Lesbian Necromancers in Space!

[mtvessel]

Feb 2022
Gideon the Ninth - Tamsin Muir – Tor.com, 2019
* * *
If it turns out that the author didn't use the title of this review as her one-line sales pitch when hawking this book to agents and publishers, I shall be seriously disappointed. Though it is not, of course, an entirely accurate summary. This is a dark science fantasy thriller based around an inventive necromantic magic system, and the characters, though admittedly largely women some of whom are attracted to each other, are much too busy doing plot stuff to engage in significant sapphic steaminess. And the protagonist is not a necromancer at all.

She is instead an example of that underused fantasy trope, the female fighter. We first encounter Gideon Nav as she attempts to escape by shuttle from the House of the Ninth, a cult of skeleton-raising adepts who tend an artefact called the Locked Tomb and who are as dreary as the planet they live on. Needless to say, the plan goes awry thanks to her nemesis, the young necromancer Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Which makes it all the more awkward when Harrow is summoned to the First House as a candidate to become a Lyctor (a powerful disciple and mouthpiece of the Emperor, the Necrolord Prime), and decides to take Gideon as her cavalier. They travel to the empire's ancient capital and meet the candidates from the Second to Eighth Houses, many of whom are as scheming and ruthless as Harrow herself. As the race to discover the secrets of lyctorhood hots up and events start to spiral out of control, Gideon finds herself having to work with her nemesis in order to survive.

There is a lot to like in the setting and the story. The First House has echoes of Gormenghast and New Viron in its size, inscrutability and sense of deep history, and the large cast of secondary characters from the various houses are well-drawn and in some cases sympathetic. The necromantic doubletalk was well done and made the events seem plausible, and I liked the horror-inflected cabin-in-the-woods feel of it all.

Unfortunately this only exacerbates the book's greatest flaw, which is that the dialogue is completely out of keeping. Having grown up in a gothic, static environment, it makes no sense whatsoever for the characters to speak in modern American snark, but that is what they do. An example from page 60:

"Isn't this the part where you give me intel," Gideon said, standing up and flexing her stiff muscles, "tell me all you know about the tasks ahead, who we're with, what to expect?"
"God no!" said Harrow. "All you need to know is that you'll do what I say, or I'll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut."

Entertaining and readable to be sure, but not plausible. The jokey dialogue spoils the atmosphere and makes the characters feel insincere and lightweight.

This is a common problem in what has been dubbed squeecore – SFF stories written in an upbeat tone clearly influenced by fan fiction which focus on young (or weirdly young-acting) protagonists. Personally I am not comfortable with the term since the writers of such tales, which would include people like Becky Chambers and N.K Larkwood, are mostly women, so it feels like a coded form of misogyny. But Doris V. Sutherland's observation of the tendency of many of these warmer SFF writers to use cartoon mode - punchy and quirky dialogue and viewpoint descriptions that create memorable cartoon-like "silhouettes" of the main characters at the expense of plausibility - strikes me as bang on the money. Of course there is nothing wrong with cartoons – they can be very entertaining – but I prefer my SFF to be tonally consistent. I imagine what writers who really care about dialogue and language, such as Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe or Susannah Clarke, could have done with Muir's setting had they thought of it, and sigh.