IN Yoon Ha Lee’s Revenant Gun (2018), the gripping final installment in the Machineries of Empire trilogy, an unstable genius, Jedao, is resurrected (again) to shore up the crumbling remains of a star-spanning empire, the Hexarchate, since his nonpareil cunning is counterbalanced only by his sheer unpredictability, an invaluable asset for a baroque far-future society run entirely on impossibly advanced algebra wedded to an equally accelerationist system of time.
In his mastery of the military-sf game theory of space warfare, Jedao, whose emblem is inspired in part by the Gumiho trickster fox of Korean folklore, is the epitome not only of the strategist Shuos clan from which the general hails, but of the society’s technologies of calendars, rigorously aligned by a relay of clocktowers throughout the star systems, which operate as a consensus delusion for all the characters in the space opera. This calendar is an ideological construction designed to exercise maximal imperial control and coercion and that organizes everything in the universe from the exotic technology (created by the Nirai faction) to the intricate politics (ruled by Rahal faction) to the byzantine diplomacy (the Andan faction) to the behavior-modified military rank and file (the Kel) to the ruthless police system (the Vidona), which all rigorously adhere to Days of Remembrance, i.e., systems for the ritual torture of dissidents, prone as they are to calendrical “rot” and “heresy”, to enforce a brutal reign of atrocities — another inspiration for the series is Harlan Ellison’s (RIP) “Paladin of the Lost Hour” (1986), which also posits a system by which cultural time-perception (in Ellison case, the Gregorian calendar) interfaces with and reshapes existence itself, though in a more fantastic and less hard-SF way in that story.
In the first book, Ninefox Gambit, (2016) Jedao, inhabiting the body of the mathematical prodigy Cheris, explains, “in a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work.” The remorseless logic by which the futuristic calendar-based society of these books work, then, exists in concert with moral hazards and multi-polar asymmetries that disrupt the equilibria of game theory, which of course must massively simplify to pure, complete, and finite dimensions in order to make the messiness of human behavior even marginally calculable. As one egghead Nirai in the second book, Raven Stratagem (2017) puts his aversion to the real politick that infests the universe, he does not deal with unknowns, inconsistent, or insincere players, deeply averse to mixed strategies and multiple tactics extending into infinite regresses of endless decision trees and payoff matrices: “I solve equations, not guns.”
So, in Revenant Gun, about halfway through the novel, the first opportunity Jedao gets to command a swarm fleet of Kel warships against the outnumbering Goliath of an ostensibly hostile enemy, he boldly charges his gravitation cannon and threatens to ram the lead bannermoth and its human cargo of Protector-General Inesser to force compliance, against his explicit orders to simply destroy a mothyard pursuant to a calendrical spike that might begin to re-establish the collapsed Hexarchate. Jedao signals to his opponent through the screen of his risky gamble his credibility as a wildcard player, even though his own actual willingness to execute the methods in his madness remains dubious: as Jedao explains his impulse for self-destruction to himself, "that would be stupid, if possibly amusing to whatever fox spirits lurked in space watching human antics. But the more he could scare [Protector-General Inesser] the better. Failing that, he might as well use his reputation for being crazy." This madman brinksmanship, one of the paradoxically most rational ways to add credibility to a deterrence threat in game theory, is the reason why Jedao was executed to begin with, and the selfsame reason he was arcanely resurrected subsequently is likewise tied to the trauma at the heart of this series: namely, the battle of the Hellspin Fortress where Jedao snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by massacring a million people, including his own side. For this treason, Jedao became went down in history as a infamous celebrity disparagingly referred to as the Immolation Fox. Hence, during the attack on Inesser's fleet, Jadeo’s watchdog, the creator of the Black Cradle immortality device that allows minds to anchor to new bodies, Kujen, immediately incapacitates the unstable genius through a built-in fail switch before the Immolation Fox can command a repeat performance of the massacre, or worse, from Kujen’s warped perspective, begin to sniff that there’s something rotten in Denmark and that hope for a better future without an atrocity-regulated calendar is remotely possible.
The disturbing implications of Yoon Ha Lee’s eminently compelling fictions are that our technological progress — and our increasing dependence on ornate systems of clock and calendar at the expense of the here and now — must both be continually sustained and disrupted by the mutual assured destruction of escalating saber-rattling and such suicidal poker-faced refusal to retreat after a bluff gone awry. Such blowing up of the game is not cheating per se but the irrevocable consequence of the game itself at a deep structural level. The remorseless logic of playing the game to its inevitable limits ends up not with the slow dissipation of the tragedy of the commons, or the erasure of clashing systems of belief in a bleakly homogenized future, but the terror of an erratic instability that leaves nobody, especially not the calendrical heretics, unscathed.