Short Book Reviews: When World-Building Isn't Enough

Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee is the third and last volume of the trilogy, “Machineries of Empire,” that began with Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem. I absolutely loved the first two books with the concept of a space-faring empire based on a mathematically derived calendar. It tickled my geeky self that to see mathematicians highly valued in a society. It struck me as weird and wonderful that a revolution could happen through the means of instituting a new calendar. In this universe exotic effects make space flight and many other things — including immortality — possible, and these effects are in turn the result of the way human beings conceptualize time. (Of course everyone is not on the same page about which calendar is the correct one.) I loved the way this creative intersection of mathematics and physics and culture interacted with the tendency of humans to form armies on opposing sides. I was intrigued, if sometimes a bit appalled, by the Immolation Fox, Shuos Jedao, a brilliant general who committed unspeakable atrocities many hundreds of years ago and whose physical remains are incarcerated in something called a black cradle but whose mind now occupies the body of a fairly ordinary woman in the soldier caste.

“Which one are you?” it asked Jedao-Cheris-whoever.

“Whoever I need to be,” Jedao-Cheris-whoever said. Their eyes were sad. “I used to be one person. I was a Kel. Now I have fragments of a dead man in my head.”

Revenant Gun begins with Jedao awakening in a body much older than his self-perceived age and quite ignorant of recent history, as well as all the things that he supposedly knows about military strategy. To my disappointment I found that the magic had gone out of the story arc. The gimmick of space flight by via calendrical manipulation had lost its luster, and the characters and their interactions seemed artificial and forced. There is one extremely nifty revelation about halfway through the book, which I won't say reveal because it’s a major spoiler. Suffice it to say that even though I found this on a par with the wacky and delightful inventiveness of the world-building in the first two books, it was not enough to sustain my interest through this climactic volume. I really wanted to see the revelation played out in all its consequences and implications, and was sadly disappointed.

Alas, long sections of the book were tedious to the point of being boring, and it felt like slogging through far too many pages to get to an unsatisfying ending. It's hard to put my finger on exactly why I felt this. Certainly there are interesting characters, particularly the servitors, mechanical servants who have their own culture. I think the world-building was imaginative enough to carry a single stand-alone volume, but when stretched out to a trilogy it could not sustain the length. Lee is a highly competent writer whose prose ranges from proficient to soaring. I know as a writer myself how easy it is to become so enchanted with a world of my own devising that I want to spend many, many pages exploring it. The result is a static travelogue, unless there are compelling characters and ever-rising dramatic tension. I especially enjoy writing and reading stories in which inner conflict parallels external struggle, and where the protagonist must grow and change in order to overcome both. It may have been the author’s deliberate portrayal of ambivalence, which is in general a good thing because then the reader is free to make up his own mind about moral issues, but it seems to me that the interpersonal and galactic-level conflicts belonged in different stories. I didn’t experience any resonance between the layers of conflict. Not only that, there was a loss of dramatic shape, of escalating tension and heightened stakes. At least, I think that's what's what was going on that made it so easy for me to put put the book down even during the climactic scenes.

I will freely admit that my reaction to this third volume is highly personal and that another reader might find this to be a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. Certainly, Lee’s work is much above a great deal of what is being published today, and I very much want to support and encourage the kind of world- and culture-building involved in these three books. Fortunately, the first two volumes can be read on their own, although I would not advise that for this final volume. If you’ve enjoyed the earlier ones, go for it.


The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book, but no one bribed me to say anything about it.