Gideon the Ninth

 
 

Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

Tor Dot Com

2019

 

 

Gideon the Ninth is obviously very popular, and some of my friends absolutely love it. My initial reaction was a sense of alienation from the text - at first Muir seems to be targeting a specific audience, and despite being a queer woman in the Millennial age range, I don't think I'm part of it. In the early chapters, Gideon the book seems to borrow from the tropes of fanfiction, and Gideon the character talks like a Very Online person posts. Muir's close third person narration, centered on Gideon, adopts the same sort of netspeak whenever she needs a metaphor or analogy. I did warm up to the book though, and really enjoyed it from about page 150 onward.

 

The book starts out on the sepulcher homeworld of the Ninth House, one of eight royal families who each have their own planet, ruled by very Catholic-seeming necromancers, who serve the Immortal God Emperor of the First House. The Emperor's self-resurrection, ten-thousand year reign, and unceasing interplanetary war against unspecified enemies bear more than passing resemblance to Warhammer 40K.

 

Harrow is the royal daughter of the Ninth House, and Gideon is a commoner and indentured servant with the demeanor and vocabulary of someone who spends about 12 hours a day on Twitter and Tumblr, although what she actually does is practice swordfighting. How it's possible for Gideon to be the way she is is never addressed, you just have to accept it. 

 

Harrow and Gideon are both in their late teens, and are the only two people under 40 on the whole planet. This ominous fact is stated once, early on, and then rarely referred to again until about 300 pages later, when we get the official version of what happened, and then the truth like 1 page after that. So the amount of foreshadowing and pace of information reveal could've been better, in my opinion. 

 

Because they are the only two children, Harrow and Gideon grow up a bit like sisters, but with a vast inequality in their relationship that makes them seem like rivals who hate each other at the start of the book. Early on, I assumed they were in an enemies-to-lovers romance arc, which is basically a fair statement of their trajectory. To make sense of their behavior, I think you have to be pretty familiar with that trope, and/or assume that they always loved each other but neither knew how to express it, or else their eventual reconciliation and pairing seems awfully fast and not well supported by events shown in the text.

 

Okay, so, the Emperor invites one necromancer and their sworn cavalier from each House to come to the First House and learn to be his new Lyctors, since the original immortal house-founders are finally ready to be replaced. Harrow's actual cavalier flees the planet, so Gideon is recruited to tag along and pretend to be Harrow's faithful, loyal servant, in exchange for freedom from her indenture afterward. To help with the ruse, Harrow also orders Gideon to pretend to be a nun under a vow of silence.

 

Pairs from each of the eight Houses gather in the disused and gigantic First House building, where they're told that they're there to learn how become Lyctors, and that the first thing they'll have to learn is how to learn that. Harrow sneaks off to start studying immediately, and Gideon is a mute witness to everyone else's interpersonal drama without really understanding any of it. 

 

One thing that's clear is that the Ninth House is unusually small, devout, and isolated, like a remote convent. The others are still necromantic royalty, but they vary in their degrees of ceremonial pomp, religious intensity, kindness and cruelty, and most of them know each other from previous state dinners and the like. Everyone's last name is based on their House number, which is convenient for a reader trying to keep track of the large cast, and also contributes to the tongue-in-cheek nature of the worldbuilding. The characters all take themselves very seriously, but Muir has set them in something like the Adventure Time version of the 40K universe.

 

For me, the point where things finally really got interesting was when Harrow realizes that she can't do this alone, asks Gideon for help, and starts sharing information. We get some very D&D-esque scenes where the pair explores the halls of the labyrinthine First House looking for secret doors, then studying tableaus of objects trying to discern what they indicate about the previous occupants. 

 

The way Harrow and the other necromancers learn here is to find preserved ten-thousand year old laboratories where they can repeat key necromantic experiments that show them how to cast new spells. In what feels like a nod to Jack Vance, the spells are essentially equations or proofs - math that has become magic. The labs date to a time just before the Empire, and belong to a world that's recognizably the near-future of our own contemporary Earth. The experiments all require cooperation between necromancer and cavalier, which forces Gideon to trust her body and spirit to Harrow's magic, which she does more readily than you'd expect.

 

And this is the other interesting thing about this section. We finally get to see who Gideon really is, as revealed by her actions, rather than her words, ironically, especially so once she discards the fake vow of silence. Gideon talks like a shitposter and fancies herself a super cool tough-guy badass, but behind her bravado, we eventually see someone who's much kinder (and much more vulnerable) than she thinks she is. She's also kind of a pushover for any pretty girl who's nice to her. My regrettable tendency to see reflections of myself in fictional red-heads led me, in spite of my initial annoyance, to sympathize a great deal with the Gideon we see in the latter half of the book.

 

The final element of the plot, that adds time-pressure to everyone's search for new spells, is that about halfway into the book, necromancer-cavalier duos start turning up murdered, and suddenly we're in an Agatha Christie And Then There Were None style locked-room mystery. I didn't care for this development when it cropped up in Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, but it really works here. Interestingly, to me at least, despite the fact that everyone's magic is powered by death energy, and they've mainly learned it so they can go off and fight in whatever war the Empire is engaged in, they're all shocked by the murders and consider the killings to be immoral.

 

So, the femslash romance, the magic school competition, and the whodunnit plots define the middle and most interesting section of the book. Initially you wonder if it's Obvious Suspect, before eventually discovering that no! it was Unlikely Suspect all along. This is another area where I think Muir leans on her audience's familiarity with the tropes to make up forestall questions you might ask based on what she wrote alone. Because I think Unlikely Suspect does a few things that are difficult to square with the eventual revelation of their guilt. It's clear Muir knows the tropes well and is skilled at playing with them, but I wish she didn't seem to lean on them to supply logic to actions whose motives she doesn't explain herself.

 

Once all three plots resolve, what we get for the last 50 pages or so is one long climactic fight-for-your-life fight scene. And to give Muir credit, she certainly knows how to write action. If someone wanted to make a movie out of this, I think they'd be happy with the tour de force boss fight that caps off the story.

 

This is an ongoing series, and to judge from the fan response, continues to improve after the first book. I haven't decided if I'll continue. Certainly not right away. I am glad I stuck with it through my initial reservations and doldrums, because once the pace picked up and the stakes of the story were revealed, I really liked reading from that point on.