Three-time Hugo Award finalist Yoon Ha Lee returns to science fiction with a swashbuckling space opera fighting against an evil empire trying to erase history.
In the stars-spanning Censorate, languages other than the Republic's own lingua rubra, which has reality-altering properties, are forbidden. Nevertheless, there are discrepancies. The Censorate's star forces are called the Athenaeum Navy, and each of its ships is referred to as a codex. Instead of port and starboard, its soldiers refer to verso and recto. The unholy "stigmata" gouged into the ships' hulls might, to a foreign scholar, bear a resemblance to verboten texts in other languages.
The Censorate is ruled by its Peacock, Aurelia, feared for the power of panopticon: she can look through anyone's eyes. Moreover, Aurelia's mastery of lingua rubra lets her force anyone who can understand her to follow her orders. Valentina, sold to Aurelia's family as a child to be Aurelia's oath-sister and companion, is its Swan, responsible for extracting useful information from foreign texts, then destroying them as well as entire languages through arcane arts. Valentina is assisted in her work by lower-ranking linguists and AI assistants who accept temporary contamination by foreign languages as a necessity of their work.
But this isn't enough for Aurelia. She wants to control and deploy the Censorate's thousand-year traitor and prisoner, the Basilisk, a man with a gaze so lethal that he destroyed its fleet of old through camera feeds. Unfortunately for her, the Basilisk gave himself a form of aphasia that makes him immune to her commands. Yoon Ha Lee is a Korean-American science fiction and fantasy writer who received a BA in math from Cornell University and an MA in math education from Stanford University, and is currently pursuing an MA in professional media composition from ThinkSpace. Yoon's novel Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His middle grade space opera Dragon Pearl won the Mythopoeic Award for Children's Literature and the Locus Award for best YA novel and was a New York Times bestseller. Yoon's short fiction has appeared in publications such as Tor, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Audubon magazine, as well as several year's best anthologies.
