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Ninefox Gambit: Tenth Anniversary Edition
The tenth anniversary edition of the Locus Award Winning classic. Featuring a new introduction by Ann Leckie.
When Captain Kel Cheris is disgraced for her unconventional tactics, Command gives her a chance to redeem herself, by retaking the imposing Fortress of Scattered Needles from the heretics rebelling against the hexarchate. Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at if the fortress falls, the whole empire is at risk.
Her best hope is to play host to the imprisoned soul of the gifted tactician Shuos Jedao, who has never lost a battle. But it’s a terrible in life, Jedao went mad and massacred two armies, one of them his own.
As the siege wears on and the secrets of the hexarchate come to light, Cheris must decide how far she can trust the ghostly Jedao – is he leading her to the truth, or will she be his next victim?
When Captain Kel Cheris is disgraced for her unconventional tactics, Command gives her a chance to redeem herself, by retaking the imposing Fortress of Scattered Needles from the heretics rebelling against the hexarchate. Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at if the fortress falls, the whole empire is at risk.
Her best hope is to play host to the imprisoned soul of the gifted tactician Shuos Jedao, who has never lost a battle. But it’s a terrible in life, Jedao went mad and massacred two armies, one of them his own.
As the siege wears on and the secrets of the hexarchate come to light, Cheris must decide how far she can trust the ghostly Jedao – is he leading her to the truth, or will she be his next victim?
352 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 11, 2026
About the author
Yoon Ha Lee
212 books2,102 followersYoon Ha Lee is an American science fiction writer born on January 26, 1979 in Houston, Texas. His first published story, “The Hundredth Question,” appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1999; since then, over two dozen further stories have appeared. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This anniversary edition was my first time reading Ninefox Gambit, so allow me to create a review of the whole! To my understanding, the only differences between them, however, is Ann Leckie's foreword.
While Leckie is a brilliant author, I don't think her foreword serves this work very well. Beyond the general praise, the two things it does are praise how it dumps you thoroughly in the middle with no explanation of anything, and talk about the work as an entry into the genre of "lesbian space atrocities." I love queer fiction but I am pretty middling on atrocities for the sake of atrocities. You gotta give me the complicated characters who don't justify their own actions. If they justify it and lose their own complication about it, I'm out, because I enjoy the human element of the work, including the atrocities. And I love having some in media res where I get to learn the world as I experience it, but I need enough hints and elements that I CAN put in the work to make the connections -- yet the foreword made me feel like the whole book would never explain anything.
And while technically both these things are true, they put an undue emphasis on it that I think may sheer a larger percentage of readers off than those who would actually be turned off by the content itself, because I am exactly the person who might be sheered off from it if I hadn't been giving an ARC a good college try, and I ended up quite enjoying it. So again, love Leckie's stuff, but take the foreword with a grain of salt!
Anyway, onto the work itself.
There were parts of this that I found utterly opaque to me, and parts that I was eating up desperately. Overall, I ended up deeply loving this book, but I think that the first 20% of it or so could be deeply cut down. Where the book started really going off was once Cheris and Jedao were interacting. That's the meat, that's the part that's delicious, and waiting until 20% of the way through a meal to get to anything really tasty feels like a missed opportunity. There's definitely some setup that's required to understand Cheris's limits and boundaries, and why she'd get the chance to pitch the use of Jedao as a weapon in the first place, but I'm not sure it needed quite that much of it. Likewise, I felt like there were two many cuts away to people on the ground doing their jobs only to die horribly. Maybe the "oh we're seeing other people's atrocities first hand again? Gross and unfortunate events. When do we get back to the fun stuff?" was deliberate, to put you into a similar position to the leads where the human cost was partly a distraction from what their goals were, but I think that could have been done with about half of them.
However, the rest of the book was delightful. I think it would probably have remained opaque to me if I hadn't read someone else talking about this, so here's what helped the 'mathematics' click for me. The thing they said was that the calendar, and the mathematics of their powers, was essentially feng shui. Alignment and formations that caused auspicious outcomes, and might vary by specific auspicious or inauspicious days. This philosophy isn't explained in the text, but seeing someone put it like that made me click into how this book works sooner. It's really not about hard math powering their weapons and reality, it's about soft math instead: about the power of belief in significance as tied in this case to numbers and days as the signifiers, which is why getting a large group of people to agree on a different significant base number system and calendar was in fact wrecking the signifiers for other people.
Anyway, that's not what makes this book sing, though. It's the character interactions, it's Cheris's flexible immobility bending more and more under a terrified self-hating manipulative genocide-causing meow meow. Which really understates Jedao's character. It's a guy who sees that this world is suffering under a terrifying regime—Cheris (and Jedao) are working for the bad guys, after all, that's the perspective here. He's making omelets and counting every egg. He's unable to stop thinking about the human cost and he's doing it anyway. It's impossible to tell how much he's telling the truth and how much he isn't except we see his life, too. And he's an undead possessor force.
I will probably read the rest of these, though the fundamental changes at the end of book 1 make me worry we're going to lose some of that intense focus on the core arc. Corruption arc? The arc.
Great story here, with amazing writing.
Thank you to NetGalley and to Solaris Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
While Leckie is a brilliant author, I don't think her foreword serves this work very well. Beyond the general praise, the two things it does are praise how it dumps you thoroughly in the middle with no explanation of anything, and talk about the work as an entry into the genre of "lesbian space atrocities." I love queer fiction but I am pretty middling on atrocities for the sake of atrocities. You gotta give me the complicated characters who don't justify their own actions. If they justify it and lose their own complication about it, I'm out, because I enjoy the human element of the work, including the atrocities. And I love having some in media res where I get to learn the world as I experience it, but I need enough hints and elements that I CAN put in the work to make the connections -- yet the foreword made me feel like the whole book would never explain anything.
And while technically both these things are true, they put an undue emphasis on it that I think may sheer a larger percentage of readers off than those who would actually be turned off by the content itself, because I am exactly the person who might be sheered off from it if I hadn't been giving an ARC a good college try, and I ended up quite enjoying it. So again, love Leckie's stuff, but take the foreword with a grain of salt!
Anyway, onto the work itself.
There were parts of this that I found utterly opaque to me, and parts that I was eating up desperately. Overall, I ended up deeply loving this book, but I think that the first 20% of it or so could be deeply cut down. Where the book started really going off was once Cheris and Jedao were interacting. That's the meat, that's the part that's delicious, and waiting until 20% of the way through a meal to get to anything really tasty feels like a missed opportunity. There's definitely some setup that's required to understand Cheris's limits and boundaries, and why she'd get the chance to pitch the use of Jedao as a weapon in the first place, but I'm not sure it needed quite that much of it. Likewise, I felt like there were two many cuts away to people on the ground doing their jobs only to die horribly. Maybe the "oh we're seeing other people's atrocities first hand again? Gross and unfortunate events. When do we get back to the fun stuff?" was deliberate, to put you into a similar position to the leads where the human cost was partly a distraction from what their goals were, but I think that could have been done with about half of them.
However, the rest of the book was delightful. I think it would probably have remained opaque to me if I hadn't read someone else talking about this, so here's what helped the 'mathematics' click for me. The thing they said was that the calendar, and the mathematics of their powers, was essentially feng shui. Alignment and formations that caused auspicious outcomes, and might vary by specific auspicious or inauspicious days. This philosophy isn't explained in the text, but seeing someone put it like that made me click into how this book works sooner. It's really not about hard math powering their weapons and reality, it's about soft math instead: about the power of belief in significance as tied in this case to numbers and days as the signifiers, which is why getting a large group of people to agree on a different significant base number system and calendar was in fact wrecking the signifiers for other people.
Anyway, that's not what makes this book sing, though. It's the character interactions, it's Cheris's flexible immobility bending more and more under a terrified self-hating manipulative genocide-causing meow meow. Which really understates Jedao's character. It's a guy who sees that this world is suffering under a terrifying regime—Cheris (and Jedao) are working for the bad guys, after all, that's the perspective here. He's making omelets and counting every egg. He's unable to stop thinking about the human cost and he's doing it anyway. It's impossible to tell how much he's telling the truth and how much he isn't except we see his life, too. And he's an undead possessor force.
I will probably read the rest of these, though the fundamental changes at the end of book 1 make me worry we're going to lose some of that intense focus on the core arc. Corruption arc? The arc.
Great story here, with amazing writing.
Thank you to NetGalley and to Solaris Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Displaying 1 of 1 review