It’s easy to get lost in the kaleidoscopic world-­building of NINEFOX GAMBIT (Solaris, paper, $9.99), the first ­novel by the well-regarded story writer Yoon Ha Lee. Lee submerges readers without explanation into the hexarchate — a star-spanning far-future society whose culture relies on advanced mathematics to produce “exotic effects” that are nigh magical. A sort of unearthly physics, these can make select individuals functionally immortal, even as exotic generators churn forth monstrous ­vector-scrambling storms that disintegrate enemy soldiers down to component atoms. At the core of the technology is the high calendar. More than just a measurement of time, this calendar shapes the mathematical base of the exotic effects. Yet by changing the calendar and thus the underlying math of reality, dissidents can cripple hexarchate technology — a heresy to those in control, who punish dissenters by destroying them whole planets at a time. The disproportionate reprisals inevitably beget more heresy, so the hexarchate exists in a perpetual state of war in which it is too beneficially invested ever to end.

Amid such brutal calculus, Lee (himself an Ivy League-educated mathematician) fortunately doesn’t stint on character development or plot. The protagonist is Kel Cheris, a young soldier gifted in number theory, who is summoned from the battlefield for a strange new mission. She must partner with the disgraced General Jedao, possibly the only person in the hexarchate who can help reclaim the strategically critical Fortress of Scattered Needles and stop the looming threat of calendrical rot. Problem: Jedao has been dead for centuries, executed after he went mad and slaughtered thousands of his own people. Cheris must become host to this unstable genius’s “ghost,” or preserved personality — and once she does, she must immediately learn how to navigate her way through politics more ancient than the hexarchate itself. Meanwhile, if she slips even once in her self-control or calculations, her ghostly ally will drive her mad too. Or worse.

The story is dense, the pace intense, and the delicate East Asian flavoring of the math-rich setting might make it seem utterly alien to many readers — yet metaphors for our own world abound. Mathematics is often lauded as a universal language, but this is blatantly untrue; for universality to work, adherents must believe in the same basic truths, or principles, to the same degree. Lee’s quasi-­religious treatment of mathematics, and Cheris’s need to simultaneously exploit and rely on Jedao, both serve as metaphors for colonialism. (As does the quiet, oblique rebellion taking place in the background amid the hexarchate’s artificially intelligent servitors.) And the lesson of colonialism applies as well: Brute-force domination gets you only so far. For stability, trust is key.