And for those joining us who dont know, the Draco in Leather Pants is the fanfiction trope of a character whos morally ambiguous and kind of lounges around saying sexy bitchy one-liners to the hero. It makes her become just vulnerable enough to be lovable. And they finished the book, and theyre like, Cool, really interesting, really liked that sisterly relationship. And I was like, Oh, no, its gay. Because I mean, Harrow and Gideon, for whatever else it is worth, is explicitly homoerotic. Ive had to really guard myself to make sure that I dont just let Ianthe run riot. Its the space between monstrous sin and grief, and the way that the people who commit those sins and feel that grief are just people. Its just Harrow making the name stupid. To my eye, this book suffers a bit from second-volume-itis: It has a lot of cleanup from volume one to take care of, and a lot of pieces to put into place for volume three, and it more or less pulls off both, but you can see the strain. And in book two, you are hopefully slapped in the face first thing with just how ferociously Harrow hates herself, and the violence with which she does. And one thing I did want to see is that enmeshed battlefield feeling between women and women, or between men and women and flipped over. [27], The novel was also shortlisted for the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel,[28] the 2020 World Fantasy Award,[29] and the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It is in so many ways a codependent relationship. Gideon and Harrow's own relationship reaches a low point over Gideon's infatuation with the terminally ill heiress of the Seventh House, Dulcinea Septimus; tensions run high after Gideon discovers the severed head of the Seventh House cavalier among Harrow's things. How do you feel about the world-building that happens in this volume, and how do you think it works at setting the stage for the forthcoming Alecto the Ninth? 2019 science fantasy novel by Tamsyn Muir, "Announcing Nona the Ninth, a New Addition to The Locked Tomb Series From Tamsyn Muir! Emily: I will be totally honest: For as much as I love the Locked Tomb books, I find the world-building so trope-y that I kind of gloss over it. The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers. They seem to be a little divisive. The FBI and Energy Department think Covid-19 came from a lab. But Ive got one single page of notes in the back of an old school book where Id written down the idea of it about three weeks before I started writing. Our conversation about the book covered second-person point of view, the trauma of dissociation, incredibly bad puns, and more. But I mean, there are so few female characters who are like Ianthe. Tragedy Beats At The Heart Of 'Do You Dream Of Terra-Two? Oops. I also want to talk a little bit, before we get into more specifics, about all of the memes in the book. No, it's a line that lurks a little bit further back in the pack; that mocks its betters under its breath and slinks right into your brain to let you know exactly what you're in for. Now what? But now they have to depend on each other to survive because, of course, the minute everyone arrives at Caanan House (the creepy mansion), all communications are blacked out, all the fancy space shuttles they came in are pushed into the sea, and they are told there's a very good chance that all of them are going to die, because there's something horrible hidden inside Caanan House. Not to [talk] down here in any way on Magnus and Abigail, who are not really a battlefield couple, at least you dont get to see them doing that too much. You were so afraid anyone might touch you. Constance: Oh man, I loved the reveal that the narrator was Gideon so much that I stood up and fist pumped. Something Gideon Prime? It is Muir's debut novel and the first in her Locked Tomb series, followed by Harrow the Ninth (2020), Nona the Ninth (2022),[1] and Alecto the Ninth (2023).[2]. The set-up is genius: In some (possibly distant, possibly ancient, probably super-far-future) corner of the universe exist nine ancient houses with nine rulers and heirs adept in different forms of gooey, death-obsessed magic. [30], In 2021, NPR listed Gideon the Ninth and the Locked Tomb series as one of the 50 best science fiction and fantasy books of the 2010s.[31]. It has been in there from book one, it saturates the book. The two of them hate each other. Theres a hell of a lot of Bible stuff in there too. In the star system Dominicus, there are nine planets, each home to a great House which practices its own school of necromancy. Muir acknowledges that her writing "includes useless memes and jokes for the reader that nobody in my universe would get. I am in the second camp, and so is Voxs critic at large Emily VanDerWerff. After a brief confrontation with Palamedes the Sixth, the Seventh House heiress reveals herself to be an imposter: not Dulcinea the Seventh, but Cytherea the First, one of the Emperor's Lyctors. In The Immortal King Rao, a tech billionaire becomes king of the world, Raven Leilanis wickedly smart Luster is the Vox Book Clubs February pick, Why Eli Lilly is voluntarily capping insulin costs at $35 a month, OpenAI wants to build systems smarter than us. The characters are forever strolling through its shadowy corridors to discover horrors lurking, or marveling at the ancient luxuries slowly rotting before them. So in the first editor pass, my editor was like, Nah, this is not Harrow, people are going to immediately see. But then again, I see lines that are so plainly obvious that got left in. Some can siphon the soul right out of your body. I wanted to do the everyones at a ball and Harrows received a makeover. Thats just absolutely right for Harrow. Obviously, it's perfect", "Tamsyn Muir's Goony Fun 'Gideon The Ninth' Takes Sci-Fi Fantasy Prose Into New Territory", "Smart, Snarky 'Gideon The Ninth' Swears Her Way Through The Stars", "The Making of a Cavalier: Meet the Actual Rude Lesbian Swordfighter Behind Gideon the Ninth", "Best Reads Of The Year, Picked By NPR Book Editor", "The best science fiction and fantasy books of 2019", "10 new science fiction and fantasy books to check out this December", "This Year's Debut Authors Pick The Best Books Of 2019", "Shelf Awareness for Readers for Tuesday, December 3, 2019", "The Best Sci-Fi And Fantasy Novels Of 2019", "Gideon the Ninth Is Amazon's Best SciFi/Fantasy Book of the Year! But at the end of the day, what I will say in terms of Gideon and Harrow is that it is meant to be homoerotic. Constance: Muir is definitely taking more risks in book two. Its just Harrow being a dick. But Harrowhark worships all the lurid skeletal nonsense around her with a religious intensity, and she considers boning jokes prurient. The bulk of Gideon the Ninth takes place in Canaan House. And then I was like, fine. Support our mission, and make a gift today. And then in the last one with the coffeeshop AU, theres maybe the worst pun Ive ever done, but I dont even care. Sign up for our newsletter to make sure you dont miss anything, and well see you in 2021! Everything came from the story template. Gideon takes her suspicions (and the head) to the Sixth House, who in turn confront Dulcinea. You can also contribute via. I love seeing pairs of people in a not necessarily romantic way. The collaboration is reflected in Gideon's journey retraining from a soldier's longsword to a duelist's rapier; Harris herself transitioned from fencing to the longsword. We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and I hadnt envisioned it as a sex scene. All the weird, all the violence, all the rebellious snark and darkness live in that one line. How? And again, thats something that theyre all made to be hinting at: bigger ideas that Harrow hasnt even quite been able to figure out herself. It is altogether its own thing. She begs the Emperor to resurrect Gideon, only to learn that Gideon's soul is irreversibly merged with hers. Something went wrong. WebSPOILER Thoughts on NTN [Discussion] I just finished up Nona The Ninth and I greatly enjoyed it, despite some issues with pacing at the start I liked the characters they introduced, particularly Nona herself and the various supporting characters along with the depictions of the returning characters. But you see a Bible reference and are like, Oh, well, the author is well-learned, or, The author is extremely Catholic. You come by the classics. Its a rich and vibrant story about love and sin and redemption, laced through with allusions to everything from Peters denial of Christ to the none pizza with left beef meme. Go nuts. So that helped a lot. Except here, Harrow is the black-gowned, black-cloaked, black-hooded daughter of the Ninth House rulers, a powerful bone magician who sweats blood and can kill you with a flick of her wrist. And how do you think about that dynamic complicating the love that these pairs all appear to share? But I really wanted a magic system that was scholarship-based, that was something that you had to earn. It doesnt seem like its Harrow, does it? Brad Pitt was the only winner of the Aniston-Jolie tabloid battle, Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword, Make Trump a non person: Rupert Murdochs Ron DeSantis pivot, explained by a legal filing, The Supreme Court will decide if a whole federal agency is unconstitutional, Sign up for the Constance Grady: I have a hard time working out exactly how I feel about volume two of this trilogy. So how do you think making that trope feminine changes things? Joe Biden is pretty good at being president. WebGideon the Ninth is too funny to be horror, too gooey to be science fiction, has too many spaceships and autodoors to be fantasy, and has far more bloody dismemberings than It doesnt have anything in it of the mythology, which I hope is baroque, which comes later. and Harry Potter in equal measure; to a thousand Agatha Christie locked-house mysteries and Sweet Valley High. One of the tropes of anime is for two characters who are destined to fall in love to take a bath together and talk about their pasts, often while revealing their deepest and darkest secrets. The resultant tension is part of what animates this trilogy, and its mysterious backstory, and even the romance between Gideon and Harrow. That is something that is going to be, not explained, but visited again, in the third book. (John is exactly who I would be if, after a nuclear disaster that it is heavily implied I caused, I ended up becoming an immortal necromantic god, in that I too would spend a lot of time making pop culture references to properties no one else knows because they all came out 10,000 years before.) Google Pay. I never stopped delighting in them, but I would guess a bunch of people found them tiresome. And now Id like to hear what they are about for you, dear readers. I wish that I was writing into the void, where I could just be interrogated for what it is, not for what people bring into it. Because Harrow when shes thinking of herself is not how she talks. Its like, I only get to make the highfalutin Rainer Maria Rilke references so long as Im also making references to Homestar Runner. The morning started as every other morning had started in the Ninth since the Ninth began. Please consider making a one-time contribution to Vox today. WebGideon is not a fireman, that has been tragically excised from the mythology. What I love about anticipating the third (and final) book in this series is that I have literally no idea what to expect from it. I have always been fascinated by enmeshed relationships, I think is not an unfair way of putting it. Which House are you? How the Great Recession paved the way for influencers to inherit the earth, The surprising lesson from a century of Oscar scandals. WebThe shades of the Ninth were deep and shifty; they were bruise-coloured and cold. Even if those depictions ended up making me sad. Way back when I had just finished the book, and I had started sending it out to agents, I got a super nice agent who was really excited about it. What tropes did I miss in this basic overview? It tasted gorgeously grey and horrible. Thats part of what helps puncture the grandiosity of Muirs worldbuilding and keep everything feeling accessible and human-scale, no matter how complicated the mythology might be. The Emperor needs necromancers. (My fan theory: The seemingly random Harrow the Ninth epilogue is actually a flashback to a 21st century planet Earth, just before John blew everything up, and were going to spend at least a little time in the past a.k.a. The group is tasked with exploring the mansion to discover the secrets of Lyctorhood. Brad Pitt was the only winner of the Aniston-Jolie tabloid battle, Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword, Make Trump a non person: Rupert Murdochs Ron DeSantis pivot, explained by a legal filing, The Supreme Court will decide if a whole federal agency is unconstitutional, Sign up for the Her plans of fleeing to join the Emperor's armies (called the Cohort) are quickly foiled by her lifelong antagonist and heiress of the Ninth House, Harrowhark "Harrow" Nonagesimus. Which is why its so interesting that Harrow keeps using her AUs to try to prevent herself from remembering Gideons death. Theres a plot reason for this move: Harrow has worked out that if she has no knowledge of Gideon, then she wont be able to fully absorb Gideons soul, and as a result Gideon wont be completely gone forever. Well, it means I have a lot of fun. Possibly too much fun. The zombies are coming back. She comes from such a privileged position. I wish I could say I was one of those authors who for five years before publication had this really thick journal where they were like, heres exactly what goes on. There isnt actually that much onscreen, you know, liquids, which is the only way I can put it. And so what the real takeaway at the end of the day was, the love of your friends and hugs is the greatest thing that a woman can have. He should run again. Constance, how do you feel about Harrow the Ninths literary bag of tricks? But Nona's not like other people. Thats what these books are about. Lyctors are immortal necromancers, revered as saints, who serve as the Emperor's right-hand necromancers in wars against his enemies. Its just me going ham. There is so much more of it in book three. Who knows? 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