Yoon Ha Lee: Raven Stratagem

Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee’s sequel to last year’s stunning Ninefox Gambit, begins with an assassination attempt.

General Kel Khiruev, newly appointed commander of one of the Hexarchate’s most powerful vessels, has her orders - to deal with the Hafn invasion of the Severed March region as soon as Captain Kel Charis joins her fleet. However, when Charis arrives, it is, by all appearances, the revenant General Shuos Jedao in Charis’ body.

Kels - the hexarchate military - are psychologically programmed to obey orders from a superior. It’s called formation instinct, and Jedao relies on it to make his takeover work. But Khiruev is resilient and resourceful, and just barely manages to resist long enough to build a jury-rigged drone and set it to kill Jedao. Her plan fails, and two of her own crew are killed. Possibly worse, Jedao knows she did it, and doesn’t care.

What follows is a complicated game of cat, cat, and mouse, as Jedao chases the Hafn, and the Hexarchate chases Jedao, with the Kel and Charis’ people, the Mwennin, caught in between. Alliances shift and mutate. The stakes are higher than anything the hexarchate has imagined. They think Jedao wants power. Revenge. Perhaps even redemption. But they’re wrong. What Jedao wants is freedom.

If Ninefox Gambit was strange and wonderful, Raven Stratagem is both, and more.

Fonda Lee: Exo

Fonda Lee’s young adult novel Exo is set in a future society where humans are subordinate to an alien race, the zhree. The fortunate humans are “marked,” tattooed to indicate that they are loyal to a zhree patron. Most other humans struggle to find work, hoping to be marked themselves. And some humans resist, even after a century of zhree presence on earth.

Donovan Reyes is 17, and marked, a soldier-in-erze. He’s an exo, surgically modified with alien technology that protects him for projectile weapons, heals his wounds, gives him advantages over unmodified humans. But it still doesn’t prevent him from being captured by the resistance, known as Sapience, during a routine check of a civilian tip. What keeps the resistance from killing him at first is the fact that he’s the son of the Prime Liaison, the human representative of the zhree.

Lee’s vision of conquerors and resistance is a nuanced one. The alien zhree take good care of their human associates, especialy those accepted into the zhree social network, those “in erze.” They are patronised, they have no political autonomy, they have been colonised, but they are not slaves. It’s very much a rcapitulation of the “white man’s burden” style of colonial rule, with the zhree as benevolent rulers and compliant humans as junior partners.

And the resistance is not necessarily the ‘good guys’ - they are engaged in guerilla warfare, and that includes all the tools, including bombings, assassinations, hostage-takings and provocations intended to make the aliens deal more harshly with humans, to generate more support for the cause. They torture captured exos to death and release films of these executions. They don’t protect innocent civilians caught up in violent interactions with zhree or human exos. They are fighting by any means necessary and there is little that’s noble about their methods - it’s a realistic picture of resistance fighters justifying the means by the ends.

As an exo, Donovan is “other” to both non-modified humans, and zhree. He is only really comfortable with other exos. Though his father sees him and other exos as a bridge between the two peoples, he is in reality neither fully part of either group. As if to underscore the way his identity is caught between worlds, once he is taken to a secret resistance, he learns that the mother who left him as a child is one of the resistance leaders. Part human, part zhree, he is also caught between the humans who comply, and the humans who resist, bound by ties of family to both factions.

Lee crafts a tightly woven story, combining YA themes of coming to terms with the influence of one’s parents and finding one’s own moral code with standard science fiction themes of alien invasion and colonisation and the use of advanced technology. All of the factions - rebels, marked humans, exos and zhree - are drawn with complexity; there are no clear heroes or villains, and no monolithic blocks where everyone shares the same opinions. There are just sentient beings doing what they think is best for their people, however they may define that. I thought that Donovan’s situation at the end of the book was a little far-fetched, but so did several of the characters, which made it a bit more believable. This the first book in a series, and I am curious to see where it leads.