review: Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee
Mar. 23rd, 2018 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaRevenant Gun is a book about space battles, but it's also a book about mending things. At the end of Raven Stratagem, the ritual calendar that the hexarchate's empire depended on was smashed, and most of the hexarchs were murdered. How, then, should the empire be mended? By building something new, and better, as High General Brezan has promised? By pursuing the strategy of Protector-General Inesser and her regiments, and holding the pieces together as best one can? Or should the old system be restored, carefully timed torture and all?
One of the two surviving hexarchs, the undying scientist Kujen, favors the last option. And he has a weapon, a young copy of Shuos Jedao. This Jedao has all the charm and contagious momentum that made him the hexarchate's most effective general, and the bone-deep instincts toward commitment that made "I'm your gun" his best-known phrase. But he doesn't remember why he was also the hexarchate's most feared general, or what his loyalties were.
The first half of the book is exuberant adventure. Kujen's old enemy, Cheris, pulls off an elaborate heist by using a chocolate festival. We meet a dedicated but naive flying robot, the servitor Hemiola, who likes making fan vids. We learn that the hexarchate's spaceships are called "moths" because they're alive, and the gate space they travel through, faster than light, has an entire ecology of its own. Then Jedao wins his first battle, and learns what the modern hexarchate does to prisoners of war.
The second half of the book tracks a web of alliances. Both human and nonhuman agents seek to destroy Kujen, but that doesn't mean they trust each other, nor that they should. Meanwhile, Jedao and Hemiola both try to figure out why Kujen made the calendar in the first place. Turns out it's the old trade: stability for your soul. Kujen has lace and gems and art, and an empire where children do not starve by accident. Jedao was another of his beautiful, leashed possessions, once upon a time.
The culminating space battle has exotic weaponry and spaceships in atmosphere and desperate attempts to coordinate calendrical math. The hexarchate's soldiers call themselves suicide hawks, and in the battle's aftermath they justify that description, for good or ill.
Once the dust clears, we know the old, human calendar is dead. We don't know how the nonhumans will respond, though, or what's really going on in that ecosystem in between space and time. This isn't a universe where the arithmetic works out neatly: stuffing all the answers into a single trilogy seems like one of many vain hopes.
One of the two surviving hexarchs, the undying scientist Kujen, favors the last option. And he has a weapon, a young copy of Shuos Jedao. This Jedao has all the charm and contagious momentum that made him the hexarchate's most effective general, and the bone-deep instincts toward commitment that made "I'm your gun" his best-known phrase. But he doesn't remember why he was also the hexarchate's most feared general, or what his loyalties were.
The first half of the book is exuberant adventure. Kujen's old enemy, Cheris, pulls off an elaborate heist by using a chocolate festival. We meet a dedicated but naive flying robot, the servitor Hemiola, who likes making fan vids. We learn that the hexarchate's spaceships are called "moths" because they're alive, and the gate space they travel through, faster than light, has an entire ecology of its own. Then Jedao wins his first battle, and learns what the modern hexarchate does to prisoners of war.
The second half of the book tracks a web of alliances. Both human and nonhuman agents seek to destroy Kujen, but that doesn't mean they trust each other, nor that they should. Meanwhile, Jedao and Hemiola both try to figure out why Kujen made the calendar in the first place. Turns out it's the old trade: stability for your soul. Kujen has lace and gems and art, and an empire where children do not starve by accident. Jedao was another of his beautiful, leashed possessions, once upon a time.
The culminating space battle has exotic weaponry and spaceships in atmosphere and desperate attempts to coordinate calendrical math. The hexarchate's soldiers call themselves suicide hawks, and in the battle's aftermath they justify that description, for good or ill.
Once the dust clears, we know the old, human calendar is dead. We don't know how the nonhumans will respond, though, or what's really going on in that ecosystem in between space and time. This isn't a universe where the arithmetic works out neatly: stuffing all the answers into a single trilogy seems like one of many vain hopes.