Plato believed mathematics was the highest form of beauty, being entirely concerned with universal truths and untarnished by base desire. Bertrand Russell described it as “a beauty cold and austere, sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” There have even been modern studies that posit that “beautiful” equations engage our brains the way paintings and music do. And Yoon Ha Lee’s stunning debut novel, Ninefox Gambit (US/UK) makes all of this real.

The world of Ninefox Gambit is a perilous, conflict-riddled conglomeration of planets and factions, inhabited by the members of the ruling hexarcate and rebellious heretics. It is a place where war is “a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs” and “calendrical rot” can destabilize entire tracts of terrain. Though its setting may be complex, the novel's basic premise is relatively simple. A disgraced general, Cheris, seeks redemption by liberating a fortress that has been overtaken by enemy forces. To accomplish this, she does what all protagonists in her situation invariably do: allies herself with an unsavoury character. In this case, it's Jedao, an undead tactician who just so happens to be a mass murderer.

A fine piece of military fiction, Ninefox Gambit glitters with clever maneuvers and cunning ploys, heart-stopping action and hard decisions, all complicated by a repertoire of strange technologies. At the same time, Lee makes no excuses for violence and does not shy away from illuminating the grisly ramifications of war fought between people who often have more in common than they admit. “The Kel formation held as they butchered their way through the Eels," he writes. “Cheris made a point of noticing the Eels’ faces. They weren’t much different from the faces of her own soldiers: younger and older, dark skin and pale, eyes mostly brown or sometimes grey.”

Much later in the book, our protagonists dig into records of the deaths that Jedao caused when he was alive:

She read about two sisters who died trying to veil the dead after the custom of the people. She read about a child. A woman. A man trying to carry a crippled child to safety. Both died bleeding from every pore in their skin. A woman. A woman and her two-year-old child. Three soldiers. Three more. Seven. Now four. You could find the dead in any combination of numbers.

It's a gruesome vignette.

A fascinating military team

All this would not be remotely as potent, however, if the characters weren’t as well-constructed as they are. Cheris and Jedao, in particular, are fascinating, multi-faceted entities, filled with contradictions and idiosyncrasies. They're as human as undead warlords and calendrical sword-wielding soldiers can be. Jedao is more typical of his role, being cryptic and quietly sardonic, a trickster with a very limited bag of tricks. His mind has been uploaded into Cheris', so he's anchored to her with no ability to sleep, eat, or physically manipulate the world. Still, Jedao becomes a source of fascination as the chapters progress, as Cheris tries to figure out what caused his genocidal behavior while he was alive. How could such a beloved figure become responsible for the death of four million?

Cheris is a glorious protagonist, a skilled general, and a better mathematician who went against tradition by joining the Kel. That group is a faction subservient to “formation instinct,” which essentially transforms them into a kind of hivemind, preventing them from disobeying orders. (The full impact of this choice is eventually explored with wince-inducing detail through another character.) At the same time, Cheris is remarkably human, someone who will fail duels and leave lights on for sleepless ghosts.

Cheris and Jedao are a good pairing, and one of the best things about Ninefox Gambit is watching them develop into a cohesive fighting unit. The supporting cast is equally intriguing. It includes the gossipy servitors who vary in size and appearance with unusual social structures. We meet the indulgent Vahenz afrir dai Noum, with their weakness for confectionary and sassy dispositions. And there's Cheris’ subordinate, Nerevor, who is placed into a truly horrific situation.

Lee’s debut novel is easily also the most accessible of his work, which includes dozens of critically acclaimed short stories. "Variations on an Apple," for example, is his sci-fantasy retelling of the Greek myth The Judgement of Paris. It's a dense read with lines like “the voices of its victims thundered through the space-time membrane, threnody absolute” and “anamorphically distorted shining on the wrong side of the skin.” In comparison, Ninefox Gambit feels like it was written for a wider audience, a savvy decision given the importance of a debut novel.

That said, Lee’s prose remains clever and opulently detailed. His fondness for mathematical terminology persists. We see it most prominently in the action sequences when strategies are being plotted, ships are spiraling through space in intricate formations, and infantry are being cut down by vector-scrambling storms.

Challenging but gorgeous worldbuilding

The worldbuilding in Ninefox Gambit bears particular mention. It’s jaw-droppingly good. And I’m not even talking about the concepts themselves, but Lee’s method of delivery. There are no infodumps here, no unnecessary exposition. Although the world itself is tangibly alien, Lee doesn’t waste time telling us so. Instead, he shows us.

We learn about the minutiae of everyday life, but there's always a hint of something larger at stake. Cabbages are a Kel idiosyncrasy; half-gloves are an emblem of treachery; and jellied frogs’ eggs were a delicacy in certain regions 397 years prior to the events of the novel. Characters talk about stage dramas, judge each other for their tastes in dramas, and even watch dramas together in awkward silence. These are small touches, but important ones:

“I had no idea your taste in entertainment ran to romantic comedy,” he said quizzically during one of the pauses. “Romantic comedy with a rogue engineer, at that.” “Oh, they all duel each other, too.” Cheris said. “Every episode, the heroine makes a whole new calendrical sword out of paper clips and metaltape.” The duelling was the reason she liked this show. “The duelling is ludicrous, but the special attacks are really funny. Like that one just now with the galloping horses.”

I’m enamored of the fact that Lee doesn’t really make it a point to explain the "why" behind certain things. Cindermoths and calendrical systems, corpselight and chrysalis guns—all these concepts are simply treated as components of everyday life, like a car would be in literary fiction.

Ninefox Gambit is undeniably a challenging read. The first few chapters are an especially hard go. You’re pitched into the world without any immediate explanation. No hand-holding, no orientation. It’s clear that a battle is taking place, but the scope and stakes are unknown. Why? Why is any of this happening? We don’t get answers beyond allusions to heretics and rot. Mayhem ensues and events crescendo. Strange words fly everywhere, and before it ends Cheris limps out of the fray, tail between her legs, hands stained with the blood of her men.

The perspective then switches. We go from battlefield to battlefield, this one more cerebral. The second chapter begins sewing together the political background of the world. But again, there are no concrete explanations. For example, we’re told that a character is responsible for the invention of the mothdrive, which in turn enabled “the original heptarchate’s rapid expansion, and pioneered a whole field of mathematics that resulted in modern calendrical mechanics.” But what does all that mean? Some of it is explained in Lee’s earlier work, notably “The Battle of Candle Arc,” which features a living Jedao. Still, we never quite know how high generals “wired their minds together into a greater intelligence.”

Ninefox Gambit really comes into its own if you're willing to stick with it. Like the many-eyed Shuos, the book appears to delight in its own game, a tangle of plots and subplots. It almost seems content to never be deciphered, but if you do persist, you're in for a fantastic story. Lee's novel is a brilliant way to begin a trilogy. Even better, it's a piece of subtle commentary on our own complicated (and occasionally nonsensical) reasons for making war, as well as how we form relationships in the trenches.