It’s fitting that the universe Yoon Ha Lee has created features starships decorated with gardens and tapestries and beautiful statuary, because Lee’s writing is still the perfect balance of opposites: poetry and mathematics, the classical and the futuristic, the artistic and the purely functional, and most importantly self-sacrificing honor and the purest kind of galaxy-spanning narcissism you can image.Ĭertain elements of the book still go way over my head, and probably always will. He has no idea why Kujen is making him the commander of the Hexarchate army, and no memory of the fact that he was executed more than four centuries ago for slaughtering a million people, including everyone in his own command. Kel Brezan, who only ever wanted to be a good Kel and do his duty, has had to take what’s left of the Hexarchate and build it into something that doesn’t depend on the daily ritual sacrifice and torture of heretics.Įlsewhere, someone calling themselves Shuos Jedao is working behind the scenes to learn everything they can about the powerful, body-hopping, centuries old Nirai Kujen, with the hope that they can find a way to kill the insane Hexarch once and for all.Īnd deep in a Nirai stronghold the “real” Shuos Jedao wakes up, thinking he’s still a teenage cadet but finding himself in the body of an adult (and battle-scarred) general. On June 12, Solaris releases Revenant Gun, the final book in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy.īook two ended with the assassination of all but two of the ruling Hexarchs. The longer he stared at it, the more he saw the darkness giving way to a vast crevasses of gears and cams and silver chrysalises from which more moths flew free…

As he examined it more closely, though, he saw that it was made of the shapes of fluttering captive moths. Jedao had taken it for an ordinary shadow.

“Look at my shadow and tell me what you see.”

Revenant gun by yoon ha lee