(Tor, 2019)
Featured art: Gideon Nav by Simon Strohmaier on ArtStation
Genre(s): LGBTQIA, SFF
Rating: ✶✶✶✶✶
(Oh my gosh, have you seen the fanart of this trilogy on ArtStation? I’m yet to check out DeviantArt, but I will, soon.)
Eating dark chocolate, listening to Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes 1-5 on a three-hour loop, and rereading Gideon the Ninth on an evening has been one of the best decisions I’ve taken this year. Gideon the Ninth, with it’s strongly visual descriptions, lends itself easily to a filmic presentation in the mind as one reads it in time with music and savours it piece by piece. This novel is like someone married Gavia Baker Whitelaw’s recent tweet about vampire vibes films with dark academia, with music like Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli’s soundtrack for The Witcher (2019). It comes off as super-gothic and honestly quite cool at the same time, with it’s amalgamation of contemporary language and mannerisms, and tropes made popular in queer fanfiction, with horror, space opera, and mediaeval, Catholic-infused death cult magic. There’s no review that can do this sort of book justice.
The story is about Gideon Nav, raised as an indentured servant to the Ninth House, the rulers of the ninth planet in a solar system ruled by the sciences but also by necromancy. Basically if the underworld was real, it was a Christian hermitage and prison at the same time, and it was based on Pluto. (I mean, it’s as if someone had researched the exact ways to pique the interest of a Scorpio.) Gideon Nav is a butch lesbian with a body shaped by thousands of hours of exercise that I cannot even begin to imagine for myself, and by god I’d have devoted all my life to her, had I known someone like her in my life. I’m serious; you can only feel the texture of her personality once you read the book, her POV, the expression of her character, and it is so absolutely loveable. I kept imagining someone like David Tennant’s Crowley in Good Omens (2019), except with bumper biceps and a slightly rounded face and that exquisitely butch quality that I’ve never had the fortune to see in anyone in real life. Needless to say, but I’m still saying it, I fell in love with her within the first fifteen minutes of reading her. And there, I just spent a hundred and thirty five words raving about a fictional lesbian —
The other main character is Gideon’s apparent nemesis, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the Reverend Daughter and de facto Lady of the Ninth House, practically Gideon’s boss, and she’s one hell of a viperous Scorpio, I can tell you. Sorry I’m dipping into astrology here, for anyone who’s not particularly thrilled by astrology here, but the book kinda demands it. She has that consuming passion for power, and knowledge as power, that I can empathise with. About half the book is spent describing Gideon and Harrow’s hatred towards each other, which I thought was very nice of Tamsyn Muir to write. I didn’t realise how much I’d been missing the depiction of two women who hate each other with such force of feeling, unadulterated by heterosexist nonsense, until I read such an account. Because, of course, it’s not hate at all, but projected self-loathing, confusion about one’s place in the order of things, and it’s very gay. So, of course I, a young gay, liked it.
Now, I was supposed to be writing a passable, if not good, summary.
The third majorly diverting thing about this book is it’s treatment of necromancy. No hand-waving about like it’s some other sort of abracadabra, nope; necromancy in the Locked Tomb trilogy is serious f–king science, with at least eight different types, each with its own methodology, mathematics, and specialisations. I nearly died reading all of it, and I’m rereading the novel partly because I want to go back and understand all the precious little details we the readers were given of it. I’d love to see Muir’s notes on this stuff; I’ll read a whole treatise if she decides to publish a fictional treatise on necromancy tomorrow.
Speaking of which, Alecto the Ninth is coming out in 2022. I think it’ll be about God the Emperor’s greatest enemy and I CANNOT WAIT.
Well, I’ve got Harrow the Ninth to finish this year. I’ve only started reading it, I don’t understand what’s going on yet, and yet! I’m halfway in love again!
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