Gideon the Ninth

4/5. This was my third try, and this time oh wow I thought it was great -- though the first two times I foundered in the first chapter. You see, I was brought up in a style of reading SF/fantasy where language is worldbuilding. Word choice tells you important things about the universe, what things exist in this universe, what things don't. The way characters talk tell you important thing about their culture in-universe. And a large part of what makes a book good, in this way of thinking, is how well it is able to maintain the balance of teaching you about the world through language and word choice and still keep you empathizing and in the heads of the characters.

...Muir does not freaking care about language and word choice as worldbuilding AT ALL. In fact, to a certain extent Muir does not care about worldbuilding at all -- and the way I just said that isn't quite right, as I think she has actually done some interesting worldbuilding in setting up her necromantic systems and the Houses and so on (whether it is consistent I guess I'll have to read the next book to see), and there are certain word choice things that she does really well, like have all the cavaliers referred to by their House -- but, like, there's a part she cares about and a part where she Does Not Care At All. So, on the first page, where chocolates on fancy hotel pillows are referred to (which caused me to nope out the first time) -- eh, sure, this universe can have chocolates on fancy hotel pillows just like the twenty-first century US, sure, why not, we're just not going to worry about the implications of that for consistency at all. People say "that's what she said" in this universe, why not?

So for this reading (as counseled by ase quite a while ago) I deliberately tried to turn off my SF-reading brain and tell it sternly, "Look, just roll with it and assume that nothing in terms of word choice is worldbuilding-specific." (I think one of you counseled me to think of it as if a translator had translated it into twenty-first-century jargon? Good idea, thank you to whomever suggested it.) And when I did that, Muir's stylistic choices turn out to work pretty well, actually -- I'll have to read the second book and see how that goes, but one thing that made it work was that this book was quite restricted in terms of setting; in a book taking place in more locales than one house I could see this not working, but as it was it allowed Muir to focus on language and word choice as character development.

(I didn't mind the memes showing up, though I live in a cave so I don't get memes in general -- but hey, I was raised on John M. Ford, who tried to put a reference to "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards..." in as much stuff as he could, including his Richard III vampire AU, so in general that kind of thing delights me. I am super delighted by all the quasi-spooky-Biblical stuff and hope it gets picked up on in the next book.)

And wow, once I could turn off my SF-reading brain I really liked the book. I mean partially because it is ALL the loyalty tropes on steroids and I feel like my brain does not admit the possibility of the loyalty tropes get to be Too Much, oh no, there's no such thing! So, you know, I got overloaded with loyalty trope and it was great! And also it reminded me of the Gormenghast books [ETA: I probably got this idea from skygiants's review, but I entirely concur], only with way more narrative drive, a compelling plot, and a heart, which I enjoyed. The plot just never let up, I loved it. I should have seen the ending coming because everything just leads directly to it, but I didn't because the narrative drive just took me straight through.

Also, I got blindsided a bit by the Gormenghast vibes and thought the book would all take place in the Ninth House with just the Ninth House characters, and no one told me that if I'd got through the first couple of chapters that it would be a "teams compete in a competition that involves necromancy laboratories" story because that kind of thing is my jam and I would probably have read this quite a bit earlier :P

One of the things I rather loved about it was that I kept hearing that it was "lesbian necromancers in space!" and I guess that's an accurate description, but that sort of makes me think there's going to be a sappy gooey romance, and, like. I loved Gideon because she was unabashedly into girls, like, attracted to them to the point where it's a plot point, but ~romance~ wasn't in some sense the character/relationship point of the book or of Gideon. (~Over-the-top loyalty~, mind you, can be the character/relationship point of any book anytime, yes please :D ) It was just one of those things where she had porno magazines of girls and she found women compelling in a way she didn't at all find men compelling (even though she would notice things about men's bodies too, mostly from a professional standpoint). And I hadn't realized how refreshing that would be, that Gideon just got to be into girls without it being a big deal in any way, inverting the usual careless pulp-SF het.

ahhhhh I really want to read the second one now but all these other Hugo holds came in so I will have to wait...

[I know a bunch of you wrote reviews of this which I missed because of reading it a year later than everyone else... so feel free to link me!]