Most people seem to either love or hate Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, but I can't quite bring myself to do either. I guess I've been out of the loop, because it's apparently getting a lot of buzz but I hadn't heard of it before the Hugo nominees were announced.
The basic premise sounded cool. Necromancers! Someone labeled it "science fantasy"! I'm almost always a fan of genre-blending/obliterating. So that's what I was excited about going in.
But there were also some red flags for me once I started reading reviews. Some complained about an obnoxiously snarky YA-style protagonist. Many complained about being confused. Others complained about weird dialogue choices (contemporary colloquialisms in world most definitely not our own). And I admit this is the weirdest red flag, but hear me out: a lot of the enthusiastic Goodreads reviews include copious pictures and animation, and in my experience books with lots of reviews like that tend to not be my thing (no judgment of those who write these reviews or love books with these reviews... it's just an observation about my personal tastes).
So, what did I think? This is definitely a weird book. For most of the book I couldn't decide if I liked it or not. I found myself not really caring about the narrative, but then I kept reading, anyway (okay, occasionally skimming). And the ending was engaging even if I didn't completely understand it.
I was going to separate everything I liked and everything I didn't, but I can't quite seem to do that. Instead, I'll keep them together (somewhat like the two main characters, I guess, who seem opposed but can't get rid of one another!).
The takes place in a far future/other dimension/unspecified setting but it's filled with contemporary colloquialisms (someone is referred to as a "pizza face" and there are at least two occurrences of "that's what she said"). This is supposed to be funny and relatable (I guess?), but it often took me out of the story.
But then I wonder if the colloquialisms are really just translations into contemporary English of whatever language they're actually speaking. I wonder because I got some Gene Wolfe Book of the New Sun vibes, and this is a move he makes if I remember correctly (also the word "lyctor" is similar to Wolfe's "lictor").
Speaking of Gene Wolfe, Muir doesn't have quite the maddening vocabulary of Wolfe, but you get occasional glimpses of that influence. One Wolfe-style move: the characters' last names are the numbers of their houses in Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit. For example, Gideon Nav's last name is from the Sanskrit "nava" for "nine" and there is a "Chatur" (4), Asht ("ashta", 8), etc. (all those years studying Sanskrit don't often come in handy when reading science fiction, so I have to point it out when they do).
A lot of people are praising the world building, which is cool. There are hints of a really interesting world of necromancer houses in space who use animated skeletons as servants. My complaint, though, is that we don't actually learn much about this world. There is a spaceship at one point, but I didn't really have a much of a sense of the world until the end of the novel, and even then I'm left with a lot of questions, but more "well, that was muddled and unclear" type questions than "oooh, I can't wait to find out more" type questions. A lot of people are praising the depth of the novel, which I suppose is there somewhere, but I personally found these depths disappointingly unexplored for the most part.
The story was okay. I felt like I got the basic idea, but I admit I got lost in the details a lot, and the middle really lagged for me. There were twenty or so secondary characters who mostly seemed interchangeable but then would come in and do major things as if I had any idea who they were beyond their name in the Dramatis Personae list (note that list; you will need it!). One thing I did really like was finally (after hundreds of pages) learning the back story of the two main characters. And the necromantic "constructs" were really cool (I won't spoil it, but look out!).
I think I finished the novel mostly to see if the interesting bits got more depth (some of them did, most of them didn't), but I was also chuckling a bit. Mostly because of Gideon.
Let's get to what everyone tends to either love or hate the most: Gideon herself! I'll be the first to admit that a little bit of a snarky protagonist can sometimes go a long way for me, especially if she's constantly spouting Joss Whedon dialogue like half the YA speculative fiction protagonists out there. And Gideon does fit this mold pretty closely, but there's more to her than you think. I ended up liking her a lot more than I thought I would. She's funny and cool and really does care about stuff (although she'll rarely admit it).
I chuckled a lot while reading about her, sometimes even while I was rolling my eyes at her 21st century colloquialisms. She's the "lesbian" part of the "lesbian necromancers in space" promised on the font cover, but aside from mentioning her love of pornography and occasionally ogling somebody, that's part's pretty tame. Also, she's not a necromancer. Her frenemy Harrow is the necromancer, and the development of their relationship is one of the things I really liked about the novel.
I'm having trouble identifying much philosophical depth from the novel, aside from "necromancy is cool, but scary" (a reflection on death, I suppose) and a little bit about causation and when you can be said to have caused something like somebody's death. Maybe the philosophical bits are there eluding my discovery.
In the end I can't say I quite understand the extreme love of this novel, but neither do I condone hatred of it. My relationship to this novel is much like Gideon and Harrow: I don't quite understand why, but I stuck with it anyway.
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