![]() A living soldier named Cheris with an unlikely facility for mathematics, and Jedao, the centuries-old ghost of a brilliant general and known mass-murderer who lives in her shadow and in her head. ![]() It is the result of heretical forces allied against this world's rulers, and someone is going to have to go in there and purge the non-conformist thought from the system. Here's the plot, presented as simply as I can make it: In the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a "calendrical rot" has begun altering the fabric of reality. ![]() And then twisting himself in the opposite direction, asking (and answering) how, in a place so alien, can you root the experience in something that gives it the roundness of an internal humanity? ![]() So how much can you screw with a world before you take it completely to pieces? How much fundamental similarity to our own must an author's imaginary place possess in order to hang together for a reader? With Ninefox, Lee has turned this elementary concern into a game of chicken he plays with himself, pushing hard to see how many of the essential, structural underpinnings of the universe can be removed before the fabric of stars unravels. ![]() Lee's is a universe that operates under different laws than does ours, where science and technology are based not around the manipulation of atoms (necessarily), but the interface of numbers and observance of a calendar, where power derives from the order given unto things by acceptance and belief in them. ![]()
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