2025-10-11 Gideon the Ninth

tl;dr: (That's what she said!) An interesting world, appropriate protagonist, and entertaining — though predictable — plot. 5/7, though that might increase as I read the rest of the series.

My first thought when starting Gideon the Ninth (2019, Tamsyn Muir) was "this setting is just like Dune." It's not, but it certainly has parallels. The setting is far-future-plus-magic, with a big focus on politics and heritage. Curiously, the protagonist/narrative focus is someone who couldn't care less about any of that "big focus," and has no direct access to the magic. This means the writer gets to maintain the mystery around the various systems (e.g. What are the limits of necromancy? Why does the Eighth hate the Ninth so much?) without making any characters deliberately oblique, a delightful contrast to two other authors I've read recently: Weir's attempts to hide important facts and Tolkein's delight in telling you every fact.

The plot itself centers around a sort of political... challenge? tournament? where representatives of each house/planet/lineage must not only figure out what the challenge is, but even why they're not being told what the challenge is. Sadly, this falls a bit short of intriguing by dint of the fact that most of the mystery is revealed in the final few chapters... along with the key facts that would have been necessary for the reader to unravel the mystery themselves. A tragic consequence of the otherwise-perfect protagonist setup. Even so, character motivations and natures (except for the twist villain) remain consistent with previous depictions, almost never contradicting known facts.

The setting is of particular interest to me, as I have long had a love of necromancy and the narrative keeps the details tantalizingly just out of the reader's understanding. The politics, character motivations, and challenge rules are slowly unveiled as the protagonist meets with, and speaks to, each of the representatives of the other houses, almost always in a way that demonstrates their character's nature.

My second thought when starting Gideon the Ninth was "wow, it's been a long time since I've felt the need to look up the definition of a word casually dropped in the writing." The one that particularly stood out to me is "prolix," which this book fortunately isn't, favoring a moderate vocabulary for most of the readtime, but casually sprinkling in word-of-the-day words at a rough rate of one every-other page. As someone who grew up reading Calvin & Hobbes and gaining a fair amount of vocabulary from that, I quite enjoyed being blindsided by the odd word I didn't know, but easily guessed by context.

Between the uncommon setting, sporadic vocabulary spikes, and occasional raunchiness, I can't recommend this book to everyone, but the few I do recommend it to will greatly enjoy it. If you like the political machinations of Dune or sword-and-sorcery-in-space, you'll probably like this one. I'll be picking up the remainder of the series after I get through a bit more of my backlog (How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying and The Hamilton Scheme are next on my list).

Oh, and the stupid joke in the tl;dr is because that's how the protagonist would probably react to reading this much.