Chicago Nerds- Ninefox Gambit

For the May meeting of the Chicago Nerds' book-club, we discussed Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. This was also our first meeting at our new spot—Volumes Bookcafe, just up the road from our old digs.

Ninefox Gambit is a weirdly inventive space opera, and in fact a lot of our discussion revolved around whether to think of it as science fiction or "fantasy in space". A fairly ruthless interstellar civilization, the Hexarchate, maintains its control through the use of "exotic" technologies, which in turn rely on the "calendar", a kind of consensus reality. When a group of heretics make a particularly daring secession, the Hexarchate pairs a low-ranking soldier with genius mathematical abilities—Kel Cheris—with the imprisoned immortal spirit of one of their greatest and most treacherous generals: Shuos Jedao.

This is a weird, surreal book, setting up a very bizarre world and then not explaining it very much. This is one of the things I like most about it, as I said in my review last year. At club, we had good debates about both how and whether different aspects of this novel work. Brief notes below:

Overclocking Clarke's Third: Yoon Ha Lee's "Ninefox Gambit"

An unusually inventive military SF novel, I found Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit very enjoyable in a very science-fictional way: I spent almost the entire novel building and revising this world in my head, and I'm still not entirely sure I've got it right. Like my last two reviews, I recommend it highly, with audience-specific caveats. Possible spoilers below.

Classic Sci-Fi: The Forever War

Starting October right off with Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel "The Forever War", an appropriately classic selection for the Classic Sci-Fi Meetup.

"The Forever War" is told from the perspective of William Mandella, a conscript in the titular war who winds up being one of the very few to live through it from beginning to end. The war is being fought against an alien race, the Taurans, at far-flung locations around the galaxy (and at least one outside it); time dilation effects mean that each wave of combatants wind up temporally separated from the rest of the war (and the rest of society) for tens or hundreds of years at a time.

It's a Hugo and Nebula winner, seen by many as a challenge to Heinlein's pro-military "Starship Troopers" (1959), and a reflection on/of the Vietnam War.

There may be spoilers below!

Chi-SF: The Quiet War

At last week's meeting of the Chicago Speculative Fiction Community, we discussed Paul McAuley's "The Quiet War" (2008), a relatively near-future science fictional tale wherein humans have spread a bit throughout the solar system, and Earth-based interests are rapidly headed towards a military engagement with the fairly anarchic societies of the Jovian satellites.

Before we got talking about the novel, we got some reports from Worldcon--we had three attending members who gave us some highlights from Spokane this year. That in turn led us to talk a bit about the Hugos, the preponderance of "No Award", and the whole Puppy kerfuffle. Also: fire! Spokane was apparently inundated with smoke from (relatively) nearby forest fires for a few days.

But! "The Quiet War". I was so pleased to come back to this book--hadn't read it since it came out, and forgot how enjoyable it was. Possible spoilers below!