Harrow the Ninth

"The second, yes, in what’s going to be a quartet – the final book is not yet published, we’re all waiting on it! I picked the second book, because this one is my favourite so far. It’s a far-future story in a full grand space opera style. There’s an empire of multiple planets, there are mysterious space beasts… But also, everything about the civilization is fundamentally rooted in necromancy as the core mechanism of power – both magical and political power. The first book tells the story of how the two main characters are called upon by the god-emperor to research and carry out this magical process of empowerment and ascension, because he wants them to help in his own higher purposes. They succeed, sort of – very ‘sort of’. Harrow the Ninth is about the ramifications of ‘sort of’ – what does ‘sort of’ mean exactly. The necromantic research in both books is presented in very scientific terms. There are learnable techniques and replicable methods; there are laboratories and technologies; there’s engineering, there’s schools of thought. Tamsyn Muir does something very clever in the way that she leads you to greater and greater levels of complexity as the series progresses. When it starts off, in Gideon the Ninth , it seems very quippy and swashbucklingly straightforward – as the now-famous tagline has it, “lesbian necromancers in space”. But it seemed more straightforward than it eventually turned out to be. It rapidly becomes evident that there’s a lot more going on. And in Harrow the Ninth , we’re doing some very beautifully complicated things. One of the main narrative threads of Harrow the Ninth is re-telling the entire story of Gideon the Ninth , the first book; except that it rapidly diverges, quite dramatically, from the actual events of the first book. The main difference is that Gideon, the main character of the first book, has been completely excised from the narrative. Harrow doesn’t remember that there was ever such a person. So we’re getting that same story again, and now we are tracking the differences and trying to figure out what the differences mean. At the same time, Harrow is struggling to deal with her semi-botched ascension as the newest and most junior hench person of the tyrannical god-emperor in the war against the space beasts, who turn out to be the collective ghosts of dead worlds – the very worlds that were once killed and resurrected by necromantic powers to form the empire. So this is an empire that’s literally haunted by its war crimes. We follow Harrow as she discovers exactly how her god is flawed, and there’s so much history that has been hidden. In that sense this is actually similar to The Old Drift and Gnomon , because in both, to understand the story of the later generation you also have to understand the backstory of the previous generations. Those generations are widely separated in time in the Locked Tomb books, but they’re also not, because these people are immortal – so they’re kind of the same people that they were when they were annoying millennials, before the earth died. Now they’re all-powerful immortals, but they’re still the same people. They talk the same way. And their relationships with their offspring and their successors are very relatable."