Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee

This was a case where I really wished I'd had the time to read the first book in the series before delving into the second - but since this is my first year trying to read all the Hugo nominees *before* the voting deadline, I was trapped. I'd missed Ninefox Gambit when it was nominated last year (I'll read it eventually, I promise!) and had to jump right into Raven Stratagem if I were going to finish everything I needed to by the end of July.

In this book, I was thrown into a world without a lot of context. I was able to glean a lot of it, but it was more in the sense of broad meanings than specifics, and I suspect that if the specifics have been explained, it was in the prior book, and would have been redundant to re-explain. It did mean that I was struggling to catch up a bit, which is partly why this book is not in my top few rankings for this category.

That is not to say that it is bad - the one thing I have been so delighted by is how strong entire Hugo categories are. It's not just one or two good books and then filler, it tends to be six solid books that tie me up in knots trying to figure out my voting rankings.

Still, this is one where I felt most at sea. I was able to get the larger sense of what Lee was going for, but the specifics escaped me. I think I got the outside edges of calendrical issues, but I'm more than a little bewildered as to what that means, precisely, what calendrical heresies are, and why they would give rise to, for lack of a better term, the different magics different sectors of this interstellar Empire have at their disposal. I was able to get past that by just labelling it all magic in my mind, and that worked fine, but I was always curious to find out what it meant in this universe, or to this author.

We are in a universe where the people are dispersed over many planets, and it seems like some or most of the people (I wasn't sure if picking a faction was mandatory or only for a few) join one of the factions and gain the powers thereof. (There are the military, the spies, the inquisitors, and a few more I'm a little vague on.)

Within this, a body is taken over/shares consciousness with a Shuos (the spies, as near as I can tell) who was disembodied and held incorporeal for centuries after he caused a massacre. He comes onto a Kel (military) ship in a, to use the language of the book, womanform, and takes advantage of Kel hierarchical instinct to take over just as they're engaging an enemy force. He's brilliant, and the captain he usurped first tries to assassinate him, and then puts her life on the line to follow him.

But there is more going on here, and it's all fascinating, but it wasn't the deepest characterization I've found in this batch of books. Honestly, the interactions between the leader of the Shuos and his brother/stand-in were probably the most complex and interesting of anything that was on the table here, and I could have read a whole book about them alone. This book tries to find a middle path between being about the plot (but doesn't let me all the way in to understand it) and about the characters (but doesn't give us a ton of time with characterization.)

It's all leading somewhere, and it was interesting along the way, but because there were things I didn't understand about the underlying world, or really, about the characters, it didn't land as strongly as it could have. That's the problem with coming in on the second book of a series, and makes this, for me, not as strong a contender for the Hugo as some of the other books. Yet, I liked it, and might have liked it a whole lot more if I'd read the first book first.