world into powdery fragments. The structure of Revenant Gun, especially in the early chapters, reflects both the time displaced nature and splintered personalities of its major players – the young, incomplete Jedao, the split psyche of what has become of Cheris, the immortal, sociopathic Kujen, the crashhawk Brezen – by toggling through a wider roster of perspectives than the previous two books, and through different points in the nine years since the events of Raven Stratagem.
The upstart, democratically inclined Compact is nothing like Ninefox Gambit’s exuberantly doomed calendrical heretics from The Fortress of Scattered Needles; when following Cheris or Kujen or young Jedao, Revenant Gun pulls off the chess-like dynamism of a spy thriller, while Brezen – perpetually pushed to the brink of exhaustion, enduring chaos for the dubious hope of future stability – lends the narrative a sobering counterpoint. The surprising addition of a servitor, the snakeform Hemiola, among the ever-shifting perspectives is also a canny choice: one of Ninefox’s most humane moments came from a servitor’s point of view, and here, Lee puts Hemiola in a position to make one of the novel’s most ethically consequential choices, with clear-sighted effect.
Like its predecessors, Revenant Gun doesn’t shy away from serious themes or intimate observations, while its author has the good taste to recognize that space opera is, above all, meant to be fun. Lee’s adroit prose always strives for balance, even when reveling in pandemonium. His shrewd humor and sense of irony are perfectly suited for a story largely concerned with military ethics, where service doesn’t end with death if one is deemed useful enough. As the concluding volume to this phenomenal and unconventional sci-fi series, Revenant Gun is both riotous and perfectly controlled.
Revenant Gun, the final book in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy, opens with its most infamous character displaced in time. Garach Jedao Shkan’s most recent memory is as a first year Shuos cadet serving the Heptarchate – yet here he is 400 years later, with the now-Hexarchate in complete disarray, and Nirai Kujen, the sole remaining Hexarch, explaining to him that he is suddenly a general tasked with leading a fleet against two different successor states: the rebellious Compact, and the presumptuous Protectorate. Kujen’s ultimate goal is to restore the Hexarchate to its pre-rebellion state and stabilize the high calendar, and while this young resurrected Jedao construct has no memory of the battles he later won or the genocide his older self is famous for, Kujen is betting that enough of Jedao the brilliant strategist had been formed by this point, while he also hopes to capitalize on the terror struck by the very mention of Jedao’s name.
Of course, all the scary bits of Jedao’s memory and personality are housed in the mind of the rebel instigator Kel Cheris. To wipe out the Hexarchate once and for all, Cheris must find a way to kill the unkillable Kujen, while her ally, Compact High General Kel Brezen jockeys for strategic territory against his counterpart, Protector General Kel Inesser. At this point in the overall narrative of the trilogy, Lee has already untethered the wrecking ball and smashed this world into powdery fragments. The structure of Revenant Gun, especially in the early chapters, reflects both the time displaced nature and splintered personalities of its major players – the young, incomplete Jedao, the split psyche of what has become of Cheris, the immortal, sociopathic Kujen, the crashhawk Brezen – by toggling through a wider roster of perspectives than the previous two books, and through different points in the nine years since the events of Raven Stratagem.
The upstart, democratically inclined Compact is nothing like Ninefox Gambit’s exuberantly doomed calendrical heretics from The Fortress of Scattered Needles; when following Cheris or Kujen or young Jedao, Revenant Gun pulls off the chess-like dynamism of a spy thriller, while Brezen – perpetually pushed to the brink of exhaustion, enduring chaos for the dubious hope of future stability – lends the narrative a sobering counterpoint. The surprising addition of a servitor, the snakeform Hemiola, among the ever-shifting perspectives is also a canny choice: one of Ninefox’s most humane moments came from a servitor’s point of view, and here, Lee puts Hemiola in a position to make one of the novel’s most ethically consequential choices, with clear-sighted effect.
Like its predecessors, Revenant Gun doesn’t shy away from serious themes or intimate observations, while its author has the good taste to recognize that space opera is, above all, meant to be fun. Lee’s adroit prose always strives for balance, even when reveling in pandemonium. His shrewd humor and sense of irony are perfectly suited for a story largely concerned with military ethics, where service doesn’t end with death if one is deemed useful enough. As the concluding volume to this phenomenal and unconventional sci-fi series, Revenant Gun is both riotous and perfectly controlled.
September 19, 2018
I think I finally have a grip on what "calendar" is and does, but I hope nobody ever makes me explain it.
January 10, 2020
Yell and Back Again, a Scientist’s Review
There’s a scene in The Two Towers when Treebeard comes across a clear-cut forest. The sight stops him dead in his tracks, and he stares at it in disbelief. When he realizes Saruman is responsible, he utters, “A wizard should know better!”
Well, I encountered a passage in Revenant Gun that elicited an almost identical reaction from me, except it ended with, “A mathematician should know better!” I was genuinely disturbed. What was Yoon Ha Lee thinking when he wrote it? Why didn’t he fix it during the editing stage? Did he really believe no one would notice it? Is it possible he doesn’t understand its absurdity?
Regardless of the answers [see note at bottom of review], I knew this passage had to be the central focus of my review because it is symptomatic of everything I find wrong with this book, with this trilogy, and with a certain style of currently popular spec fic. Here’s the passage, which describes an infamous weapon of mass destruction. It is mostly correct, until we get to the final (bolded) sentence:
Pushdug búbhosh! Painfully affected by the linearization? Bwahahaha. That's nonsense that transcends mere techno-babble. It's a categorical error like:
If you make sure to eat your vegetables, you will grow as big and strong as triangles.
The victim was killed by 2+2 = 4.
The Bohr model of the atom involves electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting a star. Those within the blast radius of an atomic bomb are painfully affected by the Bohr model.
Even given Yoon Ha Lee’s fictional universe, in which formation geometries and strict adherence to calendars can create ‘exotic effects’ like shields and immortality, it doesn’t make sense. Those effects are created by physical actions - soldiers moving into certain patterns or ritualistic torture. No one can be physically affected by linearization because it is not a physical action. It is an abstract mathematical tool of approximation.
And sure, big whoop, some sci-fi writer tossed in some techno-babble that happens to be a little more nonsensical than usual. What’s the big deal?
The big deal is that Yoon Ha Lee studied mathematics and math teaching at Cornell and Stanford. A mathematician should know better! What’s more, it can’t be accidental. The passage is the ONLY writing in the entire trilogy that even remotely resembles actual math or physics. So why’d he write something he should have known was nonsense? Why not spend the 60 seconds to make it sensible? A few words would make all the difference, something like, “painfully affected by a scrambling of the local space-time geometry.”
Honestly, it’s mind boggling. I just could not fathom how he could be so careless with his choice of words… but then something came to me, something that clarified not just this passage, but also Yoon Ha Lee’s writing style and the spec-fic movement to which he belongs (see also my review for Ancillary Mercy) and even something fundamental about the gender & sexuality conflict underway.
I realized Yoon Ha Lee was treating that relatively exotic math term ‘linearization’ like a neologism, a made-up word whose meaning he gets to assign. And of course, why wouldn’t he? He shows a propensity for using such neologisms throughout the whole series. His space vessels aren’t ‘ships’ but ‘moths.’ His light fixtures aren’t lamps but ‘candlevines.’ And so on.
***LIGHTBULB MOMENT***
See I found the book dreadfully dull. The characters interacted with each other - often intimately - and yet never managed to form relationships. Events are written dramatically, but the drama felt hollow and forced. Indeed, the reading experience was like watching someone try to light wet wood on fire. Lots of sparks but no fire, no warmth, no radiance.
But I understand why now. Yoon Ha Lee believes more strongly in the power of words than I do. Words are not merely descriptive; they possess the power to forge reality. Linearization can cause “blood to leak from every pore in the body”? Sure, why not. And if that’s true, then it is not necessary to develop plot and conflict to craft genuine emotion. Instead, an author need only offer emotional cues to tell the reader what to feel.
But I disagree. Consider friendship.
The friends that strive together, grow together. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee’s relationship is such an enduring and powerful example of friendship because they go through so much together. Frodo and Sam are attacked by spirit ghosts, betrayed by Boromir, hunted by orcs, stalked by a paranoid schizophrenic, captured by a giant spider, all while traversing through miserable, hostile environments. It’s exhausting. I don’t remember if Tolkien ever explicitly tells us they have a great friendship, but it’d be insulting if he did. That Samwise kept going shows us everything we need to know about their friendship.
But here, in Revenant Gun, we’ve got all these relationships that I found empty and emotionless because the characters face so little together.
High General Brezan gets married to Andan Tseya. What do they go through? What’s their Shelob experience? *shrug* As I wrote in my Raven Strategm review, the SUM TOTAL of their time together is literally them just flying around on a garden ship, having boring sex. They don’t fight anything. They don’t overcome anything. They don’t fail anything.
Shuos Leader Mikodez is friends with his assistant Zehun. What do they go through? Assassination attempts? Government coups? No. They have meetings, where they eat cookies and name kittens.
Jedao and one of his closest subordinates, Commander Talaw, share maybe 20 lines of dialogue together.
Cheris is sorta friends with this servitor (robot) who pilots her ship. What do they go through together? Does either sacrifice anything for the other? Provide comfort to the other in a dark time? No, nothing.
And yet the author writes so many scenes as if these relationships have any emotional strength whatsoever. But they don’t. So the whole reading experience was this bizarre experience of an author trying to offer emotional cues and me going, Uhhh, no?
Like, I’m sitting there reading the final pages where Jedao is freaking out over Commander Talaw, and I’m thinking, What the hell? Did I miss something? Was there more than 20 lines of dialogue shared between them? Nope. *sigh*
Really, that’s how I feel about Jedao’s entire characterization in this book. A big sigh. So a man who once murdered 1 million+ people in order to achieve a political objective is now concerned about harming a few more thousand? After having his psyche reconstructed by a completely amoral psychopathic genius who specifically revived him in order to get him to kill people? What? Is this supposed to make sense?
But again, it’s that painfully affected by linearization writ large.
And because nothing bad ever comes from delving too greedily or too deep, let me dig even more, into the minefield that is Gender.
So, gender fluidity is a major theme of this trilogy. I earlier mentioned General Brezan? He has a ‘womanform’ but identifies as male, and he is marrying a man who became a woman. Indeed, the book probably has more transgenders than cisgenders. Yoon Ha Lee himself (according to his wikipedia) is transgender.
Which is fine, but it makes for fascinating pondering: Could there be a connection between this style and gender fluidity?
Indeed I believe there is! When you get right down to it, the relationship between language and reality is at the very core of the gender conflict that’s currently happening in many parts of the world:
Those in favor of gender fluidity make a big distinction between ‘gender’ and ‘sex.’ Sex refers to biological characteristics. Put simply, if a person has XX sex chromosomes, that person is of the ‘female sex’ while if a person has XY sex chromosomes, that person is of the ‘male sex.’ Gender, however, is a social construct. Gender is fluid. There is no requirement that gender and sex match. A person should be free to choose gender.
Opponents of gender fluidity make no such distinction. So transgenderism is a categorical error from such a perspective. Claims of transgender (from the opponents' PoV) would be like if I walked up to you and pointed at a wall that was white and said, “That wall is black.” And you said, “No, I’m pretty sure it’s white.” And I said, “No, it’s white and if you don’t call it white, you’re a colorist asshole.”
Now I’m torn. I’m sympathetic to the non-extremists on both sides. On one hand, I once set out to give a clear, mathematical definition of ethical good, and I discovered that freedom is largely synonymous with good. So the freedom to define ourselves however we like is not only beautiful but essential to moral society. What’s more, transgenderism is the first crest of the wave of transhumanism, which is the future of our species.
On the other hand… I’m the type of person who endeavored to create a mathematical definition for ethical good. So, yeah, I like my terms to be defined as precisely as possible. In my experience, most arguments arise because people are speaking past each other, using the same words but with different meanings. So I’m made uneasy by this notion that we’re going to take these terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ which could have really clear definitions (XY genes) or (XX genes) and then purposefully make them more vague. We know the result will be conflict because the conflict is already here.
This is why I often say mathematics is the language of peace and perhaps you can now appreciate why the initial passage angered me so. Yoon Ha Lee used the language of precision and peace to tell what amounts to a lie, for no good reason.
But it’s not surprising to me because the whole book is written this way, and it’s not surprising to me that Yoon Ha Lee wrote it that way. To liberate gender from the chains of biological definition is to assert the primacy of language. And in a way, Yoon Ha Lee is only doing what all authors attempt to do: to transmute abstract words into true and genuine feelings. To trick the reader into thinking a fictional character - a golem of ink and paper - is a real person who can be hurt, or loved, whose tragedies and triumphs constitute genuine humanity.
And, yet, such a perspective taken to the extreme reminds me of the rise and fall of the Númenóreans, that Tolkien empire of Men who sought to challenge the Gods. One must be careful not to become too divorced from reality. To merely claim drama, character, or love without grounding it in real humanity and carefully constructed plot structure is to risk those emotions ringing hollow and false.
That is is exactly what happened with me. I felt like Yoon Ha Lee was trying to hypnotize me into caring. Just as he tried to grant authenticity and verisimilitude to his ‘threshold winnower’ weapon by tossing around some math terms, it felt like he tried to grant emotional stakes by simply claiming they were there. Have characters have sex and then voila, they are emotionally connected! Have people spend time together without actually overcoming anything and then voila, they must be friends and comrades!
But no… that is not the way my mind and my heart interface with literature. I don’t care if authors write about the real or the unreal. But they need to tell the truth of humanity and truth of their reality in the language of our reality. Which also means that if you’re going to use math terms in your science fiction, then, please, use them correctly.
[Edit/note: Some time after writing this review, I discovered that Yoon Ha Lee gives an acknowledgment to Peter Berman for "helping with the mathematics of the threshold winnower." Which leads me believe that Yoon Ha Lee didn't actually know better and wrote that line in good faith.]
There’s a scene in The Two Towers when Treebeard comes across a clear-cut forest. The sight stops him dead in his tracks, and he stares at it in disbelief. When he realizes Saruman is responsible, he utters, “A wizard should know better!”
Well, I encountered a passage in Revenant Gun that elicited an almost identical reaction from me, except it ended with, “A mathematician should know better!” I was genuinely disturbed. What was Yoon Ha Lee thinking when he wrote it? Why didn’t he fix it during the editing stage? Did he really believe no one would notice it? Is it possible he doesn’t understand its absurdity?
Regardless of the answers [see note at bottom of review], I knew this passage had to be the central focus of my review because it is symptomatic of everything I find wrong with this book, with this trilogy, and with a certain style of currently popular spec fic. Here’s the passage, which describes an infamous weapon of mass destruction. It is mostly correct, until we get to the final (bolded) sentence:
Think of normal spacetime, said the author/illustrator, as a hypersurface. Each point on that surface had a tangent space associated with it. The tangent space could be considered a linearization of the area around the point, with extraneous information knifed away. Anyone stuck in the region of a threshold winnower's effect was painfully affected by the linearization.
Pushdug búbhosh! Painfully affected by the linearization? Bwahahaha. That's nonsense that transcends mere techno-babble. It's a categorical error like:
If you make sure to eat your vegetables, you will grow as big and strong as triangles.
The victim was killed by 2+2 = 4.
The Bohr model of the atom involves electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting a star. Those within the blast radius of an atomic bomb are painfully affected by the Bohr model.
Even given Yoon Ha Lee’s fictional universe, in which formation geometries and strict adherence to calendars can create ‘exotic effects’ like shields and immortality, it doesn’t make sense. Those effects are created by physical actions - soldiers moving into certain patterns or ritualistic torture. No one can be physically affected by linearization because it is not a physical action. It is an abstract mathematical tool of approximation.
And sure, big whoop, some sci-fi writer tossed in some techno-babble that happens to be a little more nonsensical than usual. What’s the big deal?
The big deal is that Yoon Ha Lee studied mathematics and math teaching at Cornell and Stanford. A mathematician should know better! What’s more, it can’t be accidental. The passage is the ONLY writing in the entire trilogy that even remotely resembles actual math or physics. So why’d he write something he should have known was nonsense? Why not spend the 60 seconds to make it sensible? A few words would make all the difference, something like, “painfully affected by a scrambling of the local space-time geometry.”
Honestly, it’s mind boggling. I just could not fathom how he could be so careless with his choice of words… but then something came to me, something that clarified not just this passage, but also Yoon Ha Lee’s writing style and the spec-fic movement to which he belongs (see also my review for Ancillary Mercy) and even something fundamental about the gender & sexuality conflict underway.
I realized Yoon Ha Lee was treating that relatively exotic math term ‘linearization’ like a neologism, a made-up word whose meaning he gets to assign. And of course, why wouldn’t he? He shows a propensity for using such neologisms throughout the whole series. His space vessels aren’t ‘ships’ but ‘moths.’ His light fixtures aren’t lamps but ‘candlevines.’ And so on.
***LIGHTBULB MOMENT***
See I found the book dreadfully dull. The characters interacted with each other - often intimately - and yet never managed to form relationships. Events are written dramatically, but the drama felt hollow and forced. Indeed, the reading experience was like watching someone try to light wet wood on fire. Lots of sparks but no fire, no warmth, no radiance.
But I understand why now. Yoon Ha Lee believes more strongly in the power of words than I do. Words are not merely descriptive; they possess the power to forge reality. Linearization can cause “blood to leak from every pore in the body”? Sure, why not. And if that’s true, then it is not necessary to develop plot and conflict to craft genuine emotion. Instead, an author need only offer emotional cues to tell the reader what to feel.
But I disagree. Consider friendship.
The friends that strive together, grow together. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee’s relationship is such an enduring and powerful example of friendship because they go through so much together. Frodo and Sam are attacked by spirit ghosts, betrayed by Boromir, hunted by orcs, stalked by a paranoid schizophrenic, captured by a giant spider, all while traversing through miserable, hostile environments. It’s exhausting. I don’t remember if Tolkien ever explicitly tells us they have a great friendship, but it’d be insulting if he did. That Samwise kept going shows us everything we need to know about their friendship.
But here, in Revenant Gun, we’ve got all these relationships that I found empty and emotionless because the characters face so little together.
High General Brezan gets married to Andan Tseya. What do they go through? What’s their Shelob experience? *shrug* As I wrote in my Raven Strategm review, the SUM TOTAL of their time together is literally them just flying around on a garden ship, having boring sex. They don’t fight anything. They don’t overcome anything. They don’t fail anything.
Shuos Leader Mikodez is friends with his assistant Zehun. What do they go through? Assassination attempts? Government coups? No. They have meetings, where they eat cookies and name kittens.
Jedao and one of his closest subordinates, Commander Talaw, share maybe 20 lines of dialogue together.
Cheris is sorta friends with this servitor (robot) who pilots her ship. What do they go through together? Does either sacrifice anything for the other? Provide comfort to the other in a dark time? No, nothing.
And yet the author writes so many scenes as if these relationships have any emotional strength whatsoever. But they don’t. So the whole reading experience was this bizarre experience of an author trying to offer emotional cues and me going, Uhhh, no?
Like, I’m sitting there reading the final pages where Jedao is freaking out over Commander Talaw, and I’m thinking, What the hell? Did I miss something? Was there more than 20 lines of dialogue shared between them? Nope. *sigh*
Really, that’s how I feel about Jedao’s entire characterization in this book. A big sigh. So a man who once murdered 1 million+ people in order to achieve a political objective is now concerned about harming a few more thousand? After having his psyche reconstructed by a completely amoral psychopathic genius who specifically revived him in order to get him to kill people? What? Is this supposed to make sense?
But again, it’s that painfully affected by linearization writ large.
And because nothing bad ever comes from delving too greedily or too deep, let me dig even more, into the minefield that is Gender.
So, gender fluidity is a major theme of this trilogy. I earlier mentioned General Brezan? He has a ‘womanform’ but identifies as male, and he is marrying a man who became a woman. Indeed, the book probably has more transgenders than cisgenders. Yoon Ha Lee himself (according to his wikipedia) is transgender.
Which is fine, but it makes for fascinating pondering: Could there be a connection between this style and gender fluidity?
Indeed I believe there is! When you get right down to it, the relationship between language and reality is at the very core of the gender conflict that’s currently happening in many parts of the world:
Those in favor of gender fluidity make a big distinction between ‘gender’ and ‘sex.’ Sex refers to biological characteristics. Put simply, if a person has XX sex chromosomes, that person is of the ‘female sex’ while if a person has XY sex chromosomes, that person is of the ‘male sex.’ Gender, however, is a social construct. Gender is fluid. There is no requirement that gender and sex match. A person should be free to choose gender.
Opponents of gender fluidity make no such distinction. So transgenderism is a categorical error from such a perspective. Claims of transgender (from the opponents' PoV) would be like if I walked up to you and pointed at a wall that was white and said, “That wall is black.” And you said, “No, I’m pretty sure it’s white.” And I said, “No, it’s white and if you don’t call it white, you’re a colorist asshole.”
Now I’m torn. I’m sympathetic to the non-extremists on both sides. On one hand, I once set out to give a clear, mathematical definition of ethical good, and I discovered that freedom is largely synonymous with good. So the freedom to define ourselves however we like is not only beautiful but essential to moral society. What’s more, transgenderism is the first crest of the wave of transhumanism, which is the future of our species.
On the other hand… I’m the type of person who endeavored to create a mathematical definition for ethical good. So, yeah, I like my terms to be defined as precisely as possible. In my experience, most arguments arise because people are speaking past each other, using the same words but with different meanings. So I’m made uneasy by this notion that we’re going to take these terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ which could have really clear definitions (XY genes) or (XX genes) and then purposefully make them more vague. We know the result will be conflict because the conflict is already here.
This is why I often say mathematics is the language of peace and perhaps you can now appreciate why the initial passage angered me so. Yoon Ha Lee used the language of precision and peace to tell what amounts to a lie, for no good reason.
But it’s not surprising to me because the whole book is written this way, and it’s not surprising to me that Yoon Ha Lee wrote it that way. To liberate gender from the chains of biological definition is to assert the primacy of language. And in a way, Yoon Ha Lee is only doing what all authors attempt to do: to transmute abstract words into true and genuine feelings. To trick the reader into thinking a fictional character - a golem of ink and paper - is a real person who can be hurt, or loved, whose tragedies and triumphs constitute genuine humanity.
And, yet, such a perspective taken to the extreme reminds me of the rise and fall of the Númenóreans, that Tolkien empire of Men who sought to challenge the Gods. One must be careful not to become too divorced from reality. To merely claim drama, character, or love without grounding it in real humanity and carefully constructed plot structure is to risk those emotions ringing hollow and false.
That is is exactly what happened with me. I felt like Yoon Ha Lee was trying to hypnotize me into caring. Just as he tried to grant authenticity and verisimilitude to his ‘threshold winnower’ weapon by tossing around some math terms, it felt like he tried to grant emotional stakes by simply claiming they were there. Have characters have sex and then voila, they are emotionally connected! Have people spend time together without actually overcoming anything and then voila, they must be friends and comrades!
But no… that is not the way my mind and my heart interface with literature. I don’t care if authors write about the real or the unreal. But they need to tell the truth of humanity and truth of their reality in the language of our reality. Which also means that if you’re going to use math terms in your science fiction, then, please, use them correctly.
[Edit/note: Some time after writing this review, I discovered that Yoon Ha Lee gives an acknowledgment to Peter Berman for "helping with the mathematics of the threshold winnower." Which leads me believe that Yoon Ha Lee didn't actually know better and wrote that line in good faith.]
May 21, 2019
Revenant Gun is the third and final book in the sci-fi trilogy Machineries of Empire, also known as “the mass murder magic math books” or, more simply, “my favorite books”.
I usually don't like finales. If I made it to the end, there's a chance that I'm a little disappointed that the thing I'm reading is actually ending, yes, but that isn't the point - it's that finales often lose sight of the emotional and personal stakes in favor of tying up the plot, which is always unsatisfying. And this book doesn't. If anything, it feels more personal than the other two, and the most battle-focused novel was the first one.
For me, this series is about how you don't get to choose who is human, who deserves rights, and who doesn't. And while it might seem a message that is as relevant as it is somewhat obvious, the nuance this series approached it with is what makes it stand out to me. From necessary casualties to the cost of war and the right of non-human sentient beings - there's a lot in here, and this series doesn't shy away from the fact that sometimes there's no such thing as a good choice, but it always wants you to remember that you're talking about people.
And for such a big, terrible world, there hasn't been a moment in which the characters inhabiting it haven't felt like fully rounded people.
Revenant Gun takes place almost ten years after the events of Raven Stratagem and is narrated through four PoVs:
🚀 Jedao, or, maybe more accurately, Jedao #2, as we're talking about a 17-year-old amnesiac version of Jedao, brought back to life by Kujen. His storyline, of which I will talk more about later, was both very painful to read (so much self-loathing and sadness) and the best thing this book could have done. Seeing the ways in which he is like Jedao #1 and yet different from him was really interesting, especially considering how some scenes of this book mirror the first two.
🚀 High General Brezan, who is trying to learn how to lead a country and manage the Compact's situation after Cheris/Jedao #1 ran away. I still love him a lot. He's grumpy in such an endearing way. And his feeling for Tseya? Of course I want to talk about Tseya. And I love as an idea, especially with these two, this is perfect
🚀 Hemiola, a snakeform servitor (robot, basically) who served Hexarch Nirai Kujen and is now accompanying Cheris/Jedao (Jeris?) on a mission it doesn't fully understand yet. It deserves better and is too pure for this world. I love it, and I love how this series has evil humans with nice AIs instead of the other way around
🚀Protector-General Inesser, the only human character we hadn't already met. She's the oldest Kel general, she's a woman with multiple wives, and this book allowed her to be competent, definitely not nice, and yet definitely not evil. More competent women in power who fit these standards! I didn't always like her (especially in previous reads) but I appreciate her a lot.
But to be honest, I will always kind of see Revenant Gun as Kujen's book. He has spent the past ones being secretively horrible and causing a lot of damage that way, and now he's as out in the open as he gets. I've never read about anyone so... horrible who is as entertaining to read about.
The dysfunctional relationship he and the various version of Jedao have is so fascinating. There's mutual dislike as much as there's mutual fascination and attraction, and there are mind games and there's straight up abuse from Kujen's part. There are so many things wrong with it. I love all of it.
The way Kujen manipulates Jedao #2 was heartbreaking to read (), and... I'm proud of Jedao #2, can I say that? He would disagree, but I am. It also showed that Kujen, for how much he claims to be the only one who understands and accepts Jedao (ohh the red flags), actually doesn't at all.
The attention this series gives to details will never fail to get me. Every time I notice something new, some things that call back to previous scenes, or the excellent foreshadowing, or even just the way the series itself acknowledges the importance of little things. You have to keep going, it says, and I appreciate that a lot. That one conversation Mikodez and Brezan have about hobbies and how being self-destructive helps no one, especially.
Also, the constant casual queerness? The way this series has a major, developed and morally gray aroace character - Mikodez, I love him so much, and I love how this dysfunctional horrible person was at times the wise person in the room - and no major romantic subplots? The way the only real romance is between two trans characters, and it's not more developed than any other non-romantic relationship in this novel? I... all of this means a lot to me.
And, to end this: what it says about letting go, and the role of punishment vs. limiting damage - that's not a direction novels often choose to explore, as "everyone who has done evil either dies or is 100% redeemed" is much easier, but I will never not love this series' dedication to moral grayness and not taking the easy way out.
Trigger warnings, because this book really needs them: death, shooting, gore, not-that-explicit sex scenes but dubious consent situations, psych surgery (read: mind control), memory loss, suicide (not main character), suicidal ideation (main character), torture, body horror, non-human slavery (enslaved alien species). Mentioned: a character was a child sex worker in the past, starvation, rape, genocide.
I usually don't like finales. If I made it to the end, there's a chance that I'm a little disappointed that the thing I'm reading is actually ending, yes, but that isn't the point - it's that finales often lose sight of the emotional and personal stakes in favor of tying up the plot, which is always unsatisfying. And this book doesn't. If anything, it feels more personal than the other two, and the most battle-focused novel was the first one.
For me, this series is about how you don't get to choose who is human, who deserves rights, and who doesn't. And while it might seem a message that is as relevant as it is somewhat obvious, the nuance this series approached it with is what makes it stand out to me. From necessary casualties to the cost of war and the right of non-human sentient beings - there's a lot in here, and this series doesn't shy away from the fact that sometimes there's no such thing as a good choice, but it always wants you to remember that you're talking about people.
And for such a big, terrible world, there hasn't been a moment in which the characters inhabiting it haven't felt like fully rounded people.
Revenant Gun takes place almost ten years after the events of Raven Stratagem and is narrated through four PoVs:
🚀 Jedao, or, maybe more accurately, Jedao #2, as we're talking about a 17-year-old amnesiac version of Jedao, brought back to life by Kujen. His storyline, of which I will talk more about later, was both very painful to read (so much self-loathing and sadness) and the best thing this book could have done. Seeing the ways in which he is like Jedao #1 and yet different from him was really interesting, especially considering how some scenes of this book mirror the first two.
🚀 High General Brezan, who is trying to learn how to lead a country and manage the Compact's situation after Cheris/Jedao #1 ran away. I still love him a lot. He's grumpy in such an endearing way. And his feeling for Tseya? Of course I want to talk about Tseya. And I love as an idea, especially with these two, this is perfect
🚀 Hemiola, a snakeform servitor (robot, basically) who served Hexarch Nirai Kujen and is now accompanying Cheris/Jedao (Jeris?) on a mission it doesn't fully understand yet. It deserves better and is too pure for this world. I love it, and I love how this series has evil humans with nice AIs instead of the other way around
🚀Protector-General Inesser, the only human character we hadn't already met. She's the oldest Kel general, she's a woman with multiple wives, and this book allowed her to be competent, definitely not nice, and yet definitely not evil. More competent women in power who fit these standards! I didn't always like her (especially in previous reads) but I appreciate her a lot.
But to be honest, I will always kind of see Revenant Gun as Kujen's book. He has spent the past ones being secretively horrible and causing a lot of damage that way, and now he's as out in the open as he gets. I've never read about anyone so... horrible who is as entertaining to read about.
The dysfunctional relationship he and the various version of Jedao have is so fascinating. There's mutual dislike as much as there's mutual fascination and attraction, and there are mind games and there's straight up abuse from Kujen's part. There are so many things wrong with it. I love all of it.
The way Kujen manipulates Jedao #2 was heartbreaking to read (), and... I'm proud of Jedao #2, can I say that? He would disagree, but I am. It also showed that Kujen, for how much he claims to be the only one who understands and accepts Jedao (ohh the red flags), actually doesn't at all.
The attention this series gives to details will never fail to get me. Every time I notice something new, some things that call back to previous scenes, or the excellent foreshadowing, or even just the way the series itself acknowledges the importance of little things. You have to keep going, it says, and I appreciate that a lot. That one conversation Mikodez and Brezan have about hobbies and how being self-destructive helps no one, especially.
Also, the constant casual queerness? The way this series has a major, developed and morally gray aroace character - Mikodez, I love him so much, and I love how this dysfunctional horrible person was at times the wise person in the room - and no major romantic subplots? The way the only real romance is between two trans characters, and it's not more developed than any other non-romantic relationship in this novel? I... all of this means a lot to me.
And, to end this: what it says about letting go, and the role of punishment vs. limiting damage - that's not a direction novels often choose to explore, as "everyone who has done evil either dies or is 100% redeemed" is much easier, but I will never not love this series' dedication to moral grayness and not taking the easy way out.
Trigger warnings, because this book really needs them: death, shooting, gore, not-that-explicit sex scenes but dubious consent situations, psych surgery (read: mind control), memory loss, suicide (not main character), suicidal ideation (main character), torture, body horror, non-human slavery (enslaved alien species). Mentioned: a character was a child sex worker in the past, starvation, rape, genocide.
March 20, 2021
4.5 Stars
This was a strong conclusion to the Machinery of Empires trilogy. While Raven Stratagem remains my personal favourite, this third book was a close second. Filled with incredible character work, humour and exciting plot developments, I just loved spending more time in this future universe.
I enjoyed the new character added in this book, which added a new perspective of another character. This series was just so imaginative. It felt incredibly unique, like nothing else I have read before in the science fiction genre. I particularly enjoyed the elements of sexual and gender diversity, including some rather hot gay sex scenes in this book.
I would highly recommend this trilogy to any science fiction reader looking to read something new. I intend to read the related short story collection very soon because I just want to spend more time with these characters.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher, Rebellion Publishing.
This was a strong conclusion to the Machinery of Empires trilogy. While Raven Stratagem remains my personal favourite, this third book was a close second. Filled with incredible character work, humour and exciting plot developments, I just loved spending more time in this future universe.
I enjoyed the new character added in this book, which added a new perspective of another character. This series was just so imaginative. It felt incredibly unique, like nothing else I have read before in the science fiction genre. I particularly enjoyed the elements of sexual and gender diversity, including some rather hot gay sex scenes in this book.
I would highly recommend this trilogy to any science fiction reader looking to read something new. I intend to read the related short story collection very soon because I just want to spend more time with these characters.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher, Rebellion Publishing.
April 5, 2024
Brilliant science fiction, with high stakes and fascinating main characters. Every installment seems to get better and this book got me emotionally invested in a way the earlier two books never had me
Yes, you can have everything you want to have, except freedom
Jedao, Kujen, Dhanneth, Cheris, Mikodez (could have used a bit more of him) and even Innesser: the author created such great characters which partly are entirely new to the franchise. Opening up nine year after the ending of the Raven Stratagem, we are flung into a changed Hexarchate, with immortals fighting over it in an intricate manner that reminded me of Full Metal Alchemist. But then queer, almost all main characters are effortlessly so (since when was Brezen trans?). Someone is the youngest father, I love this natural way of treating sexuality and relationships, and how humanity seems to have moved on. You can be a genocidal, religious, colonial space empire, but at least no one is a homophobe in this series. Also the main queer romance with all its moral complexities manages to lift the whole book up in a steamy manner, from one of the main characters being braced against the wall by a muscular guy into bondage and cuts, and tiger tattoos on back.
But the book rests not on these more spicy elements, in essence The Machineries of Empire series is a set of high action and ideas novels. People end up stealing bodies Altered Carbon style, we have a horrific superweapon, moths being biologically hacked, memory manipulation (and getting to grip with identity and nature versus nurture questions) while servitors and impersonation remain recurring themes in this volume. Variable layout in organic war moths is an amazing idea we get to see a bit more of as well.
Besides this (and the way Yoon Ha Lee manages to nail down cool, like the training of the cadets scene is gold, how can you write something so badass?) and there is real philosophical pondering going on as well, mainly on the corrupting effect immortality would have. Or what eternal sensory deprivation would do to someone, and if this would tilt someone into a Stockholm syndrome. In general the question of how far people can be pushed, and for what, comes back. Also image and power that flows from reputations is questioned, as is identity in general.
Revenant Gun is a great conclusion to the series!
Quotes:
What the hell am I?
Half of leadership is prancing around looking like you know what are you doing, wether or not you actually do. The other half, well that is where allies and delegation to gifted subordinates is for.
The first rule of any game was to assume you could win.
You are going to believe what you’re going to believe
Physics is for the weak
Was it vain, perverse or merely mortifying to be attracted to the actor playing you?
Really, it’s not so difficult if you have all the guns
It should have learned that the unassuming ones were always agents of revolutionary change
He always possessed a healthy sense of his own importance
Fighting was usually the stupid way to win anyway
By the time he met me, deaths didn’t move him much
I’d rather fuck a squid - wow, brutal
What’s a life but a coin to spend?
We’ll fix the world and return it to how it’s supposed to be
No one chooses who they love
You’ve been hurt.
Then you know what I like.
- Girl 😛😛
Oh why use words? Weapons are a more universal language anyway
Fuck you.
That can also be arranged.
Fuck propriety
Someone had to keep on with the small acts that kept society moving
I hated you from the beginning - All the emotions, this would make such an epic Netflix series
Yes, you can have everything you want to have, except freedom
Jedao, Kujen, Dhanneth, Cheris, Mikodez (could have used a bit more of him) and even Innesser: the author created such great characters which partly are entirely new to the franchise. Opening up nine year after the ending of the Raven Stratagem, we are flung into a changed Hexarchate, with immortals fighting over it in an intricate manner that reminded me of Full Metal Alchemist. But then queer, almost all main characters are effortlessly so (since when was Brezen trans?). Someone is the youngest father, I love this natural way of treating sexuality and relationships, and how humanity seems to have moved on. You can be a genocidal, religious, colonial space empire, but at least no one is a homophobe in this series. Also the main queer romance with all its moral complexities manages to lift the whole book up in a steamy manner, from one of the main characters being braced against the wall by a muscular guy into bondage and cuts, and tiger tattoos on back.
But the book rests not on these more spicy elements, in essence The Machineries of Empire series is a set of high action and ideas novels. People end up stealing bodies Altered Carbon style, we have a horrific superweapon, moths being biologically hacked, memory manipulation (and getting to grip with identity and nature versus nurture questions) while servitors and impersonation remain recurring themes in this volume. Variable layout in organic war moths is an amazing idea we get to see a bit more of as well.
Besides this (and the way Yoon Ha Lee manages to nail down cool, like the training of the cadets scene is gold, how can you write something so badass?) and there is real philosophical pondering going on as well, mainly on the corrupting effect immortality would have. Or what eternal sensory deprivation would do to someone, and if this would tilt someone into a Stockholm syndrome. In general the question of how far people can be pushed, and for what, comes back. Also image and power that flows from reputations is questioned, as is identity in general.
Revenant Gun is a great conclusion to the series!
Quotes:
What the hell am I?
Half of leadership is prancing around looking like you know what are you doing, wether or not you actually do. The other half, well that is where allies and delegation to gifted subordinates is for.
The first rule of any game was to assume you could win.
You are going to believe what you’re going to believe
Physics is for the weak
Was it vain, perverse or merely mortifying to be attracted to the actor playing you?
Really, it’s not so difficult if you have all the guns
It should have learned that the unassuming ones were always agents of revolutionary change
He always possessed a healthy sense of his own importance
Fighting was usually the stupid way to win anyway
By the time he met me, deaths didn’t move him much
I’d rather fuck a squid - wow, brutal
What’s a life but a coin to spend?
We’ll fix the world and return it to how it’s supposed to be
No one chooses who they love
You’ve been hurt.
Then you know what I like.
- Girl 😛😛
Oh why use words? Weapons are a more universal language anyway
Fuck you.
That can also be arranged.
Fuck propriety
Someone had to keep on with the small acts that kept society moving
I hated you from the beginning - All the emotions, this would make such an epic Netflix series
March 19, 2023
Re-read 2023: Still love this series. This was a really enjoyable re-read.
Original review: Ok, this series, and this book in particular, is everything I love most in sci-fi: wildly imaginative tech (I vastly prefer fantastical, clearly made-up technology to pseudo-science tech explanations that don't make sense); so much politics; so much plotting and backstabbing and strategizing; ethical and moral tangles; characters I adore (I loved basically every main character except Kujen - I understood how Kujen became who he is, but I never liked him), including AI critters; queer and polyam characters all over the place; and Yoon Ha Lee's writing, which while obviously not for everyone seems to be a good fit for how my reading brain works. Also wow I love that cover.
Original review: Ok, this series, and this book in particular, is everything I love most in sci-fi: wildly imaginative tech (I vastly prefer fantastical, clearly made-up technology to pseudo-science tech explanations that don't make sense); so much politics; so much plotting and backstabbing and strategizing; ethical and moral tangles; characters I adore (I loved basically every main character except Kujen - I understood how Kujen became who he is, but I never liked him), including AI critters; queer and polyam characters all over the place; and Yoon Ha Lee's writing, which while obviously not for everyone seems to be a good fit for how my reading brain works. Also wow I love that cover.
May 5, 2019
Didn't really click with this series like I thought I would and I enjoyed each book a little less than the one before it. Almost DNF'd this one a bunch of times but I had already invested so much of my reading time that I finished it for finishings sake. From about 60% to about 75% on my Kindle was pretty cool but I felt absolutely nothing for any of the characters and could not have cared less about anything that was happening to any of them. Gone was the grittiness, violence, and intensity of the first book only to be replaced with some sort of sing-songy, light-hearted stuff that I didn't connect to at all. In book one people were getting blown up and shredded, and intestines were hanging from trees and shit and by this book, to me at least, it seemed the author wanted to do something that was more palatable for the masses, maybe even a younger crowd. I dunno, but he lost me along the way.
June 16, 2018
Dear Hugo voters,
Let me share with you my thoughts about this book. I remember the first time I read Ninefox Gambit. I was stunned. Entering a world of the Hexarchate, a repressive space empire (not unlike the Empire from Star Wars), that derived its power from “calendrical weapons”, which rely on the acceptance of a particular calendar to power devices that bend and break the laws of physics. I was so confused at first. This regime was so paranoid, they had a special faction (one of the six) specializing in arresting and torturing 'heretics' and use their military might (again, with another special faction) to suppress whoever deemed responsible for 'calendrical rot'. All these weirdness are spiced with super cool worldbuilding with its gender-fluid societies, biological mothships, adorable servitors who love serialized drama, and many more.
And then I met Shuos Jedao, a mad military genius who was resurrected at other's bidding, ensconced in another soldier's body, Kel Cheris, who had a very interesting personal background. And the way Cheris and Jedao interacted was one of the key highlights that entertained me in this series. Alas, I did not get it in this last book.
Here in this last book of the trilogy, we have some new POVs that reduce significantly Cheris/Jedao dynamics and inner dialogues. One - a servitor named Hemiola - is actually very endearing. No complaint there. But, there is one POV that rather disappoint me since I was expecting so much more when it was revealed. I also missed some characters, whose POVs in the previous books were so much fun to follow. I do wish Lee would consider doing what GRRM did with A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons - two books with much of the stories are happening in parallel, hence we do not miss any important POVs.
Having said that, Machineries of Empire is one of the best series out there. It is fresh, engaging, confusing, exhilarating. It made me think about competing world views (who are we? who are they? do we want they to think like us? why?) and most of all, the moral agency of the characters, humans or non-humans. To quote Faulkner, 'The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself'. This trilogy is all about that.
With that (hopefully) high note, I sincerely request that you vote Raven Stratagem to win the Hugo for best novel category and put this series in your slate for next year's best series nominees.
Yours in calendrical heresy,
Silvana.
Let me share with you my thoughts about this book. I remember the first time I read Ninefox Gambit. I was stunned. Entering a world of the Hexarchate, a repressive space empire (not unlike the Empire from Star Wars), that derived its power from “calendrical weapons”, which rely on the acceptance of a particular calendar to power devices that bend and break the laws of physics. I was so confused at first. This regime was so paranoid, they had a special faction (one of the six) specializing in arresting and torturing 'heretics' and use their military might (again, with another special faction) to suppress whoever deemed responsible for 'calendrical rot'. All these weirdness are spiced with super cool worldbuilding with its gender-fluid societies, biological mothships, adorable servitors who love serialized drama, and many more.
And then I met Shuos Jedao, a mad military genius who was resurrected at other's bidding, ensconced in another soldier's body, Kel Cheris, who had a very interesting personal background. And the way Cheris and Jedao interacted was one of the key highlights that entertained me in this series. Alas, I did not get it in this last book.
Here in this last book of the trilogy, we have some new POVs that reduce significantly Cheris/Jedao dynamics and inner dialogues. One - a servitor named Hemiola - is actually very endearing. No complaint there. But, there is one POV that rather disappoint me since I was expecting so much more when it was revealed. I also missed some characters, whose POVs in the previous books were so much fun to follow. I do wish Lee would consider doing what GRRM did with A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons - two books with much of the stories are happening in parallel, hence we do not miss any important POVs.
Having said that, Machineries of Empire is one of the best series out there. It is fresh, engaging, confusing, exhilarating. It made me think about competing world views (who are we? who are they? do we want they to think like us? why?) and most of all, the moral agency of the characters, humans or non-humans. To quote Faulkner, 'The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself'. This trilogy is all about that.
With that (hopefully) high note, I sincerely request that you vote Raven Stratagem to win the Hugo for best novel category and put this series in your slate for next year's best series nominees.
Yours in calendrical heresy,
Silvana.
September 13, 2023
4.5 stars rounded up
A very strong conclusion to the trilogy! Revenant Gun jumps forward 8 years and then proceeds with a dual timeline leading to a fairly satisfying end that still leaves some questions open-ended and a world with plenty more room to explore. This is a great trilogy and this volume seems very interested in exploring bodily autonomy, power, and consent. It's also the most overtly queer of the series. Video to come but I'm glad I finally finished these.
A very strong conclusion to the trilogy! Revenant Gun jumps forward 8 years and then proceeds with a dual timeline leading to a fairly satisfying end that still leaves some questions open-ended and a world with plenty more room to explore. This is a great trilogy and this volume seems very interested in exploring bodily autonomy, power, and consent. It's also the most overtly queer of the series. Video to come but I'm glad I finally finished these.
June 4, 2018
Charming military space opera not too far afield from David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, which was a guilty pleasure for me over decade ago. In this conclusion of the trilogy, the stable domination of the galaxy by human factions has been upset by the assassination of most of the six overlords known as the hexarchate. Again, the personality of the brilliant and long-ago dead general Jedao is a main character, here put in place in a fresh body as the military commander for the most nefarious surviving hexarch, Narai Kujen. He makes for a colorful bad guy of the highest order, given skills in manipulating people from his 900 years in power, fiendishly inventive in developing new weapons, and is effectively unkillable from his ability to jump into the control of any available human. Jedao, who we followed in service to the reform faction in his last incarnation, is here tasked with assuming the role of military commander for Kujen. Unfortunately, he only has access of his memories up to his cadet days and doesn’t recall committing the mass murders of his own men that now inspire loathing and fear in his current subordinates. Yet the identity left him is human enough to despise Kujen and to look for ways to somehow betray him.
One of the masterminds of the downfall of most of the hexarchate, Cheris, disappeared, leaving her partner Brezan to a carry their mission of reform of the Kel faction and recovery of the hexarchate. They objected to the tyranny, enslavement, and ritual torture employed by the past regime, all empowered by their use of a “calendar” system which affects physics in favor of special weapons, certain stardrive advances, and an adaptation of the military to “formation instinct”, which compels obedience to orders rather than the usual dependence on rank hierarchy. Cheris undermined all that by broadcasting a new calendar. Brezan hopes to forge a new alliance with the remaining Kel and get them to renounce the “high calendar”, but he must act fast before Kujen wipes them both out. A key to subverting and defeating Kujen may lie with factions among the lowly servitor AI robots, which provide a delightful set of characters to the mix.
One of the main pleasures of this epic lies in all the personality quirks and interactions of its byzantine cast of characters. As with the Game of Thrones, there are a lot of nasty power-mongers and substantial play with twisted sexuality. On the other hand, some might wish for less jockeying for power and more action. The technology of the calendrical system is odd and interesting, but it’s divorced from anything but handwaving with respect to physics, and thus on the order of magical systems. We do have exotic weapons like the gravity cannon and the “threshold winnower”, but they don’t get much play. The main technology used for the core plot is the technique of personality preservation and implantation in another brain, which has been used a lot by other writers (such as in recent years by Richard Morgan). The art lies in the whole symphony Lee directs among the various factions with their power plays and treacherous plots, rendering plenty enough fun and excitement to keep me turning the pages and neglecting sleep..
This book was provider for review by the publisher through the Netgalley program.
One of the masterminds of the downfall of most of the hexarchate, Cheris, disappeared, leaving her partner Brezan to a carry their mission of reform of the Kel faction and recovery of the hexarchate. They objected to the tyranny, enslavement, and ritual torture employed by the past regime, all empowered by their use of a “calendar” system which affects physics in favor of special weapons, certain stardrive advances, and an adaptation of the military to “formation instinct”, which compels obedience to orders rather than the usual dependence on rank hierarchy. Cheris undermined all that by broadcasting a new calendar. Brezan hopes to forge a new alliance with the remaining Kel and get them to renounce the “high calendar”, but he must act fast before Kujen wipes them both out. A key to subverting and defeating Kujen may lie with factions among the lowly servitor AI robots, which provide a delightful set of characters to the mix.
One of the main pleasures of this epic lies in all the personality quirks and interactions of its byzantine cast of characters. As with the Game of Thrones, there are a lot of nasty power-mongers and substantial play with twisted sexuality. On the other hand, some might wish for less jockeying for power and more action. The technology of the calendrical system is odd and interesting, but it’s divorced from anything but handwaving with respect to physics, and thus on the order of magical systems. We do have exotic weapons like the gravity cannon and the “threshold winnower”, but they don’t get much play. The main technology used for the core plot is the technique of personality preservation and implantation in another brain, which has been used a lot by other writers (such as in recent years by Richard Morgan). The art lies in the whole symphony Lee directs among the various factions with their power plays and treacherous plots, rendering plenty enough fun and excitement to keep me turning the pages and neglecting sleep..
This book was provider for review by the publisher through the Netgalley program.
July 26, 2018
A few non-spoilery ways I've described this series:
-A homicidal space ghost goes around fighting injustice with math magic in a vacuum-faring moth.
-A psychedelic K-drama in space pretending to be military sci-fi.
This will either intrigue you or repulse you, I think. I thought it was glorious. As military sci-fi-ish as Star Wars or perhaps even Star Trek. Maybe more Star Trek, because while there are battles, the battles within are always the most interesting.
It's hard for me to do my usual format for this book without getting into things that might spoil it or earlier works. So I'll just do overall bullet points for my impressions.
CONTENT WARNING: (no actual spoilers, just a list of topics)
-Delightful world. As usual, Yoon (I'm pretending we're friends now because I love his brain so much) has an incredible imagination just enough spelled out that I could flesh them out the way they wanted.
-The characters are amazing. HOLY SHIT DO I LOVE JEDAO. HOW MUCH DO I LOVE HIM, YOU ASK? SO MUCH. Everyone else, also great. I loved that there's different sorts of humor. I love that I hate Brezan's antagonistic defensiveness which is sarcastic but different from Jedao's self-loathing confident irony. I like that I know so much about what makes each of them tick.
-The pacing is off. Again, as with others, the big climax is sort of flat. The build up is always better than the finale for me.
-What we don't know. There are so many mysteries still. It was a good conclusion, I feel at peace, but also I desperately need to know some things.
In sum, a brilliant series that I'm so glad I read and which will definitely occupy brain space for a long time, but I think Yoon has even more perfection in front of him and also I basically just need to read Jedao's diary for a fewdays, months eternities.
-A homicidal space ghost goes around fighting injustice with math magic in a vacuum-faring moth.
-A psychedelic K-drama in space pretending to be military sci-fi.
This will either intrigue you or repulse you, I think. I thought it was glorious. As military sci-fi-ish as Star Wars or perhaps even Star Trek. Maybe more Star Trek, because while there are battles, the battles within are always the most interesting.
It's hard for me to do my usual format for this book without getting into things that might spoil it or earlier works. So I'll just do overall bullet points for my impressions.
CONTENT WARNING: (no actual spoilers, just a list of topics)
-Delightful world. As usual, Yoon (I'm pretending we're friends now because I love his brain so much) has an incredible imagination just enough spelled out that I could flesh them out the way they wanted.
-The characters are amazing. HOLY SHIT DO I LOVE JEDAO. HOW MUCH DO I LOVE HIM, YOU ASK? SO MUCH. Everyone else, also great. I loved that there's different sorts of humor. I love that I hate Brezan's antagonistic defensiveness which is sarcastic but different from Jedao's self-loathing confident irony. I like that I know so much about what makes each of them tick.
-The pacing is off. Again, as with others, the big climax is sort of flat. The build up is always better than the finale for me.
-What we don't know. There are so many mysteries still. It was a good conclusion, I feel at peace, but also I desperately need to know some things.
In sum, a brilliant series that I'm so glad I read and which will definitely occupy brain space for a long time, but I think Yoon has even more perfection in front of him and also I basically just need to read Jedao's diary for a few
October 16, 2022
I woke up spontaneously in the middle of the night last night because I needed to finish reading the last three chapters. What an amazing series of books Yoon Ha Lee has created here. Definitely one of my favorite SF authors!
October 16, 2022
This series was such a great surprise 🖤
April 24, 2021
"There are a lot of problems that can be solved more fruitfully by not shooting things."I think Hexarch Mikodez is right—and he has reason to know—but... even so, Revenant Gun involves a lot of shooting. It comes with the territory.
—Shuos Mikodez, p.35
I certainly wouldn't recommend starting your exploration of Yoon Ha Lee's work with Revenant Gun, though. This is the final entry in the amazing Machineries of Empire trilogy, whose previous books—in case you're somehow coming at this review cold—are Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem. Start with those.
Revenant Gun begins with the former Hexarchate in the middle of multiple crises, embroiled in civil war between a Protectorate that's trying to preserve the old high calendar despite the cost in lives, and the nascent Compact which disrupted it to save those lives despite how that affects the exotic mathematics that permit star travel in the first place. Other realms are biting opportunistic chunks out of the faltering empire. Alternating chapters focus on each one in turn of two Shuos Jedaos—and we thought the universe could barely handle one!
Yoon Ha Lee gives us a lot to keep track of, but he also trusts the reader to understand—and he never betrays that trust. Everything is obliquely expressed, but very little is hidden altogether.
Sometimes he's maybe a bit too oblique, I'll admit—I was struggling for awhile there in the middle third, unsure about which maneuvers were leading where. I pulled this quote to start my review of the previous volume, and it's even more apposite here:
Brezan had expected chaos, just not this much of it.
—Raven Stratagem, p.11
Revenant Gun has its own share of piquant observations, of course:
"The presence of atrocity doesn't mean you have to put your life on hold. You'll arguably be better at dealing with the horrible things you have to witness, or even to perpetrate, if you allow yourself time to do the small, simple things that make you happy. Instead of looking for ways to destroy yourself."I'm not sure whether we're supposed to agree, but this certainly resonated with me.
—Shuos Mikodez again, p.124
As does a lot of Revenant Gun.
And there are some unexpectedly beautiful images amid the chaos, too:
If he knew Kujen, the statues had been chiseled by master sculptors, the rock quarried from mountains where the very birds sang their stories into the stone.
—p.284
Sometimes Revenant Gun seems only barely under control, but all questions—or almost all, anyway—get answered in the end. This novel is a worthy summation for Yoon Ha Lee's epic tale—and if he were never to write anything else (perish the thought!), this trilogy would still stand as a stunning achievement.
July 13, 2018
It's nine years since the climactic events of Raven Stratagem shattered the Hexarchate. What's left has consolidated into two groups, the Protectorate, loyal to the last Hexarch and effectively being run by the traditionalist General Kel Inesser while the Compact, running on the heretic calendar that was instituted in the previous book has formed up under General Kel Brezan. There's been a delicate peace between the two because both realms are worried that the Hexarchate's enemies would strike if they fell to all out war, but the remaining Hexarch Nirai Kujen is maneuvering to change that. Key in his plans is another instance of Shuos Jedao, taken from a much younger version of the brilliant General. So the stage is set for a battle between the forces of the old Hexarchate with different partial versions of Jedao on both sides.
Very satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, addressing how the High Calendar and the Hexarchate came into place as well as its purpose, along with wrapping up Jedao's story pretty well. There's a lot of time given to the better elements of this series, including the servitor side-culture, the fascinating work-life balance of the caste-dictated Kel and other groups and how interpersonal relationships work in a society as diverse as the Hexarchate. Probably the only element I didn't love is how little of Cheris there was in this one. She's still a key element of the story, but she's far from front and centre as she was in the first two books, with the lion's share of the narrative coming from the new Jedao.
Very satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, addressing how the High Calendar and the Hexarchate came into place as well as its purpose, along with wrapping up Jedao's story pretty well. There's a lot of time given to the better elements of this series, including the servitor side-culture, the fascinating work-life balance of the caste-dictated Kel and other groups and how interpersonal relationships work in a society as diverse as the Hexarchate. Probably the only element I didn't love is how little of Cheris there was in this one. She's still a key element of the story, but she's far from front and centre as she was in the first two books, with the lion's share of the narrative coming from the new Jedao.
December 18, 2022
What a worthy finale of the best series I've read in a long time.
Lee seems to create a big arch with the last part of the series referring back to the military focused storyline of Ninefox Gambit.
I would've hoped for a tiny bit more story about Cheris, but this would have definitely bloated the book and I can accept the author's decision against this.
I think the servitors are the most interesting and impactful side characters I have encountered during the last few years.
This book definitely cements Yoon Ha Lee as a new favorite author of mine.
Lee seems to create a big arch with the last part of the series referring back to the military focused storyline of Ninefox Gambit.
I would've hoped for a tiny bit more story about Cheris, but this would have definitely bloated the book and I can accept the author's decision against this.
I think the servitors are the most interesting and impactful side characters I have encountered during the last few years.
This book definitely cements Yoon Ha Lee as a new favorite author of mine.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 16, 2018
Compared to the gloriously bewildering Ninefox Gambit and it's sequel, Raven Stratagem, which occasionally doled out information in a begrudging kind of way, Revenant Gun practically holds the reader's hand. This isn't a slight against the book, because it never dips into the realm of infodumps, but more something that made me affectionately roll my eyes. Like, really Yoon? Now you decide to explain your shit? We made it this far only barely grasping the mechanics of this world, we could have made it all the way with you man!
But, no matter. A deeper understanding of exotic effects and moths was like a nice little bonus that I didn't expect, but understanding everything was never what I loved these books for. No, I loved these books for Jedao, and Revanent Gun has two of them! Cheris!Jedeo, and a new, painfully young Jedeo made up from whatever memories Cheris didn't get. A wide-eyed Jedeo who keeps asking if anyone knows what happened to his best friend from four centuries ago. Still brilliant. Still dangerous. But just, like, you want to hug him?
Two Jedeos, but barely even one Mikodez. I can forgive that in Ninefox Gambit, because I didn't know he was the best yet, but I swear I almost knocked a star or two off for his absence here. He was sorely missed. If I'm being totally honest I wavered a little between four and five stars. This book lacked the glittering edges of the first two, maybe because Lee was better about making sure the reader understood everything, maybe because it lacked a really cutting POV, a role filled by Jedeo in book one and Mikodez in book two. It was still fantastic, don't get me wrong, but I suspect I loved it a five-star amount because it had the benefit of the groundwork laid down by the first two books.
I think, maybe, if we had stayed solely in baby Jedeo's head, with maybe some corrospondance between Brezen and Cheris!Jedeo ala the 'yours in calandrical heresy' asides in Ninefox, it would have been different. But sometimes the book felt a little spread thin across POVs and there wasn't enough time for the emotional moments, and fuck did young Jedeo have some really excellent ones, to properly land.
But, minor gripes. Such minor gripes. This really was a fantastic end to one of the finest trilogies I have ever read.
But, no matter. A deeper understanding of exotic effects and moths was like a nice little bonus that I didn't expect, but understanding everything was never what I loved these books for. No, I loved these books for Jedao, and Revanent Gun has two of them! Cheris!Jedeo, and a new, painfully young Jedeo made up from whatever memories Cheris didn't get. A wide-eyed Jedeo who keeps asking if anyone knows what happened to his best friend from four centuries ago. Still brilliant. Still dangerous. But just, like, you want to hug him?
Two Jedeos, but barely even one Mikodez. I can forgive that in Ninefox Gambit, because I didn't know he was the best yet, but I swear I almost knocked a star or two off for his absence here. He was sorely missed. If I'm being totally honest I wavered a little between four and five stars. This book lacked the glittering edges of the first two, maybe because Lee was better about making sure the reader understood everything, maybe because it lacked a really cutting POV, a role filled by Jedeo in book one and Mikodez in book two. It was still fantastic, don't get me wrong, but I suspect I loved it a five-star amount because it had the benefit of the groundwork laid down by the first two books.
I think, maybe, if we had stayed solely in baby Jedeo's head, with maybe some corrospondance between Brezen and Cheris!Jedeo ala the 'yours in calandrical heresy' asides in Ninefox, it would have been different. But sometimes the book felt a little spread thin across POVs and there wasn't enough time for the emotional moments, and fuck did young Jedeo have some really excellent ones, to properly land.
But, minor gripes. Such minor gripes. This really was a fantastic end to one of the finest trilogies I have ever read.
June 8, 2018
This, by the way, seems to be my 500th review on this website! I want a cookie. And what a fitting book to mark this moment.
----------------------------
I read this book courtesy of NetGalley in exchange for an honest review; nonetheless, I also bought a paper copy with my own money (and it's reportedly on its way to me already).
It's difficult writing the review of a next or last volume in a series! So much of what might be said is a spoiler for earlier volumes, or might make little sense for those who haven't read them; in addition, it's not as though I am attempting to convince anyone to read this particular book - it is the whole series that I am recommending.
So what I can say is that this was a great way to start my #pride reading month. Yoon Ha Lee writes a complex and fascinating world that is in itself queer; he conceives of ways of being that are both strange and familiar. This volume brings the series to a staggering and logical conclusion; it gives protagonists fitting endings and it's poignant and tragic but also hopeful.
I must confess I wish it had been longer. It gives us more clarity and explanations than volume 2 (and particularly - more than volume 1, which could be occasionally abstruse) but at the same time, its quick pacing meant we didn't linger as long as I would have loved to with some characters or plotlines. It was good, but maybe not enough of a good thing--or perhaps I'm merely being greedy. I could keep reading about some characters, including new ones, for a hundred more pages.
I think this was a powerful conclusion to a great trilogy of novels; I expect it will lend itself well to re-reading. Take this as a strong recommendation - even if this genre doesn't seem like your thing, Yoon Ha Lee's posthumanist military sf novels are full of heart, soul and humanity.
----------------------------
I read this book courtesy of NetGalley in exchange for an honest review; nonetheless, I also bought a paper copy with my own money (and it's reportedly on its way to me already).
It's difficult writing the review of a next or last volume in a series! So much of what might be said is a spoiler for earlier volumes, or might make little sense for those who haven't read them; in addition, it's not as though I am attempting to convince anyone to read this particular book - it is the whole series that I am recommending.
So what I can say is that this was a great way to start my #pride reading month. Yoon Ha Lee writes a complex and fascinating world that is in itself queer; he conceives of ways of being that are both strange and familiar. This volume brings the series to a staggering and logical conclusion; it gives protagonists fitting endings and it's poignant and tragic but also hopeful.
I must confess I wish it had been longer. It gives us more clarity and explanations than volume 2 (and particularly - more than volume 1, which could be occasionally abstruse) but at the same time, its quick pacing meant we didn't linger as long as I would have loved to with some characters or plotlines. It was good, but maybe not enough of a good thing--or perhaps I'm merely being greedy. I could keep reading about some characters, including new ones, for a hundred more pages.
I think this was a powerful conclusion to a great trilogy of novels; I expect it will lend itself well to re-reading. Take this as a strong recommendation - even if this genre doesn't seem like your thing, Yoon Ha Lee's posthumanist military sf novels are full of heart, soul and humanity.
May 31, 2018
I wish I could stop caring.
And the day after that, scrawled in the margin in jagged, shaky letters almost entirely unlike his usual handwriting:
I know how to do that.
- from the journal of Inhyeng Kujen
One of the greatest trilogies of hard science fiction comes to close with plenty left over for more.
What was well done:
The origin story of Nirai Kujen.
The rise of the servitors.
A shock or two.
Calendrical Warfare, obviously.
What could have been better:
Some threads, they dangled.
The special refrigerator.
The sex switches and binary individuals. If you can make up calendrical warfare you can make up a third sex pronoun that isn’t plural.
Overall it was a good story that had me tense and guessing but failed to live up to the shock and awe of Raven Stratagem.
![Profile Image for laurel [the suspected bibliophile].](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1645808644i/7494844._UX200_CR0,6,200,200_.jpg)
September 24, 2021
Whew. This was a wild conclusion to the trilogy, and while I spent the first quite a bit trying to figure out what the fuck was going on (complicated by the fact that math magic is weird and I haven't read the series since 2019 or something), it was ultimately really damn good.
June 11, 2018
What am I going to do with my life now that this series is over? I suppose I’m left with no choice but to read everything else Yoon Ha Lee ever writes.
Revenant Gun is the third and final book in Lee’s military space opera, The Machineries of Empire trilogy. I would advise against reading it without reading the other books in the series (start with Ninefox Gambit). Also, be advised that this review can’t avoid spoilers for Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem.
Cheris, Brezan, and the remnants of Jedao have brought down the hexarchate, but fractions remain that want to see it reestablished. Most dangerously, the immortal Hexarch Nirai Kujen. And he’s got an ace up his sleeve: some of Jedao’s remaining memories, enough to build a new copy of the famed general.
Shuos Jedao wakes up with the memories of a seventeen-year-old cadet, one who has not yet begun his military career. Yet, everyone tells him he is an accomplished general? They also seem afraid of him, knowing more of his history than he himself. Jedao quickly realizes he’s trapped in a terrible situation. He’s being used by Kujen, who plays at friendliness when he’s anything but, and he’s forced to use the Kel under his command, who have been compelled by the standard brainwashing to obey him and Kujen.
Revenant Gun isn’t only focused on the new Jedao (here after, Jedao 2.0). From the start, we see glimpses of Brezan’s struggles at running a new country. For the early sections of the book, Cheris is still missing in action, having disappeared on a mysterious quest years ago. When we finally do see her again, it’s through the eyes of a servitor, one of the robots who ensured the hexarchate runs smoothly. This one has led a very isolated existence and is just now being exposed to the greater world and servitor culture.
I don’t think I’ve talked enough about servitors in my reviews. They’re a fascinating aspect — unremarked upon, but actually sentient with their own thoughts and feelings. Servitors are a huge blind spot for so many characters in the series, especially Kujen. Cheris is remarkable for how she recognizes them as autonomous individuals, able to help or hinder her if they wish. I’m glad Revenant Gun included a servitor as a major POV character, as it adds a very different perspective to the world Yoon Ha Lee is creating.
Kujen has been a shadowy villain throughout the series, and it is only in Revenant Gun that he comes fully into view. The servitor is reading his old notes and discovering more about who Kujen was and how he changed over the centuries. Jedao 2.0 is rediscovering Kujen’s particular fascination with him and his particular carelessness about human life. This is the man who built an entire system based on torture. We do find out that Kujen’s childhood was completely terrible (he was essentially a child prostitute for a warlord), but while the narrative has sympathy, it never attempts to use his past to excuse what he’s done in the present.
The Machinaries of Empire is not a happy series. Almost all of the characters are morally grey. Many do or have done terrible things. Perhaps my favorite is Mikodez, who pretends at soullessness (he gets a few appearances here). Jedao 2.0 is just realizing what a dark and twisted world he’s landed in. On that note, there’s some situations with dubious consent.
However, while The Machinaries of Empire may be dark, it is not without hope. It’s not grimdark. The protagonists seek to create a better world, and the narrative doesn’t chide them for it. There may be deaths along the way, but there’s also a future worth striving for. That’s a huge part of why I love this series.
I love this series so much. I mean, why wouldn’t I? It’s essentially queer geniuses playing mind games with each other (except for the incredibly straight forward Brezen, that is), which is something I’m so here for. And Revenant Gun has the added delight of a showdown between Cheris’s Jedao and Jedao 2.0. Delicious. Man, I wish there was more. Luckily for me, I’ve heard there’s going to be a collection of short fiction released! I also plan to read literally anything Yoon Ha Lee writes, including his upcoming middle grade novel even though that isn’t an age range I usually prefer.
This series is heart-wrenchingly wonderful. I can’t recommend it enough.
I received an ARC in exchange for a free and honest review.
Review from The Illustrated Page.
Revenant Gun is the third and final book in Lee’s military space opera, The Machineries of Empire trilogy. I would advise against reading it without reading the other books in the series (start with Ninefox Gambit). Also, be advised that this review can’t avoid spoilers for Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem.
Cheris, Brezan, and the remnants of Jedao have brought down the hexarchate, but fractions remain that want to see it reestablished. Most dangerously, the immortal Hexarch Nirai Kujen. And he’s got an ace up his sleeve: some of Jedao’s remaining memories, enough to build a new copy of the famed general.
Shuos Jedao wakes up with the memories of a seventeen-year-old cadet, one who has not yet begun his military career. Yet, everyone tells him he is an accomplished general? They also seem afraid of him, knowing more of his history than he himself. Jedao quickly realizes he’s trapped in a terrible situation. He’s being used by Kujen, who plays at friendliness when he’s anything but, and he’s forced to use the Kel under his command, who have been compelled by the standard brainwashing to obey him and Kujen.
Revenant Gun isn’t only focused on the new Jedao (here after, Jedao 2.0). From the start, we see glimpses of Brezan’s struggles at running a new country. For the early sections of the book, Cheris is still missing in action, having disappeared on a mysterious quest years ago. When we finally do see her again, it’s through the eyes of a servitor, one of the robots who ensured the hexarchate runs smoothly. This one has led a very isolated existence and is just now being exposed to the greater world and servitor culture.
I don’t think I’ve talked enough about servitors in my reviews. They’re a fascinating aspect — unremarked upon, but actually sentient with their own thoughts and feelings. Servitors are a huge blind spot for so many characters in the series, especially Kujen. Cheris is remarkable for how she recognizes them as autonomous individuals, able to help or hinder her if they wish. I’m glad Revenant Gun included a servitor as a major POV character, as it adds a very different perspective to the world Yoon Ha Lee is creating.
Kujen has been a shadowy villain throughout the series, and it is only in Revenant Gun that he comes fully into view. The servitor is reading his old notes and discovering more about who Kujen was and how he changed over the centuries. Jedao 2.0 is rediscovering Kujen’s particular fascination with him and his particular carelessness about human life. This is the man who built an entire system based on torture. We do find out that Kujen’s childhood was completely terrible (he was essentially a child prostitute for a warlord), but while the narrative has sympathy, it never attempts to use his past to excuse what he’s done in the present.
The Machinaries of Empire is not a happy series. Almost all of the characters are morally grey. Many do or have done terrible things. Perhaps my favorite is Mikodez, who pretends at soullessness (he gets a few appearances here). Jedao 2.0 is just realizing what a dark and twisted world he’s landed in. On that note, there’s some situations with dubious consent.
However, while The Machinaries of Empire may be dark, it is not without hope. It’s not grimdark. The protagonists seek to create a better world, and the narrative doesn’t chide them for it. There may be deaths along the way, but there’s also a future worth striving for. That’s a huge part of why I love this series.
I love this series so much. I mean, why wouldn’t I? It’s essentially queer geniuses playing mind games with each other (except for the incredibly straight forward Brezen, that is), which is something I’m so here for. And Revenant Gun has the added delight of a showdown between Cheris’s Jedao and Jedao 2.0. Delicious. Man, I wish there was more. Luckily for me, I’ve heard there’s going to be a collection of short fiction released! I also plan to read literally anything Yoon Ha Lee writes, including his upcoming middle grade novel even though that isn’t an age range I usually prefer.
This series is heart-wrenchingly wonderful. I can’t recommend it enough.
I received an ARC in exchange for a free and honest review.
Review from The Illustrated Page.
April 21, 2019
Reading Ian McEwan’s comments about SF with regard to his new novel Machines Like Me, and being accused of ‘genre snobbery’ due to him declaring sniffily that it is not SF, lingered in my mind as I finished the final instalment in the Machineries of Empire trilogy.
Yes, for once I think we can safely say that there won’t be others … Not to say that the ending is isn’t open-ended enough to allow for a continuation. But Yoon Ha Lee subverts so much else about SF in this trilogy, that I think this does include the very nature or concept of the SF ‘series’ itself.
‘Genre snobbery’ is usually associated with space opera, which invariably has spaceships and battles and exotic aliens, and is often considered juvenile as a result (the shadow of Star Wars, unfortunately, looms large over literary SF.)
Furthermore, Yoon Ha Lee works in the sub-sub-genre of military SF, which I myself particularly don’t like due to its predictability and lantern-jawed heroes. You see, even SF fans themselves can be ‘genre snobs’.
Following the second volume, it seemed pretty clear what direction the story would go in. Needless to say, Yoon Ha Lee is not afraid to thwart expectations: Expectations set by his own narrative, and then the larger overarching expectations of the genre itself, which state that the Bad Guy must be defeated, with a certain level of pedagogy conveyed to ensure that the ‘right way’ (i.e. [Western] civilisation as we know it) prevails.
Well, that all goes out of the window in volume three, as Yoon Ha Lee confronts us with our own prejudices about who, and what, Jedao truly is, and the nature of monsters themselves. I honestly didn’t think these books could get any better. But the third is the best in the trilogy by far. Confident and assured, it is abundantly clear Yoon Ha Lee had immense fun writing this.
The plot zings along, taking in a variety of breathtaking space battles, and including a running joke about cats, not to mention some oddball new characters in the form of servitors (having subversive robots that enjoy watching soap operas seems to be a new genre trope, thanks to the Murderbot books by Martha Wells. Interestingly, both Yoon Ha Lee and Martha Wells are on the 2019 Hugo ballot.)
It is going to take me some while to digest the unexpected ending. I wonder if Yoon Ha Lee deliberately evoked the Duncan Idaho plotline of the later Dune novels with his Jedao iterations? That is what makes SF such a wonderfully refractive genre totally in tune with its own history and the prevailing zeitgeist. Anyone who writes SF is automatically entangled with a complex dialogue with the genre itself.
How you deploy the tools, and the weapons, of that genre is up to the writer him or herself, of course. In the midst of much lurid goings-on, Yoon Ha Lee paints an incredibly nuanced story of identity (sexual and otherwise), and the dynamics of political oppression (again, the comparison with Frank Herbert is obvious.) The end result is a glorious new highwater mark in space opera.
Working within such a tradition of entangled tropes and expectations, what Yoon Ha Lee achieves in the trilogy is nothing short of miraculous. Years from now this is going to be regarded as a classic of the genre, upheld as a masterclass of what can be realised with space opera – if those very tropes and expectations are respected. Because then they become malleable, and in the hands of a writer like Yoon Ha Lee, transformed.
Yes, for once I think we can safely say that there won’t be others … Not to say that the ending is isn’t open-ended enough to allow for a continuation. But Yoon Ha Lee subverts so much else about SF in this trilogy, that I think this does include the very nature or concept of the SF ‘series’ itself.
‘Genre snobbery’ is usually associated with space opera, which invariably has spaceships and battles and exotic aliens, and is often considered juvenile as a result (the shadow of Star Wars, unfortunately, looms large over literary SF.)
Furthermore, Yoon Ha Lee works in the sub-sub-genre of military SF, which I myself particularly don’t like due to its predictability and lantern-jawed heroes. You see, even SF fans themselves can be ‘genre snobs’.
Following the second volume, it seemed pretty clear what direction the story would go in. Needless to say, Yoon Ha Lee is not afraid to thwart expectations: Expectations set by his own narrative, and then the larger overarching expectations of the genre itself, which state that the Bad Guy must be defeated, with a certain level of pedagogy conveyed to ensure that the ‘right way’ (i.e. [Western] civilisation as we know it) prevails.
Well, that all goes out of the window in volume three, as Yoon Ha Lee confronts us with our own prejudices about who, and what, Jedao truly is, and the nature of monsters themselves. I honestly didn’t think these books could get any better. But the third is the best in the trilogy by far. Confident and assured, it is abundantly clear Yoon Ha Lee had immense fun writing this.
The plot zings along, taking in a variety of breathtaking space battles, and including a running joke about cats, not to mention some oddball new characters in the form of servitors (having subversive robots that enjoy watching soap operas seems to be a new genre trope, thanks to the Murderbot books by Martha Wells. Interestingly, both Yoon Ha Lee and Martha Wells are on the 2019 Hugo ballot.)
It is going to take me some while to digest the unexpected ending. I wonder if Yoon Ha Lee deliberately evoked the Duncan Idaho plotline of the later Dune novels with his Jedao iterations? That is what makes SF such a wonderfully refractive genre totally in tune with its own history and the prevailing zeitgeist. Anyone who writes SF is automatically entangled with a complex dialogue with the genre itself.
How you deploy the tools, and the weapons, of that genre is up to the writer him or herself, of course. In the midst of much lurid goings-on, Yoon Ha Lee paints an incredibly nuanced story of identity (sexual and otherwise), and the dynamics of political oppression (again, the comparison with Frank Herbert is obvious.) The end result is a glorious new highwater mark in space opera.
Working within such a tradition of entangled tropes and expectations, what Yoon Ha Lee achieves in the trilogy is nothing short of miraculous. Years from now this is going to be regarded as a classic of the genre, upheld as a masterclass of what can be realised with space opera – if those very tropes and expectations are respected. Because then they become malleable, and in the hands of a writer like Yoon Ha Lee, transformed.
January 9, 2019
~3.5/3.75*
Revenant Gun is here with the conclusion to Yoon Ha Lee's smashhit Machineries of Empire Trilogy. Revenant Gun picks up 9 years after the evens of Raven Strategem, following Cheris Jedao's and Hexarch Mikodez's efforts to blow up and assassinate the Hexarchate leadership respectively. In that time, the remnants of the Hhexarchate have splintered into three groups, the loyalties flying under a Kel high general, those who follow Cheris's ideological surrogate from Raven Stratagem, Kel Brenan, and the remaining Kel who have been subsumed to the will of Hexarch Kujen.
On Kujen's Kel flagship, a man awakens with splintered memories, fragments of what remains of Shuos Jedao outside of Cheris. He's been created to be act as Kujen's puppet, and he's only just beginning to realize all of the forces arrayed against him and why it's imperative he choose to craft his own future.
I truly loved Ninefox Gambit. It was one of the most radically fascinating pieces of science fiction I'd read or seen on screen in years. I'm not entirely sure where the subsequent books in this trilogy went array for me, but it's undeniable that while Yoon Ha Lee's writing is flawless throughout, and while Raven Strategem and Revenant Gun are interesting as singular stories, together they fail to recapture the magic I experienced while reading Ninefox Gambit.
I love Lee's universe and his brilliantly envisioned mathematical space warfare. The universe as it unfolds in Revenant Gun is interesting, answering some very key questions about the technology we only get to experience vicariously in the first book.
But as with Raven Stratagem, the reader is divorced from characters they know by the emphasis on new POVs. I think one of the strongest parts of the first book was Kel Cheris herself and her relationship to the voice in her head. The fact that by the third book Cheris has the smallest amount of on screen time (and even, given to the reader through a completely DIFFERENT perspective than Cheris herself) really distanced my ability to become invested in the events of the book. Furthermore, the fact that the final chapter's emotional catharsis is weighted on our connection with Cheris, makes the author's decision to remove Cheris as a(THE) POV character in this book all the more befuddling.
I did like several of the new povs, particularly the servitor Hemiola's perspective, which added to that expansion of the universe i mentioned. but emotionally the book felt unmoored and lost in the author's own creation.
I'll definitely check out Lee's future works, because I still love his writing style, and even though this book wasn't anywhere near what I hoped it would be, I've continued to enjoy reading the books.
Revenant Gun is here with the conclusion to Yoon Ha Lee's smashhit Machineries of Empire Trilogy. Revenant Gun picks up 9 years after the evens of Raven Strategem, following Cheris Jedao's and Hexarch Mikodez's efforts to blow up and assassinate the Hexarchate leadership respectively. In that time, the remnants of the Hhexarchate have splintered into three groups, the loyalties flying under a Kel high general, those who follow Cheris's ideological surrogate from Raven Stratagem, Kel Brenan, and the remaining Kel who have been subsumed to the will of Hexarch Kujen.
On Kujen's Kel flagship, a man awakens with splintered memories, fragments of what remains of Shuos Jedao outside of Cheris. He's been created to be act as Kujen's puppet, and he's only just beginning to realize all of the forces arrayed against him and why it's imperative he choose to craft his own future.
I truly loved Ninefox Gambit. It was one of the most radically fascinating pieces of science fiction I'd read or seen on screen in years. I'm not entirely sure where the subsequent books in this trilogy went array for me, but it's undeniable that while Yoon Ha Lee's writing is flawless throughout, and while Raven Strategem and Revenant Gun are interesting as singular stories, together they fail to recapture the magic I experienced while reading Ninefox Gambit.
I love Lee's universe and his brilliantly envisioned mathematical space warfare. The universe as it unfolds in Revenant Gun is interesting, answering some very key questions about the technology we only get to experience vicariously in the first book.
But as with Raven Stratagem, the reader is divorced from characters they know by the emphasis on new POVs. I think one of the strongest parts of the first book was Kel Cheris herself and her relationship to the voice in her head. The fact that by the third book Cheris has the smallest amount of on screen time (and even, given to the reader through a completely DIFFERENT perspective than Cheris herself) really distanced my ability to become invested in the events of the book. Furthermore, the fact that the final chapter's emotional catharsis is weighted on our connection with Cheris, makes the author's decision to remove Cheris as a(THE) POV character in this book all the more befuddling.
I did like several of the new povs, particularly the servitor Hemiola's perspective, which added to that expansion of the universe i mentioned. but emotionally the book felt unmoored and lost in the author's own creation.
I'll definitely check out Lee's future works, because I still love his writing style, and even though this book wasn't anywhere near what I hoped it would be, I've continued to enjoy reading the books.
June 19, 2018
Complicated and mixed feelings about how this one ultimately handled the themes of abuse and how it's perpetuated on a personal level, though I thought the issues of social change were handled well. The pacing felt uneven in the first half and some things were resolved with less conflict than I expected (both good and bad); I liked Hemiola a lot and I liked the ending and epilogue.
November 1, 2018
I'm still trying to parse whether I like this book or not, and I'm not sure that three stars will be my final rating. I thought that the overall plot produced a good ending to the series, but there are many, many details below that I'm not sure I appreciated. I'm going to begin with the parts that I liked, and work my way to the parts that I didn't like.
So, yes, I'm definitely disappointed. If I wasn't so emotionally dedicated to the series, I may have even only given this book 2 stars. Clearly I feel something for this book since I've written such a long review of it.
So, yes, I'm definitely disappointed. If I wasn't so emotionally dedicated to the series, I may have even only given this book 2 stars. Clearly I feel something for this book since I've written such a long review of it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 11, 2019
Unbelievable, but “Revenant Gun” pulled me in like none of its predecessors and finally made me a believer (or wait – isn’t that a heretic nowadays?) out of me. Yoon Ha Lee is definitively the master of ‘show - don’t tell’ and this book has been very rewarding in that regard. I’m not really the space battles fan (at least not in books) and therefore, I specially loved to see how this universe and all its various players started to make sense. Particularly, I was very keen to learn more about which might have played a vast role in my enjoyment of this series! I also really liked the humour in this book, I might have missed this in the previous ones, but it felt very refreshing and somehow made the book lighter and more fun. And then there was this twist very early in the beginning and I could just not get enough of - absolutely brilliant!
Finally, we get to meet another really cool character: Hemiola - go meet it yourself!
These books are about oppression, doing-the-right-thing-wrong and what else it means to be human.
“But Hemiola reminded itself that it wasn’t the only one adrift in a large universe.”
Oh and of course this is all mixed with some space-battles.
Finally, we get to meet another really cool character: Hemiola - go meet it yourself!
These books are about oppression, doing-the-right-thing-wrong and what else it means to be human.
“But Hemiola reminded itself that it wasn’t the only one adrift in a large universe.”
Oh and of course this is all mixed with some space-battles.
May 1, 2018
Yoon Ha Lee's "The Machineries of Empire" trilogy offers something truly unique: dense world building in terms of which society and technology are based on the strength of the shared belief in the calendrical mathematical system.
As Jedao postulated in Ninefox Gambit: "all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fuelled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work."
It has been said before, but to truly enjoy this series, you are going to have to let go of trying to understand the science and just accept its function as the operation of magic - a mystical, incomprehensible power - utilised in a military sci-fi setting.
While Ninefox Gambit may have offered the purest form of mathematical military sci-fi in the series and Raven Stratagem expanded upon this unique blend of mathematical mysticism and socio-political systems, both previous novels are, inescapably, the ultimately set up for the concluding Revenant Gun novel.
The question is: "Does Yoon Ha Lee deliver in his maiden full length series?"
The answer is a nebulous yes and no. The unique characters and character building is exceptional and in this regard the finale does not disappoint. However, a resounding epic "Saving Private Ryan" battle is simply not on the cards, despite a 300 page setup for the ultimate faceoff.
Instead of adrenaline filled blood, sweat and tears with a magical blend of math, we have certain pacing issues and obscure mathematical stratagems that fail to fully ignite the imagination.
Don't get me wrong - this is still a truly unique series that is worth pursuing, with incredible characters and a fair share of revelations that add to the mythology and methodology of the series as a whole, but Revenant Gun could have taken it past Einstein and defined a new gold standard.
As Jedao postulated in Ninefox Gambit: "all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fuelled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work."
It has been said before, but to truly enjoy this series, you are going to have to let go of trying to understand the science and just accept its function as the operation of magic - a mystical, incomprehensible power - utilised in a military sci-fi setting.
While Ninefox Gambit may have offered the purest form of mathematical military sci-fi in the series and Raven Stratagem expanded upon this unique blend of mathematical mysticism and socio-political systems, both previous novels are, inescapably, the ultimately set up for the concluding Revenant Gun novel.
The question is: "Does Yoon Ha Lee deliver in his maiden full length series?"
The answer is a nebulous yes and no. The unique characters and character building is exceptional and in this regard the finale does not disappoint. However, a resounding epic "Saving Private Ryan" battle is simply not on the cards, despite a 300 page setup for the ultimate faceoff.
Instead of adrenaline filled blood, sweat and tears with a magical blend of math, we have certain pacing issues and obscure mathematical stratagems that fail to fully ignite the imagination.
Don't get me wrong - this is still a truly unique series that is worth pursuing, with incredible characters and a fair share of revelations that add to the mythology and methodology of the series as a whole, but Revenant Gun could have taken it past Einstein and defined a new gold standard.
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