Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit
I couldn't tell you exactly what happens in Yoon Ha Lee's fantastic novel Ninefox Gambit. I don't mean that as a knock. I think it's a fantastic novel, massive in scope, packed with imagination, and slyly critical of orthodoxy in its many forms. It's also a visceral, often brutal military space opera.
What I mean when I say that I can't tell you what happened, exactly, is that it pulls a very clever trick, bringing the point of view so close to its characters that the worldbuilding happens all around you, through character, and some things are never explained.
The setup is simple. Captain Kel Cheris is paired with a traitorous and possibly immortal general to breach and reclaim a massive space station that has gone rogue. Cheris can't trust the general, Jedao, because he is a war criminal, possibly mad; he lost his command after he unleashed horrific weapons on both his enemies and his own troops. He's a mass murderer.
What sets Lee's the universe apart from others is that the empire Cheris is sworn to serve has technology that runs on an imperial calendar. The population's adherence to this calendar runs, well, everything. In Jedao's time, he was fighting a splinter faction that had adopted a "heretical" calendar, and a resurgence of such remains one of the empire's greatest fears.
Okay, you're asking, how does that work?
I'm sure Lee could tell you. I'm not sure I can. Oh, don't get me wrong; there's all kinds of cool technology and grand weaponry clearly linked to belief in the "calendar." But what we don't get is an exact accounting of the calendar's makeup, or a specific description of the technological breakthrough that allows it all to hold together. And thank goodness for that.
This isn't just a simple case of that old chestnut, "Show, don't tell." Because Lee knows exactly when to tell. For example, we get lots of prose aptly describing the political makeup of the empire—the Hexarchate—and its bureaucracy, how different people are tasked with different roles, different personalities. And, most importantly, what these different factions within the Hexarchate think of each other. Cheris is consistently underestimated for being a Kel—infantry, basically—which proves to be an advantage, as she is in fact a skilled mathematician, and can therefore make good use of the empire's technology.
Put another way: Lee assumes you can keep up with the technology, with the weird stuff. It's the human interactions, the backstabbing and the reasons behind them, that interest us.
I don't want to say that the technology and how it works doesn't matter. It does, at least in the broad strokes. Ninefox Gambit is, in a sense, about how we choose to believe what we believe—and who we believe in. Cheris is a soldier through and through, but over the course of the novel she sees and does things that even the most hardened soldier can't quite internalize without some kind of change. The novel is a war story, with the siege of a fortress driving the plot. But the real engine is Cheris, and how she views the unimaginable slaughter she's wrought. Slowly, it becomes less and less unimaginable, as plans spiral out of control and the body count mounts. In a world where an army's technology is tied to belief in an intangible system, this matters quite a bit—both literally, in the plot of the novel, and as a metaphor for the psychic machinery that rules the despotic regimes of our own reality.
I guess I'm just throwing in my lot with us writers who have rebelled against adages. You don't always need to show. Sometimes, you don't need to tell, either. Every world has problems. I don't know exactly how the calendar-based technology of Ninefox Gambit works, but I don't need to. I know it has its problems, and the people fight and die over them. I know that it matters to Cheris. You don't need to show the workings of a whole universe if you can show us the workings of a single heart in that universe—and Ninefox Gambit goes one extra, by its very nature. As Cheris has to work with a war criminal, a madman who seems in many ways saner than the devastating war around her, Ninefox Gambit gives us two.
