Hexarchate Stories
May. 20th, 2019 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaI received a review copy of Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarchate Stories from Netgalley.
Many of the Hexarchate Stories center on details of Cheris or Jedao's early life. They're sweet on their own, or filled with doom if you start thinking about the fates of Cheris and Jedao's families. Jedao's family menagerie often appears, including his mother's geese and a laid-back, tractable cat (I expected said cat to end up having kittens on a pile of clothes in the back of someone's closet, but apparently that memory belongs only to my childhood, not to Jedao's). Of the domestic stories, one from Jedao's older brother's point of view and another about Cheris's birthday particularly stand out.
The final story is "Glass Cannon," a novella which picks up a few years after Revenant Gun left off. Much of "Glass Cannon" is straight-up adventure, echoing the exuberant action scenes of the beginning of Revenant Gun. I was spoiled for lots of plot points (in fair disclosure, I have a beta-reader's credit at the end of this book, though I hadn't actually read any of the "Glass Cannon" text). The spoilers didn't really matter, though, because Jedao's quest to recover his memories pulled me along faster than I could recollect who shot whom with what type of bullet.
I was expecting a cliffhanger ending, but actually the final scenes in "Glass Cannon" had a satisfying feeling of clarity. In each successive hexarchate book, more and more of the plot is driven by nonhuman figures' agendas. Two of my favorite "Glass Cannon" characters--or, more accurately, two of the characters I found most interesting--were a moth named Harmony and an installation named Avros Base, each of whom has very strong opinions about what Cheris and Jedao ought to do. At the end of "Glass Cannon," other humans finally figure out what we, as readers, have known since Revenant Gun: the moths who power the hexarchate's spacedrive are intelligent, and they do not want what humans want.
Many of the Hexarchate Stories center on details of Cheris or Jedao's early life. They're sweet on their own, or filled with doom if you start thinking about the fates of Cheris and Jedao's families. Jedao's family menagerie often appears, including his mother's geese and a laid-back, tractable cat (I expected said cat to end up having kittens on a pile of clothes in the back of someone's closet, but apparently that memory belongs only to my childhood, not to Jedao's). Of the domestic stories, one from Jedao's older brother's point of view and another about Cheris's birthday particularly stand out.
The final story is "Glass Cannon," a novella which picks up a few years after Revenant Gun left off. Much of "Glass Cannon" is straight-up adventure, echoing the exuberant action scenes of the beginning of Revenant Gun. I was spoiled for lots of plot points (in fair disclosure, I have a beta-reader's credit at the end of this book, though I hadn't actually read any of the "Glass Cannon" text). The spoilers didn't really matter, though, because Jedao's quest to recover his memories pulled me along faster than I could recollect who shot whom with what type of bullet.
I was expecting a cliffhanger ending, but actually the final scenes in "Glass Cannon" had a satisfying feeling of clarity. In each successive hexarchate book, more and more of the plot is driven by nonhuman figures' agendas. Two of my favorite "Glass Cannon" characters--or, more accurately, two of the characters I found most interesting--were a moth named Harmony and an installation named Avros Base, each of whom has very strong opinions about what Cheris and Jedao ought to do. At the end of "Glass Cannon," other humans finally figure out what we, as readers, have known since Revenant Gun: the moths who power the hexarchate's spacedrive are intelligent, and they do not want what humans want.