Black Gate

Operation Arcana
Edited by John Joseph Adams
Baen(320 pages, $15 trade/$7.99 paperback/$6.99 digital, March 3, 2015)
Cover by Dominic Harman

Operation Arcana is another collection by prolific editor John Joseph Adams, built of stories crafted around a theme that gives it a fairly unique flavor among recent speculative fiction anthologies. That theme is basically something like “soldiers and magic.”

On first blush, especially considering the cover image of modern soldiers using assault rifles against a rearing dragon, that might seem a bit of a cheesy juxtaposition. But it actually works quite well, and Adams has crafted an anthology of consistently compelling stories. There’s a wide spectrum of tales here, from alternate histories in which historical wars are fought with magical aid, to realistic slipstream in which modern soldiers encounter mythical creatures, to high fantasy focused on the gritty lives of campaigners.

More than just compelling stories though, there’s something about the juxtaposition of magic and warfare that seems to just really work. Why? I think the authors have stumbled onto something profound in their disparate tales, and I think it involves this fact: that magic is defined by rules. Even if the rules are strange or mysterious, stories involving magic are almost always faithful to the orderly structure of the magic that undergirds their imaginary universes. By contrast warfare — or at least battle — in the real world is inherently chaotic. At times the violence appears meaningless and the carnage random. So there’s something very appealing and attractive about stories that play with this sense of chaos on a backdrop of rule-structured magical systems.

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Ninefox Gambit
Yoon Ha Lee
Solaris (384 pages, $9.99 paperback, June 2016)

I will freely admit that I don’t think I understood everything in Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit.

Give me a break – there’s a reason I teach History and Social Studies and not advanced calculus. I spent about the first third of the novel trying to figure out what exactly “calendrical heresy” and “formation instinct” meant, which are cornerstones of a world where technology, military strategy and social order seem to be largely based on mathematical formulae.

I’m reasonably certain that the high calendar that dominates most of Ninefox’s human society is a sort of belief system that allows certain “exotic” technologies to exist; basically, if everyone in civilization is on the same page, then the machinery functions properly, but if people start believing a bunch of different things, machinery breaks down. That in and of itself is a brilliant concept – presuming I got it right.

But then you also add in the undead soul of a possibly-insane general bonded to an infantry captain in order to fight a campaign, robotic sentient servitors that take the forms of snakes and other animals, and apparently using antonyms as weapons (which I think was a way of disrupting the concentration of someone manning a protective shield around a space station) and things get even more… alien.

However, as Ann Leckie has said, Ninefox is somehow “human and alien at the same time.” Even as I slowly figured out the larger world of this novel, I was hooked by its characters and the conflict around them. Kel Cheris is great as a fish-out-of-water protagonist, someone comfortable as an infantry soldier promoted to general, and aware that she’s a pawn in someone else’s plot. Shuos Jedao, her undead bonded ally, is sort of like the hallucination of Kilgrave whispering in Jessica Jones’s ear, if Kilgrave recognized he was a psychopath and didn’t have absolute power to manipulate people.

You know you probably can’t trust a guy who murdered thousands of innocent people, including his own staff, and was locked away for four centuries as a result, but when he’s the guy telling Cheris to get some sleep and actually look after herself, it’s hard not to root for him.

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