I knew next to nothing about this going in, except that Charlie Stross wrote the cover blurb which advertised "lesbian necromancers explore a haunted Gothic mansion in space", and I figured I was on board for it. Synopsis like that you know it's at least going to be interesting, whether or not it's actually any good.
Imagine my surprise when it turns out that it not only lives up to the premise but sticks the landing, as it were. This one's a rare bird and one of my favorites of the year; it's basically impossible to pigeonhole because it does what it wants, sort of like Gideon herself. The tone is set right at the beginning as she makes her bed, grabs her stuff (which includes her sword and a couple of pornographic magazines), picks the security lock and tries to run away from home to join the space army.
But wait, you say, if they've got interplanetary space travel then why does she have a sword? Shouldn't she have, like, a ray gun? And why is paper treated like some sort of rare commodity? And I'd give a serious response, but the real answer is that it sets the tone right off so you can just put it down if you're not into this stuff. I've mentioned before that I have a soft spot for absurdist SF/F novels - stuff like Illuminatus! or Sewer, Gas & Electric or The Gone-Away World. You've just got to accept going in that it doesn't necessarily make sense except on its own terms, and if you approach it in that spirit it's fine. What I'm really getting at is that this isn't the sort of work you can nitpick.
Anyhow. Cover blurb aside, Gideon's no necromancer, she's a swordswoman. The space army she wants to join is the Cohort, which is the military arm of a necromantic interstellar empire headed up by the immortal God Emperor and Necrolord Divine. They apparently fight pitched battles against humans and things worse than humans all over the cosmos, but the details aren't really gone into because Gideon doesn't really care about any of that stuff, she just wants to get out of the Ninth House, and there you have it.
Most of the book is told from Gideon's perspective and while she's not dumb by any means, she's also more interested in working out than opening textbooks, and a lot of her mental energy has been spent devoted to the sword (which she loves and would marry if she could). Plus, she's been raised from birth in the weirdo cultish Ninth House and to the extent that she considers it odd, she also considers it old hat. Therefore, the fact that she fails in her escape attempt due to a bunch of conjured skeleton warriors does upset her, but also does not come as a surprise exactly.
The skeletal warriors are courtesy of Harrowhark, who is a necromancer, and who's ostensibly the heir to the Ninth House but is really running it on account of her parents being secretly dead and being manipulated Weekend-At-Bernie's style by Harrowhark since she was still primary school aged. This hardly counts as a spoiler since it's in the first couple of chapters, it only comes at you faster and more furiously from here. Harrow's still just seventeen, and the only person in the Ninth House who is around Gideon's age, so naturally they hate each other. Gideon appears to think she's a megalomaniac sociopath, and this is more or less borne out by her introduction, but one of the great things about this story is that it both turns out to be sort of true and also way more complicated than that.
Anyway, all the necromantic Houses have received a summons from the Emperor - they're all to send the first of their line to the Emperor's planet, accompanied only by their bodyguard cavaliers, to see if they're worthy of being selected as Lyctors, immortal servants of the Emperor and saints of the Empire. Harrow's cavalier turns tail at this prospect, being more of a scholar than a warrior, and Harrowhark offers Gideon a choice - pretend to be her cavalier so she can become a Lyctor, and she'll allow Gideon to finally leave. Gideon doesn't want to do this, for several reasons - first, cavaliers use little dinky rapiers as opposed to the big fuck-off infantry sword Gideon prefers, and she'll have to do a lot of training; second, she hates Harrowhark and doesn't want to do anything for her; third, she doesn't have any of the etiquette and formal training that are the other duties of cavaliers and doesn't really want to learn any of it; and lastly, she thinks that the promise will be broken somehow. But it's the only game in town, really, so what the hell.
It's at this point that the book does actually stall a little bit, since they arrive at the planet along with the other seven House heirs and cavaliers (fifteen people in all, since one house sends twins) and introducing all of these people takes a while, plus that's so many characters that some of them by necessity get short shrift. But they make it into the great hall, where the mysterious old monk who calls himself "Teacher" is sure to explain the nature of the tests they will face and the trials they must overcome. All the necromancers, who on the whole are young overachievers, await instruction.
Except, no. Teacher says that he's not a Lyctor and doesn't have any more idea about how to become one than they do. He asks them to please not open any locked doors without permission, and then he just leaves them to it. Gideon finds this hilarious, and Harrow tells her to pretend she's taken a vow of silence. And it proceeds on from there.
At this point the story takes on elements of a locked room mystery, a procedural, an action adventure, a serial killer / cosmic horror story. Just when you think you've figured out what's going on, there's usually another swerve coming. Various actions are explained, people turn out to have been dead all along, or actually alive when they're supposed to be dead, Gideon and Harrow confront the truth about their past not entirely without hope, and it's just generally a rollicking good time.
I said at the beginning that nitpicking something like this is fruitless, so I'm not going to. I will make two observations though. First, one of the original rules of a fair play mystery is that magic or supernatural elements can't make an appearance in the story, or if they do, they have to be consistent and clearly spelled out. This book is not interested in holding your hand, so at various points characters just come out with, Yeah, I knew X because of my supernatural powers which I never mentioned before now and you just gotta roll with it. The other thing is, the Emperor presents himself as a pretty reasonable guy but his original plan was pretty dumb. What did he think was going to happen when he stuck all these ambitious magicians together without any sense of clear direction? Admittedly most of what happened can't be fairly said to be his fault, but I don't really think this exercise would have ended up that well even in the absence of sabotage. What the hell, Emperor.
Stories like this often suffer from info dumps, so you have the fish-out-of-water character that needs to get explained to. But here, all the characters are in an unusual situation and have to figure out what the hell is going on; and there's Gideon, who probably should have known some of this stuff already but was busy working out or reading pornos and didn't pay attention. She's a great character. This is maybe the most fun I've had reading anything all year.
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