Review: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publication Date: September 10, 2019

I cannot even conceive of a reader who could hear about Tamsyn Muir's swashbuckling debut Gideon the Ninth without immediately lunging for a copy. It is literally beyond my comprehension that any sane person could hear that there exists a book about an intergalactic empire of space necromancers and just, like, shrug it off. Go about their day, whistling a jaunty tune, not reading about the lesbian necromancers in spaaaaaaaace.

Alas, for those sad souls that have been doing just that, know this: in a beautiful castle ten thousand years dead, the undying Emperor has gathered the heirs to the eight ruling Houses and their sworn cavaliers to battle it out for the ultimate prize: the immortality of a necro-saint, and a place at the Emperor's side. Through much and assorted fuckery, the hilarious and delightfully obscene master swordswoman Gideon Nav ends up as cavalier to her nemesis Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the House of the Ninth, the House that even the other Houses dread. (Which says quite a lot, as this is an intergalactic empire literally ruled by necromancers.) Bitching merrily the entire way, Harrow and Gideon descend upon the castle of the First House hoping for power (Harrow) and freedom (Gideon), only to find a vast labyrinth of ancient and eldritch secrets, byzantine politics, and more skeletons than any sane person could ever want, in places that skeletons should never, ever be. 

Seamlessly blending the hilarious with the macabre and the scientific with the magical, Gideon the Ninth is a true tour de force, the sort of book that cries out for a sequel. (And one's in the works, thank goodness.) The characters practically do somersaults off the page, written with a lightness of the soul that's more Addams Family than Stephen King, though the blood and body count are definitely more the latter than the former. You will love Gideon, or you will show yourself a liar. And you will love her world, bones and viscera and all. It's weird and wild and wonderful, and now that I've finished it I want nothing more than to read it again from the start. 

Murder and mayhem and madcap hilarity; what more could a reader want?

Review: To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 3, 2019


Becky Chambers is one of those writers whose star in the science fiction world definitely seems to be waxing, so when I got the chance to review a shorter work of hers, I was excited to give it a whirl. I'd picked up her debut The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet a while back, only to put it down a quarter way through; not because it was bad---it seemed well-written---but because something about the plot, the voice, just didn't grab me. I always intended to pick it back up, but . . . well, the world is vast and so is my TBR pile. "I'll pick it up again tomorrow," I told myself, and of course tomorrow never came.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a standalone novella, following four astronauts sent on a crowdfunded deep-space exploration mission to explore a series of worlds light-years away from Earth. Via our narrator Ariadne, we follow the joys and heartbreaks of their discoveries, the introspective and social narrations of their interpersonal conflicts, and we sit silently beside them as the slow, creeping realization hits that, back home on Earth, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

There's a lot to like here. The worldbuilding is fantastic and the writing is vivid; that perfect exhilaration, that crucial sense of wonder, is tangible whenever the story delves into the team's scientific adventures. Chambers isn't one of those authors who writes about a scientific expedition but handwaves away the science, which I really enjoyed. Many sci-fi authors can get tedious in those portions, but that never happens here, and that alone bumped this up a star.

There are flaws, however. For a foursome that never has any conflict rising above the level of passive aggressiveness, there's a bit too much introspection here, or so I felt. Some of those parts dragged a bit. And part of the ending, I thought, followed a logic stream that I found completely unrealistic. It kind of pulled me out of the story, because they end up making a decision that just seemed utterly bizarre to me. (And the fact that our narrator spends so much time explaining it . . . that that was necessary in the first place is a hint that the decision itself doesn't flow naturally from what came before it.)

But ultimately, that was probably a minor thing. Melancholy and vibrant simultaneously, To Be Taught, If Fortunate made me wonder if I should pick The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet up again. I think I probably will.

A big thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.