Jedao is more typical of his role, being cryptic and quietly sardonic, a trickster with a very limited bag of tricks. They're as human as undead warlords and calendrical sword-wielding soldiers can be. Cheris and Jedao, in particular, are fascinating, multi-faceted entities, filled with contradictions and idiosyncrasies. You could find the dead in any combination of numbers.Īll this would not be remotely as potent, however, if the characters weren’t as well-constructed as they are. Both died bleeding from every pore in their skin. A man trying to carry a crippled child to safety. She read about two sisters who died trying to veil the dead after the custom of the people.
Much later in the book, our protagonists dig into records of the deaths that Jedao caused when he was alive: They weren’t much different from the faces of her own soldiers: younger and older, dark skin and pale, eyes mostly brown or sometimes grey.” “Cheris made a point of noticing the Eels’ faces. At the same time, Lee makes no excuses for violence and does not shy away from illuminating the grisly ramifications of war fought between people who often have more in common than they admit. “The Kel formation held as they butchered their way through the Eels," he writes. In this case, it's Jedao, an undead tactician who just so happens to be a mass murderer.Ī fine piece of military fiction, Ninefox Gambit glitters with clever maneuvers and cunning ploys, heart-stopping action and hard decisions, all complicated by a repertoire of strange technologies. To accomplish this, she does what all protagonists in her situation invariably do: allies herself with an unsavoury character. A disgraced general, Cheris, seeks redemption by liberating a fortress that has been overtaken by enemy forces. Though its setting may be complex, the novel's basic premise is relatively simple. It is a place where war is “a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs” and “calendrical rot” can destabilize entire tracts of terrain. The world of Ninefox Gambit is a perilous, conflict-riddled conglomeration of planets and factions, inhabited by the members of the ruling hexarcate and rebellious heretics. Bertrand Russell described it as “a beauty cold and austere, sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” There have even been modern studies that posit that “beautiful” equations engage our brains the way paintings and music do. And Yoon Ha Lee’s stunning debut novel, Ninefox Gambit ( US/ UK) makes all of this real. Plato believed mathematics was the highest form of beauty, being entirely concerned with universal truths and untarnished by base desire.
0 kommentar(er)
