The Dragonfly Gambit

"This is a really tight piece of military sci fi , which functions as a thriller – you aren’t exactly sure who’s planning what, and therefore who’s winning. We follow Inez Kato, who is determined to bring down an intergalactic empire called the Rule, and has been brought to its heart to be forced into aiding it with her engineering knowledge. She is pitted against Ennis Rezál, running the Rule’s side in an ongoing war against the rebellion. Each main player is hoping to use the other. Also, they fancy the pants off each other. No, we stay with Kato, in first-person, so Rezál is a black box to us. And our narrator herself, we learn early, does not reveal everything to us. It’s not just a two-person cast – most notably there’s an ex-girlfriend and an old friend too, and the four are all intertwined together in different ways. But the others mostly function to flesh out the world as a place with history and depth. The core dynamic is tightly focused on those central two, which pays dividends in pacing and tension. Notably, for military sci fi, the military does not come off well. The characters are all difficult, but we forgive them because they are the products of their system. In our interview with A. D. Sui , she explains, “This was my attempt at military sci fi that was critical of the military-industrial complex… I wanted to play with the idea of the other side of military propaganda: how do people come out on the other end?”"