Gideon the Ninth

I can't tell you how many times I've picked this book up, read the first few pages and tossed it aside.

Something about those first few pages is difficult to overcome and I know I'm not the only one. Maybe it's folks around my age (pushing 40) who all seem to uniformly find the same annoyance in a snarky, smart-mouthed protagonist that feels very contemporary (if not dated) for a fantastical setting that kills our interest. Or, for me, the sorta grimdark setting of the Tomb of the Ninth.

In a way, it felt like a Nick Lutsko Spirit Halloween video with no tongues in cheeks.

If I'm honest, I can't tell you why I picked it up again. It's been recommended to me dozens of times now, and I've unknowingly bought it twice in different formats. All of my desired library holds were a few weeks out, so I sorta just said, “fine, I'll try this again until one of the holds comes through.”

Sure enough, there was that beginning again where we meet the titular Gideon and it's the same cringe epic bacon guy sort of humor that made me hate ‘The Martian' in all of its glory. Along with a comically dark setting of some sort of tomb planet with shambling skeletons and dark dungeons. Sigh.

But, I kept going. This book gets hyped a lot for queer representation, and any cynicism about this sort of melts away because Gideon is absolutely queer, but done in a way where it's very matter-of-fact. Gideon is just Gideon, being queer is just a part of the character.

See, the thing is, Gideon is also really annoying. One of the drawbacks of having an obnoxious lead is you're gonna turn some people away. That's what happened to me. Then you start to see more of Gideon, and that everyone is annoyed by Gideon and a lot of the goofy, aloof behavior is a defense mechanism from a lifetime of trauma.

You really, really need to push past those initial annoyances, though, because once you do, everything opens up.

The story winds itself around in all sorts of interesting ways, the characters are all mashed together, pit against each other and forced to cope with their own shortcomings in unique ways and while there's a relatively massive bodycount for named characters here, never did I find myself wanting to put this book aside after the story got going.

In places, the diction can feel clunky in trying to illustrate this realm as a science fantasy one, especially considering Gideon is our anchor to things and Gideon's link to everything is comic books and skin mags. Still, the occasional five-dollar word is easy enough to gloss over considering how well everything else flows.

This is a special book and if you're like me and struggled with the beginning, it's worth pushing further into before writing it off.

Where do I even fucking start? Gideon the Ninth is a barn burner, and what I mean by that it will burn up your mind like a house made of straw and gasoline.I'm not really sure how to summarize the basic premise of this book without going exorbitantly in depth - depth which this novel, mind you, doesn't really bother with most of the time. But here goes - Gideon Nav is an indentured servant, a foundling raised since she was a day old, to the House of the Ninth, Keepers of the Locked Tomb, creepy fucking nuns in death's head face paint who can raise skeleton servants from bits of bone. This is a world of necromancers - and space travel. And swords. Don't think about it too much, just go with it. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon's nemesis since childhood, is called by the Emperor, Necrolord Prime, along with the heirs of each of the other seven houses, with their cavaliers, to stand the trials to become Lyctors, achieving the pinnacle of necromantic ability and serving the Emperor directly. Nonagesimus' assigned cavalier is a wimp, so she wants Gideon, who just so happens to very good with a sword, just not a rapier. Once they arrive at the First House, the “trial” they realize is a riddle wrapped in a experiment spiced with a whole lot of what the fuck.The reason why I hesitated so long on reading this book, despite the glowing reviews, is basically because of all of waves hands that. Adult hard science fiction and high fantasy, aside from often being very obtuse and big on new vocabulary, also frequently has an...ickiness about it. It often detaches itself from the body and the head's of its characters in lieu of creating vivid and complex settings, so much that the characters feel kind of like meat puppets that terrible things keep happening to. But Gideon the Ninth is wholly committed to its characters, in a way that most authors would not even attempt. It is so grounded it is subterranean. Gideon, reluctant cavalier, lover of comic books, dirty magazines and her longsword, is deliciously irreverent. This is like if someone took, I don't know, Game of Thrones or The Witcher, whatever courtly and swordly story suits your fancy, and mixed it up with Army of Darkness. Both in content and tone. There isn't actually a character with a chainsaw for a hand, but if there was it would not be out of place at all.Tamsyn Muir is doing her thing here. I was not at all surprised when I read the acknowledgements and saw that one of her Clarion instructors and mentors was [a:Jeff VanderMeer 33919 Jeff VanderMeer https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1522640540p2/33919.jpg], because what I kept thinking as I reached the third act of this book is that I so wanted to read the next book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. The reason being is because Muir writes on an edge between body horror and cosmic horror, that also overlaps with VanderMeer's New Weird. It's just absolute flesh chaos, at points. It's not just gore, its magicians using their own bodies - flesh, bone and spirit - to become terrifying weapons. It's unsettling in a way I did not realize I could be unsettled.Muir is also breaking a lot of story telling conventions, not really bothering to tell you the whole plot or the whole setting or how anything works. There are whole chunks of narrative that are just not there because Gideon wasn't there, or just wasn't terribly interested, and you just gotta roll with it. Muir puts a lot on her plate - nearly sixteen primary characters, a complex magic system, an interplanetary conflict, not to mention individual cultures, prejudices and fields of study for each of the Houses. There are a couple moments where the story buckles under the pressure (that poor continuity editor), but most of the time I didn't even notice what I didn't know, because I was having so much fun.Because this book is so much fun. Like I said, it's rooted in its characters and great character moments. The fact that Muir created such a unique an interesting cast is incredible. The fact that she so completely unafraid to make them irreverent, hilarious and utterly vicious has my head spinning. Gideon and Harrowhark are a fractious, charming and heart-breaking pair. You know as soon as you see how many different ways they say they hate each other that they mean more to each other than either of them will say. And on top of it all, you have some bad ass duels, epic monster fights, and a bunch of necromancers being unapologetically nerdy about raising the dead.Gideon the Ninth is a hell of an accomplishment. You can still tell its a debut novel though, as you can feel Muir testing things and experimenting as she goes, so technically I'm giving this 4.5 stars, but for Goodreads that's a 5, so who cares. This book is snarky, brutal and bat shit crazy.

Loved it!!