4.0 out of 5 stars. Yoon Ha Lee concludes his debut trilogy with a satisfying end to a series full of heart, charm, and innovation. I came because I heard about the wild, math-powered world created for this universe, I stayed because I loved the wonderfully crafted characters, characters you cared about. I genuinely look forward to what we’ll get from him next. The rough parts in his books are understandable in an author’s early works and are more than compensated for by the quality of everything else. Lee also demonstrates a clear ability to improve upon his writing which you can see in the development of the series. I’m sad to see this series end, but I’m happy with the way it did and that I didn’t have to wait a decade for the conclusion of a series.

This world, the universe, is one of the most compelling and fascinating I've ever read. And Lee's hero(es) are just as fascinating and complex. I do wish we'd seen more of the moths in this book and I simply want more of everything here, which is the highest praise I can imagine for any series.

Revenant Gun is a book about space battles, but it's also a book about mending things. At the end of Raven Stratagem, the ritual calendar that the hexarchate's empire depended on was smashed, and most of the hexarchs were murdered. How, then, should the empire be mended? By building something new, and better, as High General Brezan has promised? By pursuing the strategy of Protector-General Inesser and her regiments, and holding the pieces together as best one can? Or should the old system be restored, carefully timed torture and all?

One of the two surviving hexarchs, the undying scientist Kujen, favors the last option. And he has a weapon, a young copy of Shuos Jedao. This Jedao has all the charm and contagious momentum that made him the hexarchate's most effective general, and the bone-deep instincts toward commitment that made "I'm your gun" his best-known phrase. But he doesn't remember why he was also the hexarchate's most feared general, or what his loyalties were.

The first half of the book is exuberant adventure. Kujen's old enemy, Cheris, pulls off an elaborate heist by using a chocolate festival. We meet a dedicated but naive flying robot, the servitor Hemiola, who likes making fan vids. We learn that the hexarchate's spaceships are called "moths" because they're alive, and the gate space they travel through, faster than light, has an entire ecology of its own. Then Jedao wins his first battle, and learns what the modern hexarchate does to prisoners of war.

The second half of the book tracks a web of alliances. Both human and nonhuman agents seek to destroy Kujen, but that doesn't mean they trust each other, nor that they should. Meanwhile, Jedao and Hemiola both try to figure out why Kujen made the calendar in the first place. Turns out it's the old trade: stability for your soul. Kujen has lace and gems and art, and an empire where children do not starve by accident. Jedao was another of his beautiful, leashed possessions, once upon a time.

The culminating space battle has exotic weaponry and spaceships in atmosphere and desperate attempts to coordinate calendrical math. The hexarchate's soldiers call themselves suicide hawks, and in the battle's aftermath they justify that description, for good or ill.

Once the dust clears, we know the old, human calendar is dead. We don't know how the nonhumans will respond, though, or what's really going on in that ecosystem in between space and time. This isn't a universe where the arithmetic works out neatly: stuffing all the answers into a single trilogy seems like one of many vain hopes.

Revenant Gun is the third and final book in the sci-fi trilogy Machineries of Empire.

It takes place 10 years after the end of Raven Stratagem, and most of it is told through the PoV of a 17-year-old amnesiac copy of Jedao (yes, that’s Kujen's doing, do not mess with the psych surgeon next time).
The other major PoVs are Hemiola, a Nirai servitor (robot) who loves dramas, Inesser, the senior Kel general, and Brezan from Raven Stratagem.
If Ninefox Gambit focused on Jedao and Cheris, and Raven Stratagem developed Mikodez, Khiruev and Brezan, Revenant Gun is Kujen’s book.

Kujen has spent the first two books being secretively horrible and has caused a lot of damage doing so, and now he’s as out in the open as he ever gets. This means Kujen is in a lot of scenes, and most of them are the perfect balance of unusually hilarious and unsettling. He’s a mad scientist who is definitely not the mad scientist archetype, which makes him one of the most interesting (and creepy) villains I’ve ever read about.
This series has brilliant worldbuilding, beautiful writing and deep, morally gray characterization, but what makes it stand out even more are the smaller details, one of them being the way scientists are written. If the first and second books gave me female main characters who loved science and were good at it, this has a mad scientist who usually doesn’t care about people but almost gets emotional about the new spaceship prototype. The Machineries of Empire series has little “real science” in it, but it’s about scientists, and you can feel how much they love what they do – even when it’s really frustrating, because sometimes that’s how it goes.

This is far from the only detail that got me – I teared up because of a potted green onion, and I never cry while reading – and the series itself acknowledges the importance of little things. The scene in which Mikodez and Brezan talk about this theme was one of my favorite parts, and so was the way in which Hemiola’s love for dramas and fan edits turned out to be plot-relevant.

Machineries of Empire is also the only trilogy I’ve found where not only there is a major aromantic asexual character who isn’t a stereotype (Mikodez), there also isn’t any romance and the series isn’t any less queer because of that. This series takes the space that is usually dedicated to develop romantic relationships and uses it to develop the non-romantic ones. In Revenant Gun there are a few not-that-explicit sex scenes, but the situation is so messed up I would never call that romance.
Also, in Revenant Gun is hinted that another minor character may be aroace (Ganazan). I’m so not used to seeing aromantic characters that even this means something to me. I love how much casual representation there is in this series (the human MCs here are a bi man, a trans man and a woman with multiple wives, and I’m only talking about the characters whose PoVs we follow for more than one chapter!)

The ending was hopeful without feeling out of place. This isn’t a “all morally questionable characters need to die or be redeemed” series, it’s truly morally gray – it makes you question who is right up to the end, and whether doing the right thing (if there is such a thing) is worth it if it could make everything even worse – and I love it, but this doesn’t mean it needs to be bleak. It’s violent and subtle, dark and beautiful.

If you want to read a military sci-fantasy book set in a dystopian space empire with a math-based magic system and an all-queer cast whose plot hinges around a 400-year-old mass murderous general and his dysfunctional alliances with mathematicians, the Machineries of Empire series exists, and Revenant Gun was a great conclusion to it.

This is the final book in one of my favourite extremely inventive sci-fi series. There is a time-gap between the 2nd and 3rd books but it feels like this book picks straight back up on the action. One of the things I like about this series is that it throws you into the world and doesn't overdo exposition. I did want more POV chapters from certain characters that we'd had in previous books. The ending was good and wrapped a lot up, although I would've liked more information on the impacts the events of this book had. All in all, this was a good finish to an excellent series.

A wonderful conclusion to the series which made me want to read all three books over again. The universe is fascinating, the characters and interplay between them compelling, and I always forget just how much humor is present in books that are at face value about mathematical warfare in space. Although I did miss having the narration from some characters, such as Cheris, the new characters introduced were also interesting and this book continued to flesh out the world of the Hexarchate.

So I actually finished this two days ago, but I’ve been thinking about it and how to gush about my favourite parts without spoilers and it’s probably impossible. I enjoyed books one and two, but this third grabbed all of the world building and characters threw on layer after layer of complexity. There is just so much depth to the core world, I could read another trilogy (or two) on it. More about the moths, mysterious enemy the Hafn, or the servitors, or the Gwa Reality – literally anything.

But what is most important is the depth of my love for these characters. The immortal manipulator, the insane undead general, the kel with some of that general in their head – there are so many similar and conflicting motivations driving them, it was a joy to watch their stories unfold.

Set nine years after Raven Stratagem saw the end of the calendrical regime, Revenant Gun shows us that it’s not quite that simple to change such a massive empire. Kel Cheris has disappeared, leaving Brezan struggling with a leadership role he never wanted, while a new, yet very familiar, face is brought into the fight when Kujen revives a younger Shous Jedao.

The characters are amazing, but in all honesty Jedao really made this . From his confused resurrection through to his thoughts on the current empire, he is the heart of the novel. It’s through him we finally see the depths of the rituals and torture and slavery of this world Kujen created with every good intention. His relationship with his aid, the Kel Dhanneth, and how it plays out is an incredible exploration of love and sex and power in such a socially confined society.

I did miss Cheris, whose POV was split with a servitor named Hemiola. I was interested in the servitor life, but Hemiola was dragged into Cheris’ adventures so quickly it wasn’t established as well as I might have liked. But those are my only minor quibbles.

Revenant Gun is a wonderful conclusion to the trilogy. I could have gushed much more but it’s so hard not to spoiler everything. I even wondered about mentioning young Jedao. For a story built upon mathematical warfare, there is plenty of action with assassinations, space battles, political alliances and betrayals. This is a wonderful universe and I can only hope for more.

Thanks to Netgalley and Rebellion Publishing for the ARC.

Yoon Ha Lee wraps up the intricate, vicious dance of intergalactic politics set in motion in <i>Ninefox Gambit</i>, opening nine years after the events of <i>Raven Stratagem</i> upended the Hexarchate. Kel Cheris, who set off that revolution, was the protagonist of the first book, and the focus of the second, but has now vanished, leaving allies and enemies alike scrambling to make the best of the new world she wrought. And it's important here that all of them, even the ones who seem - and are - most monstrous, have fully detailed backstories and motivations which make clear that somewhere back there, even if selfishness has since come to play a bigger role, they first got into these positions because they wanted to make the world a safer place. It can be a tricky thing to remember, trying not to assume the worst of an ideological opponent's motives, but here there's one deftly done family row in particular which serves to remind us how seldom that gets anywhere near the truth of the matter. Lee's keenly aware of the terrible choice which must always be made when weighing the blood spilled in revolution against the blood spilled by maintaining the status quo, the awful mortgage paid against a brighter tomorrow which might never come, and the cost that exacts upon the generals as much as on the poor bastards slaughtered on the front line.

In a note reminiscent of the third Takeshi Kovacs book, one of the story's strands follows a newly-resurrected younger version of undead general Shuos Jedao, pulled out of storage to take on the echo of his older self - though of course the very notion of 'self' is even more complicated in this case than it was in the world of <i>Altered Carbon</i>. Another follows Brezan, struggling to come to terms with the leadership role he's attained almost by accident, and the third...well, the third is the servitor's eye view of the story. Both the previous books relied at crucial moments on the fact that most of the Hexarchate's people ignore the robots performing menial tasks around them; it was a smart SF take on 'the butler did it' before that became cliche. So it makes perfect sense that we now see their interior life, and at first it works very well, especially given our viewpoint droid is one who's lived a rather odd and secluded existence, and as such has a slightly off understanding of humans. But if I have a criticism of the book, it's that the servitor gradually comes to seem a little too human. Politically, I understand the importance of showing a slave class as people too, but especially given the authentic strangeness of one other character here (of whom no more, because spoilers), not to mention the fractured or otherwise altered inner life of several of the nominally human cast, I wonder whether Lee couldn't have given the servitors an interiority that wasn't quite so interchangeable with our own. Robots hatewatching shitty dramas is one thing - but robots worrying irrationally about being overheard felt to me like an organic foible too far.

Still, one of the benefits of these new perspectives is that there's now an excuse to unobtrusively tell us a little more about this exotic world. One of the things I've enjoyed in the series is the reluctance to tell us more than the characters would naturally be thinking about the architecture of their world, the bizarre weapons, or why the spaceships are called moths. Indeed, part of me disliked the cover art for being a little too conventionally SF, trying to picture at all these things I would have preferred left entirely mysterious. Well, now there's reason and excuse to tell us a little more, and the beauty of how it's done is that we don't just get answers to mysteries we knew were mysteries - we also get revelations which make us realise how much was hiding in plain sight.

All in all, then, an entirely satisfying conclusion to a very good trilogy. And lest what I've written above seems a little bloodless - in part through avoiding spoilers, in part just because that's my mood at present - then I should really also note that as well as all the philosophical and world-building stuff, there are also plenty of space battles, daring commando actions, tense alliances and desperate last-ditch gambits too. It's the fun sort of harrowing read, not one of the earnest ones.

(Netgalley ARC)