Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth Is Your One-Stop-Shop for Space Necromancy, Sarcasm, and Bones

For ten thousand years the empire has endured—nine proud Houses sheltered under the aegis of the Necrolord Prime. But the ranks of the Emperor’s most trusted knights, the Lyctors, have thinned considerably after an age spent fighting in his name, and the King Undying requires new blood (literally) to fill out the fighting numbers of the First House. Nine House heirs are summoned with their sworn cavaliers, nine necromancers and nine swordsmen to vie for the ultimate honor: to become an immortal hand of the Emperor, bringing honor to their house for the next ten thousand years.

Having struck up an extremely unenthusiastic partnership, Gideon and Harrow arrive at Canaan House, a crumbling gothic sprawl of a space manor, where they meet the seven other necromancer/cavalier pairs with whom they will be competing for the honor of becoming a Lyctor. The mansion is a puzzle box full of necromantic tricks and clues, but what starts as a Westing Game-style competition amongst heirs rapidly swerves into And Then There Were None territory (with more vivid dismemberment) as the Emperor’s trial becomes (un?)deadly.  

Gideon the Ninth is a wackadoodle science fantasy that mixes horror, swordplay, creative profanity, space magicians, and sheer good fun. The novel lives or dies with Gideon: the spark and punch of Muir’s debut largely comes out of the tonal ping-pong between her baroque worldbuilding and the cheekily (but not incongruously) contemporary voice of her heroine. Muir catapults her reader into a fully formed universe of decaying empires and magical femurs, complete with heirs and courtesies, dueling handbooks, and a magic-as-science approach to raising the dead. And into this elaborate confection of skeletal handmaids and polished space filigree swaggers our main girl and her filthy mouth, all hands on her trusty longsword and her eyes locked on the nearest shortest skirt. 

As the plot picks up speed, however, almost every member of the cast becomes well-defined, interesting, and treated with a sincerity that comes almost as a surprise in a book as proudly sarcastic as this one can be—something especially potently felt in the mutating, if always adversarial, relationship between Gideon and Harrow. And if almost every member of the supporting cast plays to type—the scholar, the fanatic, the soldier, the arrogant princess, the affable knight—it only adds to the fun of being trapped with them in a weirdo gothic space thriller, and such a terrible shame that the twists and turns of Muir’s plot prove so very, very dangerous for her characters. As perhaps expected from a book with a confetti of bones on the cover and the prefix “necro” attached liberally throughout, much of the action is fittingly gruesome and probably not for delicate constitutions. 

Gideon the Ninth is available September 10. Preorder now to secure a first edition copy with stained black edges!