Content area
Full Text
Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (Tor, 2019, 444 pp, £11.99)
The iconoclastic tone of Gideon the Ninth is set by its opening sentence: 'IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD - the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! - Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth'. However, while Tamsyn Muir's debut novel might fairly be described as irreverent pulp with good swordfights, it is not as schlocky as its 'lesbian necromancers in space' tagline suggests; in fact, beneath the thick layers of cunningly plotted genre mashup, it's a rather fine planetary romance with an emotional punch that will remain with readers long after they have completed their compulsive consumption of the text. For all that it is, in many respects, the leftfield inclusion in the Hugo and Nebula shortlists of 2020, Gideon the Ninth has some things to say about the way out from the stifling traditions that have been weighing particularly heavily upon us in this plague year.
Returning to the beginning of the novel, Gideon does not of course escape. Her dirty magazines are put away, never to be seen again, and even her beloved double-handed sword will not reappear until a very late and desperate point in the proceedings. Instead, she has to learn very quickly to use a rapier to the standard of a 'house cavalier primary' because she needs to accompany her hated contemporary, the Lady of the Ninth House, Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, in...