Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
Ninefox Gambit Q7: Ninefox Gambit vs Come Looking for Me
By coincidence, the last two books we've read have had a similar conceit. Both have been about a small military force acting in a hostile territory, with more than just simple military obstacles. How are these two books similar and different? What do they say about a life of military adventure? Could you translate one story to the other setting? What would be gained or lost if you tried?
Comments
Hm, an interesting idea which hadn't occurred to me before. I'll have a think about it.
They're very different treatments, for sure, with very different features. Come Looking For Me was really about characters, and not much about warfare. It's main flaw, I felt, was that some of the motives/behaviours were not very convincing, and also it spend a fair amount of time dithering (with not much happening).
Ninefox Gambit wasn't so much about character as it was about motives. I might even argue that Cheris and Jedao were two motives looking for a character. It was a big picture book - high concept and it held itself up at that level in the clouds the whole time. It also dithered quite a bit. Come Looking (ironically, being a naval adventure) was much more grounded.
I was wondering if Ninefox Gambit would have been more interesting if Cheris had a stray civilian to look after as well as organise the assault on the station. But then it occurred to me that Ninefox Gambit would have been more interesting if Cheris had had much of anything else to do beyond assaulting the station.
Is that single goal part of the problem of the book?
Some thoughts about this, finally.
Come Looking for Me, being a historical novel, has a certain set of historical events around and within which to establish a particular plot. Clearly different historical novelists stick to known (or at least broadly agreed) facts to different degrees, but here the basic brush-strokes of the conflict, the major players, the tendency for the Royal Navy to send only second-rate vessels, etc were all there. The officers and crews were (so far as I know) broadly representative of such individuals, as inferred from diaries and other similar records. So there's a lot of world-building material already in place, and the author's job is (put very simplistically) to persuade you that some fictional people and events might credibly have lived and happened then. I think the book was pretty successful about this - I don't recall any of us saying things like "that was impossible".
But Ninefox Gambit, being a work of speculative fiction, has to establish in us a sense of the world around as well as the characters and plot. Sure there might be - probably are - analogies to current or past systems or whatever, but the world has to feel like it's one that could happen, with enough incidental details that what people do kind of makes sense in it. And I'm not convinced that this book successfully established that broader world. Leastwise, it didn't for me - I never really got a sense that this was an account of a real place and time that I could become immersed in.