Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

Like the crests and troughs of the ocean, my desire for fiction and non-fiction vary according to the moon. Even within each want, there are microcurrents of what I desire: high adventure or stoic didacticism; lost journals recovered or floating omniscient narration. Because I am old and facing my inevitable mortality–as in, there are more books in the world than I will ever be able to read in my lifetime–I no longer force my way through something I think I “should” read, or continue on the faint whiff that a book might eventually “click”. As I (assume) the hosts of my favorite now-retired podcast about reading bad books (probably) said, “life is too short to read bad books.”

I dive wholly into whatever my brain is hype-cycling right now. And in this particular moment, that was The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi. However, I was still in line at the library for Al-Sirafi—but what’s this ridiculous-looking black-edged grimdark hardcover that I picked up because booktok, of all places, kept surfacing it? Yes, it’s Gideon the Ninth.

I got it from the library and promptly shelved it. I did not even look at the cover art deeply enough to realize she was—within the standard “walking coolly away from an explosion without looking backwards" pose, wherein this explosion is mostly made of skeletons—wearing aviators.

So, the book puts what it is right on the cover. It is tropey, sort of, but a kind of send up without being satire or parody. It’s very clear to me that the author has also read all the fantasy books, and internalized their rules and standards well enough to tweak the genre’s nose without being mean or disdainful. It’s jokey, and yet sincere.

Most of all, it’s fun:

Gideon knew a this point that some really intelligent answer was the way to go; something that would have impressed the Reverend Daughter with her mechanical insight and cunning. A necromantic answer, with some shadowy magical interpretation of what she had just seen. But her brain had only seen the one thing, and her palms were damp with the sweat that came when you were both scared and dying of anticipation. So she said, “The arms kind of looked like swords. I want to fight it.”

Gideon the Ninth might actually be the most fun fantasy book I’ve ever read. Yes, there are spaceships, but it’s fantasy–phantasy, as in the SEGA epic Phantasy Star series–for sure. Her planet is basically Pluto, dim and far from the star, so she’s gotta wear the aforementioned shades…but her Necromancer (which, if you’ve never played videogames ever before, is like a death-powered wizard) covers her eyes with a veil in standard High Fantasy style. So, cloaks and veils and magic but then, cop-reflective sunglasses. Seem exactly right for Gideon. Also, she has a wizard companion. Whom she hates.

You barely see the spaceships.

Fantasy.

I…hmmm. How to put this? I can’t not recommend this book, if you are a fun person who likes reading fantasy books. Fun fantasy books. Funnnn. With like three ens. 

[Harrowhawk being dead] was contingent on either the world’s happiest accident or murder, and if it was murder, what if the murderer was like, weird, which would make their subsequent marriage to Gideon pretty awkward?

Beyond the excitement of the Danganronpa story structure (lots of talented people show up to solve puzzles and probably get unalived) and the quirky writing style that trusts the reader to follow its wobbles, the plot is not “hero leaves small town and goes on grand adventure.” I mean, it is, but the town was a planet and the grand adventure is a rousing game of Among Us.

Everybody was poised in readiness for the outlined syllabus, and scholarship made her want to die. There would be some litany of how breakfast would take place every morning at this time, and then there’d be study with some priests for an hour, and then Skeleton Analysis, and History of Some Blood, and Tomb Studies, and like, lunchtime, and finally Double Bones with Doctor Skelebone. The most she could hope for was Swords, Swords II, and maybe Swords III.

Throughout the whole book I was never quite sure where things were going. Not because of “purple monkey dishwasher” randomness or that things were opaque, confusing, or otherwise unstructured. It’s just that the book felt like it was off-leash; things were weird enough to have almost anything happen and the author was skilled enough to have the most wild events actually make sense, tie back into the plot, and fit within the context of the world. Impressive.

The weird was fun, to me, not Annihilation weird or The Vorrh weird, which are styles I’m sure some people like but I’m not super into. Gideon is my style, so much so that when I could actually pick Al-Sirafi up from the library—the fantasy adventure novel I thought I wanted—I knew I couldn’t read it right away without comparing it directly to Gideon the Ninth. Might as well compare Juliet to the sun.

Everywhere there were bits of paper or shaken-out clothes, as though somebody had left the place in a hurry or had simply been an unbelievable slob. Spotlights shone down hot on the ruined jumble.

“Hm,” said Camila neutrally, and Gideon knew immediately that she organized Palamedes’s and her socks by colour and genre.

Dude. That’s extremely funny. I am aware saying, “This is funny” and explaining the joke is silly and wasteful and kind of kills the vibe, but someone looking at a mess and saying “hm”—you can just hear it. And then to be confident enough to simply flop the “socks organized by genre” in there without spotlighting it to make sure its clear how nonsensical it is…I just really appreciate that the text can pile these jokes up without, you know, talking down to me, or making sure I saw how clever things are.

Oh, oh, and the interpersonal relationships—in the Fantasy Genre, this is known as the Sexual Tension—is handled in a way that is not gross: mostly off screen; no ”Courtly love” pining; pretty much just, “Dang, what a baddie, I’d like to make out. Ah well, maybe when we’re not all getting murdered.” Rad.

The only downside to Gideon is that it has made the thought of reading other books feel a bit more like a chore than a pleasure