‘Starship Troopers meets Apocalypse Now – andthey’ve put Kurtz in charge… Mind-blistering militaryspace opera. An unmissable debut.’ – Steven Baxter. We have talked to Ninefox Gambit author Yoon Ha Lee about the fist book in his new series.
I’m biased but I loved Ninefox Gambit. It was the perfect blend of military sci-fi and psychological thriller to sate anyone’s appetite. Do you have any military background at all? The procedures by both troops and military ‘brass’ are detailed enough to make it seem so!
Not really! My dad was a surgeon in the U.S. Army when I was a small child, so I have lived on two military bases (Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri and Yongsan in South Korea). But I don’t think I was old enough to absorb much–I have a distinct memory of a soldier bringing me in to my father’s office at the hospital once and thinking that the soldier was as tall as the ceiling, that’s how little I was.
I do like reading military history, though, and I like listening to the stories told by the grognards and folks with military backgrounds at my local game store. So I did try to do my homework!
And – if you don’t mind talking about it – what psychological/mental health background do you have? Anything in particular that relates to the Cheris-Jedao relationship? I have a background in working with/and experiencing mental health issues, and much of what you wrote resonated with my own personal demons and experience.
I have bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder, which I’ve been struggling with for years. I’m very used to the idea that my perceptions are distorted and perhaps not to be relied on, and I was able to draw on some of that for Cheris’s paranoia in dealing with Jedao.
One of the things that informed Jedao’s characterization was the notion that he’s self-destructively playing a game both against the universe and against himself. Because of my long history of bipolar depression, I’ve struggled a lot with suicidal thoughts; I’ve been hospitalized 2.5 times for suicide attempts/ideation (the 0.5 was a day hospitalization, where you get to go home at night and check your email). It gets almost to a sort of game-playing against myself–trying to create checks and balances so that I can find some kind of release for the suicidal impulses without actually carrying through.
Would you be offended if I suggested Ninefox has a blend of Space Marines and Herbert’s Dune at it’s core? Were either of these an influence?
Flattered rather! Dune I can answer straight off–I’ve heard a lot about it, but I actually bounced off it after the first 50 pages because I couldn’t stand Herbert’s prose. (Sorry! For what it’s worth, my husband really liked Dune…) So if there’s an influence, it’s indirect, through things I’ve heard and other works I’ve read that have perhaps been inspired by it.
Space marines, definitely. I enjoyed Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers when I read it in high school, although I suspect Heinlein is one of those authors who I would find maddening now. And I’m not deeply familiar with the world lore, but Warhammer 40,000 is popular at my local game store, and I’ve played in a couple short Warhammer 40k adventures run by my friend Brent Morgan for a bunch of us when we meet up at Gencon. My real introduction to Warhammer 40,000 was not through the game itself but sideways, through a fanfic by Charles Bhepin, “Shinji and Warhammer 40k,” which is a massive crossover between WH40k and an anime called Neon Genesis Evangelion. I learn about a lot of things through odd routes!
Did you map the solar system of your story? Complete with Footbreak, the Fortress of Needles, etc? …can we see it?!
I had a vague scribbly map in a notebook, but unfortunately it was destroyed–I live in Baton Rouge and we were flooded out this August, so I lost all my paper notes. That being said, I managed to recreate a more extensive hexarchate map and have commissioned someone to do a proper rendering of it. It’s not done yet, but I’m looking forward to it!
In the ‘vermin’ scene (‘Are you afraid of creepy crawlies‘) how much of ‘you’ is in this book? And in Cheris? By that, I mean is the book at all about your own personal beliefs/fears? Obviously all writers are ‘in’ their books, but coupled with your trans-gendered status and (possible) fear of bugs, this book really feels like we’re getting to see inside your head.
You got me, I’m a wimp about bugs. I used to kill bugs for my sister when we were both at Stanford (we overlapped one year when I was a grad student and she was an undergrad), and after I got married I decided that I was done killing my own bugs so now I make my husband or daughter do it for me.
But part of the inspiration for that scene was also a fabulous poem by Peter Wild called “Roaches,” which you can find online if you Google for it. In one of my high school classes we each had to bring in our favorite poem. I forget what my pick was–probably A.E. Housman’s “I to my perils”–but “Roaches” was a classmate’s pick, and I have never forgotten it. It’s now one of my favorites, too. That being said, I advise avoiding it if you are squeamish about bugs!
I drew on some of my own history to create Cheris. She’s better at math than I am, though I do like math. I only have a B.A. in the subject, and in fact hated math until 9th grade Geometry, when we were introduced to proofs and suddenly instead of arbitrary memorization we had *reasons* for things being the way they were. Cheris is combination savant and “mathematician” (in a handwavy fantasy sense)–she was originally not a savant but one of my beta readers explained to me that this wasn’t glamorous enough for a space opera so I caved on that point.
When Cheris talks about being a member of a minority group, and not speaking her mother tongue fluently anymore, that reflects my experience as a Korean-American. I was born in the USA but my parents are from South Korea, and my first language was actually Korean. I can vaguely get by, but I’m not really fluent in it anymore despite living in Korea for nine years; I have attended English-language schools all my life and for all intents and purposes my native tongue is English. But I regret that loss of connection to my heritage. We’ll see that come up a little more in the sequel to Ninefox Gambit.
Jedao’s interest in game design comes partly from my interest in the topic. I also thought it paired well with a manipulative character who sees people as chess pieces. I’ve written a couple IF (interactive fiction) games, and as part of my research I signed up for a speed game design workshop at Gencon one year, which was fantastic fun and very educational. I used to make terrible board games as a child, but back then I didn’t know much about what goes into good game design. These days you can find all sorts of articles on the internet (if you’re looking for a free course, I can recommend Ian Schreiber’s Games Design Concepts: https://gamedesignconcepts.
The other thing that I tried to convey in the book was how terrible war is. I have never seen military service, so obviously what I know is all secondhand. But starting in high school I read up on My Lai and atrocities, and I kept wondering how such incidents could be prevented from happening. My interest in military sf came after reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game–and the character who interested me most was not Ender or Valentine or even Peter, but the instructor Graff. I wondered how a man responsible for training child soldiers could possibly live with himself–how desperate the straits must be.
I didn’t grow up with war stories in the sense of soldiering, but I did grow up with stories about my family’s experiences with the Korean War.
I’m sorry I didn’t get to incorporate more of that–that’s more of a civilian’s perspective, and Ninefox was conceived as more of a soldiers’ story. My mother’s mother’s family used to live up by the Manchurian border and fled south after the end of WWII; they had to evacuate Seoul during the Korean War. My mother was born during the war and my grandmother abandoned her by the side of the road because she already had two small children and she made the difficult decision that this was the best way for the family to survive. But another woman picked up the baby and brought her up to my grandmother and said, “You forgot this,” and my grandmother didn’t have the heart to abandon the baby another time. That woman, whose name I will never know, is the only reason my mother survived, and that my sister and I were able to be born. I think about things like that.
As for being transgendered, that obviously reflected itself in the dynamic between Jedao and Cheris–male mind sharing a female body–but I wasn’t consciously aware of it while writing the book because I wasn’t ready to look at the subject head-on. It wasn’t until I’d finished writing the draft that I realized what I’d done. The mind is a funny thing sometimes. Jedao’s over-the-top desperation has some of its roots in my own gender dysphoria.
While I’m at it, I don’t condone mass murder! Jedao gets away with it because he’s a fictional character–and even then, I created him to be the *antagonist*. In a sense, I think of Jedao as someone who wants to be a revolutionary but who doesn’t have a lot of imagination. War is the world he knows, so war is the method he uses, even when it leads him to paraglide past the moral event horizon of things that people should never do.
My favourite part of Ninefox… was when Jedao was ‘going mad’ around Cheris in chapter 9. How much fun was this to write (if it was fun?!) after such a thoroughly regimented and military-esque series of chapters up until then?
It was a lot of fun! Writing Jedao was entertaining because of all the head games, if also exhausting at times. Anytime he had a line of dialogue, I had to be aware whether he was telling the truth, what the actual truth was, and what his purposes (usually more than one) were.
Is food something you are very passionate about? When you mention it in Ninefox Gambit it is always very detailed… and very mouth-watering!
If someone else is cooking it, yes! I have a mixed relationship with food. I’m perfectly happy to get by on sandwiches and I grew up eating Spam and Lipton tea from the Commissary. It always cracks me up when people think I’m some kind of tea connoisseur because I’m Korean because, seriously, my introduction to tea was Lipton! My parents and their families didn’t really do fancy teas at all; I’m not even sure if it’s a Korean thing or not, or whether maybe other families do.
I hate cooking, but I like eating food from different cuisines and cultures, and I get especially homesick for Korean food and my mother’s cooking. I live in Baton Rouge and the nearest Korean restaurant that I’m aware of is an hour out, practically in New Orleans. And I don’t know about you, but Cajun/Creole food is fabulous–I refuse to go to New Orleans to eat *Korean*, it just seems wrong!
When can we expect the sequel to your ‘Machineries of Empire‘ trilogy?
The sequel, Raven Stratagem, has already been turned in, so now it’s up to Solaris! My guess is that it’ll be out in the summer of 2017. I’m currently at work on the third book, Revenant Gun.
Thank you for your time and your words. Burn brightly, Yoon.
Thank you for having me!
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Interview by Jody Neil Ruth – SFFWorld.com © 2016
