Kujen laughed softly. “Look at my shadow and tell me what you see.”
Jedao had taken it for an ordinary shadow. As he examined it more closely, though, he saw that it was made of the shapes of fluttering captive moths. The longer he stared at it, the more he saw the darkness giving way to a vast crevasses of gears and cams and silver chrysalises from which more moths flew free…
On June 12, Solaris releases Revenant Gun, the final book in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy.
Book two ended with the assassination of all but two of the ruling Hexarchs. Book three starts nine years later. Kel Brezan, who only ever wanted to be a good Kel and do his duty, has had to take what’s left of the Hexarchate and build it into something that doesn’t depend on the daily ritual sacrifice and torture of heretics.
Elsewhere, someone calling themselves Shuos Jedao is working behind the scenes to learn everything they can about the powerful, body-hopping, centuries old Nirai Kujen, with the hope that they can find a way to kill the insane Hexarch once and for all.
And deep in a Nirai stronghold the “real” Shuos Jedao wakes up, thinking he’s still a teenage cadet but finding himself in the body of an adult (and battle-scarred) general. He has no idea why Kujen is making him the commander of the Hexarchate army, and no memory of the fact that he was executed more than four centuries ago for slaughtering a million people, including everyone in his own command.
It’s fitting that the universe Yoon Ha Lee has created features starships decorated with gardens and tapestries and beautiful statuary, because Lee’s writing is still the perfect balance of opposites: poetry and mathematics, the classical and the futuristic, the artistic and the purely functional, and most importantly self-sacrificing honor and the purest kind of galaxy-spanning narcissism you can image.
Certain elements of the book still go way over my head, and probably always will. The whole concept of living one’s life based on rules about protocol and honor might be easier to grasp for someone who grew up in an Eastern culture; entire sections of the story revolve around the formality of when it is or isn’t okay for a Kel to take their gloves off. Lee does an amazing job of conveying most of the do’s and don’ts of society, but there were still times when I only realized from someone’s reaction how stunningly not okay it was for someone to have done something.
The calendar-based technology is still beautifully incomprehensible but again, Lee always makes sure you understand when something is important even if you don’t know how it works. In a section about “threshold winnowers” you have a sentence like, “The tangent space could be considered a linearization of the area around the point, with extraneous information knifed away.” The explanation doesn’t help at all, but the Lee’s description of a threshold winnower’s effects are satisfyingly horrific. Just about every chapter has some fascinating tidbit about this futuristic society, things like “variable layout” (hallways lead to different places, depending on where you need to go), the biological components of the spaceships called “voidmoths”, and just what the heck a “suicide calligrapher” is.
The trilogy has always been told from multiple viewpoints, but here the separate storylines feel more sharply defined. Kel Brezan has to deal with all of the gritty details of government-building, knowing that he’s perfect for the job only because he’s immune to the programming that keeps Kel from disobeying orders, meaning he’s a complete failure at the one thing he ever wanted to be: a Kel. Brezan’s chapters are all about being disliked by both your enemies and your allies, the unstated prejudice against the fact that he’s a womanform (a man born into a woman’s body, and the Kel really disapprove of reassignment surgery so that’s not an option), military strategies that mean killing thousands of civilians rather than letting the enemy capture valuable resources, and family dynamics (Brezan’s former Andan lover is still lurking around, and Brezan’s older Kel sister thought he was a loser at age ten, and her opinion hasn’t changed at all.)
Meanwhile Cheris (yes, the woman calling herself Jedao is really Cheris with Jedao’s memories), is sneaking into a secret Narai hideaway and trying to find something that will let her assassinate Narai Kujen without Kujen just taking over a new body. Most of Cheris’s chapters are told by her companion Hemiola, a robot servitor shaped like a small levitating snake. These are the sections were we learn the most about Kujen’s backstory as Hemiola combs through nine hundred years of his personal notes, trying to figure out how the young boy who actually cared about a homeless girl starving to death near his academy somehow became the Hexarch who experiments on prisoners of war and makes servants out of his opponents by surgically altering their minds.
(Side note: the robot servitors are still one of my favorite parts about this trilogy. The servitors have convinced most of humanity that they’re basically just helpful furniture, when in fact they have their own language, their own society, and even their own hobbies. Hemiola’s favorite pastime is to edit videos of its favorite soap operas to make its own stories. It’s a robot who makes fan-fiction, how could you not like that?)
And then there’s the somehow reanimated Jedao, who also has the memories of Shuos Jedao, but not the same memories that Cheris has. He constantly surprises himself with how much military knowledge he has at his fingertips, but he doesn’t remember anything of his life after the academy. He doesn’t remember being victimized by the predatory Heptarch Shuos Khiaz, or his growing hatred for the Heptarchy, or the Battle at Hellspin fortress where he massacred the enemy and his entire swarm, including personally tracking down and shooting everyone on his command moth.
“Listen,” he said, “you can vivisect me for speaking out of turn, but you’re fucked in the head if you think the correct response to a psychotic mass-murdering traitor is to bring him back from the dead and hand him another army.”
Kujen has been downloading Jedao’s disembodied consciousness into host bodies every few decades for centuries, but Jedao (this Jedao) knows nothing about any of that. Kujen only gives Jedao as much information as he thinks he needs, which leaves him trying to find out his own history from rumors, or four hundred years of documentaries and sometimes hilariously bad fictionalized dramas.
None of it explains why he should keep serving a truly horrifying person like the Nirai Hexarch, and what exactly Kujen has..done to him in the process of bringing him back from the dead. Raven Stratagem mostly centered around the eccentric Shuos Hexarch Mikokez; Revenant Gun is everyone’s chance to learn exactly how terrifying Kujen is, and what he’s been up to for the last nine centuries.
The reader learns a lot in this installment, and in fact seems to learn things at the exact same pace as everyone else in this universe, about their technology and their history and exactly how horrifying the rules of their society can be. After all, the only person who’s been around since the start of all this calendrical mechanics is Kujen; for everyone else it practically takes the disintegration of their entire government to start noticing how many horrible things they’ve accepted as normal. Everyone at the highest levels is insane, soldiers are chemically programmed to follow orders, technology only works if you torture and sacrifice people at the right time, this is just the way things are. And don’t even get me started on how insane it is to have a ruling body that benefits when people break the rules, which gives them an incentive to make new rules for people to break. (Het hem, for-profit prison system, anyone?)
There’s nothing traditional about the ending of this trilogy, so don’t expect a clear-cut victory or a good-triumphs-over-evil or anything other than people having to choose the least-worst option and generally managing to still do a lot of damage by not having enough information, or getting betrayed, or by sheer accident. But there are nail-bitingly tense space battles, and tragic romance (I think? It’s messed up and taboo for a very good reason, but still…) and just enough hope to think that someone will get a happily ever after. Eventually. Yoon Ha Lee even had me getting a little teary-eyed over a potted plant for crying out loud, and if that doesn’t convey just how weird this series is then nothing will.