No (Nah)

I had the privilege of taking a whole week off of work, which among other things meant a lot of focused time for reading. I brought entirely too many books, including the absolutely massive House Of Morgan, which I may finish in 2026. Balancing that tome, though, was the incredibly fun and readable Nona the Ninth, the third entry in Tamsyn Muir's excellent series about Necromancers In Space.

 

It looks like I never blogged up my reaction to the second novel, and perhaps partly because of that, my memory of that book was a lot fuzzier than the first. I remembered many specific scenes and characters, but not much about how that book exactly ended, and as a result felt somewhat lost when following the new action here.

MINI SPOILERS

I've enjoyed all three books, but my favorite remains the first, almost purely because of Gideon's voice. Harrow and "Nona" are great and well-drawn characters, but it's tough to compete with Gideon's razor-sharp wit, sarcasm, anachronistic pop-culture references and relentless meanness. Harrow wasn't as funny, but felt really dangerous and intense. In contrast, Nona seems like a total cinnamon roll: sweet, helpful, considerate, compassionate. I can see why the people around her act so shocked at her attitude!

It felt a little constricting to step into a seemingly smaller-stakes story after dealing directly with the Necrolord Prime, the Resurrection Beasts, the River, the Saints and the other high-profile elements of the previous book. I think it works pretty well, though. Living at the smaller scale of a city wracked by fear gives a great sense of the human stakes that are impacting everyone in the galaxy. And at the same time we keep tabs on the grander story proceeding in the background. The most dramatic face of this is a series of flashbacks, between the necromancer emperor ("John") and a female companion, which lays out the origin story of the whole series.

MEGA SPOILERS

It's a pretty cool story, and makes it clear that this story takes place in our future, not some alternate Star Wars-style universe. Things on Earth have continued getting worse and worse, to the point where the whole planet is dying and our species with it. A lot of people (and companies and governments) are debating and experimenting with various last-ditch survival strategies. The big goal is to somehow get humanity to a far-away planet that can sustain life. The problem is how to get there: the distances in space are unimaginably vast, far longer than people can live. There are some suggestions like cryo, freezing bodies for the long journey and then thawing them out; and more radical ideas, like digitizing peoples' consciousness and carrying them on hard drives or scraping a few cells onto a plate and then cloning them after arrival.

John is working on his preferred approach, and discovers by accident that he is able to animate dead bodies. He experiments with this, getting to learn more about his ability and the underlying powers of thanergy and thalergy. As amazing as this ability is, it still pales in comparison to the threat of species extinction, and he tries to find ways to put his gift to use. There's some limited progress along commercial lines, but he and his followers become supremely disenheartened when they discover that the rich and powerful people bankrolling this effort have no intention of saving all of humanity: they're building a single ark that will get themselves off the planet and leave everyone else to die behind. (Which is sort of an inversion of the Douglas Adams story of the B Ark.)

Things escalate, with John deciding that he'll get more ability to direct things for good by presenting himself as a necromatic wizard instead of some scientist, and using his powers to directly affect things. It all comes to a head when John realizes that individual peoples' souls are all connected to the soul of the Earth, and then he devours the planet's soul, making himself incredibly powerful, able to crush his enemies and bring his plan into action.

These passages were really compelling: the story itself is pretty wild and bonkers, it does a great job at filling in backstory that was only teased at before, and John himself has a pretty great voice: wry, self-deprecating, chagrined, occasionally angry.

The main story doesn't rise to those high levels, but I came to really love Hot Sauce, Honesty, the Angel, and the more domestic glimpses of Pyrrha Dve and Sextus Palamades and Camilla. The Sextus/Camilla situation in particular was interesting; again, my memory of the second book is pretty fuzzy, but I think there was a similar scenario in there of multiple memories / "souls" residing in a single body, and the first book also played around some with mistaken identities and swapping bodies. I don't want to say that this book is "about" gender necessarily, any more than Gideon the Ninth was "about" sexual orientation, but it's cool to have a book that's comfortable portraying these ideas in interesting scenarios.

END SPOILERS

This was another really fun book, a quick read but not at all ephemeral. It looks like we have at least one more entry on its way. Next time around I think I'll refresh myself with a synopsis or something before diving back in, but I am definitely going to dive in!