There isn’t a glossary included that I saw, but Lee made it easy to absorb by sliding little details in at appropriate moments, tying it into character histories or plot points. Most people now know of her from Netflix, but my husband and I have loved her since Charlie Brooker's Weekly/Annual. While Star Wars certainly has its own merits, I prefer Star Trek because it offers a vision of a reality that might actually come to pass. Cheris, badass military captain and tactician, loves dueling (even though she’s terrible) and lurid soap operas with equally terrible dueling. She’s very smart, with an eye for strategy, and an ability to compute complex mathematical equations under extreme stress.

Such things are small in the face of achieving and ensuring unity, and no one knows this more than a Kel. Throughout the novel Cheris deals with questions of compliance: complying with what those under her command want her to do, complying with what her faction expects her to do, complying with the other faction she knows is pulling strings – all so she can win, because the hexarchate runs on compliance to the calendar, and without that compliance, everything fails. This is one of those books that sets you up so you think you know everything for about 90% of the book and then in the last 10% is like ha lol played you.But over the course of Ninefox Gambit, Jedao’s story is the real pull that dragged me through the book as I kept asking what kind of person truly was he, what his motives were, and what was the exact nature of his relationship with Cheris he intended to cultivate. This is the first in a series and though left in a cliffhanger, the story of the initial book is nicely wrapped up so you aren't left completely in exquisite anticipation. Though this novel is supposed to be about a siege, that story feels almost incidental in comparison to the one focusing on Cheris and Jedao. Many readers will struggle to absorb the contours of this universe by osmosis, which is the only option Lee presents.

Captain Kel Cheris is part of the Kel infantry, the ground-force military branch of the hexarchate, the galaxies-spanning empire of the universe that rules via the power of the high calendar.I dove into this one almost immediately upon release, and I am pleased to say that the last Wayfarers book is just as good as its predecessors. Instead, Jedao plunged the entirety of his force into the gyre and activated the first threshold winnowers, known ever since for their deadliness. Humanity can become a post-scarcity space-faring civilisation, if it chooses to set aside petty differences and work together towards achieving that goal. The heads of the Hexarchate have no idea that they are not just playing with fire; they are on the verge of being incinerated.

Even for readers who are willing to let those sorts of details slide in favour of other important things will soon find themselves quickly overwhelmed by the other details of the setting. Many, many, many people die over the events of the book, and Lee brings home the horror of war in both large and small scope, from showing us the personalities and individuality of the soldiers and civilians, to the powerful moment when a character realizes his team is the only group of people alive in a district that used to house thousands. And as the siege wears on and they spend more time together, Cheris begins to wonder if all that she knows about Jedao is actually true – and if such questions are not a sign of her own, impending madness. Another school of thought within the Hexarchate, that consists of assassins and infiltrators, people trained in mind games and trickery.The book is tightly plotted and intricate, dropping the reader right into an unfamiliar future, with any explanation and context shown in glimpses, bits, and gradually over time. This is an exercise in patience and focus, to be sure, and will probably turn off some readers who are looking for a more quickly-paced story, but for readers who are willing to put the time and effort into learning about the setting, the payoff is more than satisfactory. I don’t know if this one just felt simpler in comparison to those, or if it’s just not as difficult as reviews depicted it to be (it’s probably the first one). Because he had a reputation for winning unwinnable fights, they assigned him to deal with the Lanterner rebellion. You scale the mountain with Ninefox, while the next two entries give you an easier ride to the conclusions.