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Ninefox Gambit Q5: War and its horrors
Weapons do horrible things to bodies; and wars do those horrible things to many bodies and people. This book didn't shy away from what happened to people, and how many people it happened to. But the book also has many features of a military adventure romp, and the horrors aren't dwelt on. What do you think of this aspect of the book?
Comments
Confusing. It was mostly "them magic happened, and their bodies broke into thousands of glass-like shards '. I saw no attempt to relate cause and effect. It seemed arbitrary and unreal.
Yes, again I agree with @clash_bowley - in most chapters a new utterly destructive weapon was wheeled out, and there wasn't (I think) any attempt to have a consistent body of military or physical theory behind any of them - they all seemed to target either calendrical heretics or calendrical devotees in ways that seemed to have nothing to do with calendars! The weirdest bit was how pretty much all the military and civilian characters just seemed to humbly accept a horrible fate as part of life. It didn't exactly warm me to want to live a calendrical life
List most of it. this was impressionistic. It did create a colourful (if confusing) image in my mind, so mission accomplished there, but there wasn't really enough detail to nail down the military aspects of the book. It felt like military SF, but it didn't read like military SF. (I'm not a huge MSF fan, myself, so maybe that's OK).
But as sometimes captured in films, the book did convey the chaos of war. Flashes, bangs, bodyparts, flying objects, orders you never understand, motives you never understand, the disposability of people... this was all there. Maybe that's all we were meant to see?
I think Lee wanted to show the horrors of war, but again the descriptions didn't land. No-one really seemed that upset by anything that happened. As for the issues of command, I don't think we ever saw Charis really struggling with some command decisions about what was the right choice, what was the least costly, and all that.