#36: Lesbian Necromancers in Space and the Sacraments

1 april 2022

Yeah, that's right. I recently had cause to re-read the first two installations of the Locked Tomb series, Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth (cause being: I really, really wanted to). These are books which are, of course, you got it, about lesbian necromancers in space. This is maybe not a usual subject for me but: I turned in a mostly-finished draft of my book, I'm frantically researching the very small bits that are missing, and so as a result of otherwise being lightly burnt out and living in the aftermath of screaming about these books very up close to a lot of people I know, I'm going to scream about them to you, my beautiful readers, in part because if you signed up for a newsletter on lady saints you are probably going to vibe extremely hard to the tune of goth space Catholics, plus more bones.

These are the first two books--and the only two thus far published--of a planned quartet by author Tamsyn Muir. Book 3, Nona the Ninth, is due out later this year, and we are all fervently hoping and praying for Alecto by 2023. After about three of my friends had screamed at me about these books, I checked Gideon out of the library and by page 3 was just totally smitten. I cannot properly express how delightfully voice-y Gideon is, slamming back and forth between a high-fantasy register and memes and banter with all the subtlety of a two-hander broadsword. The worldbuilding is dizzying, new information flying past your ears at a million miles an hour, the dialogue is smart, I laughed, I cried.

So here's the setup: Gideon Nav is a redheaded lady-himbo currently suffering under indentured servantship in the ninth house, the outermost planet of a system that runs on necromancy, and the ninth is...the necromanciest of them all. The House is slowly dying, made up mostly of older Bone Nuns and already dead skeleton farmers (see what I mean about the world building?!), and there are only really two young people on-world, which brings us to Gideon's nemesis. Her name is Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the daughter of the rulers of the ninth house and a necromantic adept. Just as Gideon is about to finally sneak off-world, a message comes in from the Necrolord Prime, the Lord Undying, aka God but spooky, inviting the ninth house to send candidates for Necromantic Sainthood. Candidates come in paired sets: a necromantic adept who is good at dead-magic and a cavalier who is good at fighting. Through a series of misadventures, it is Harrow and Gideon who end up on a shuttle to the otherwise-abandoned First House as a necro-cav pair. From there, the plot of book 1 most closely resembles something between Secret History and uh, Name of the Rose? But gay?

And like Name of the Rose, this book makes me want to sink my claws into the incredibly rich, weird world the author has made, the kind of myths and theories and ways of living these characters have and the way that each and every one of them underscores the themes of grief and love and friendship. There is...a Lot I want to say about these books that constitutes spoilers but I'll see what I can do without ruining the twist in book one that is unfortunately integral in understanding book 2.

SO at divinity school I took this class with Matthew Potts, an Episcopalian minister, called Sacramental Imagination. We read The Road and Jesus' Son and watched Babette's Feast and mined them for their moments of sacrament: the father in The Road bathing his boy in a freezing pond, pouring water over his head. Fuckhead crouching outside a window, watching a husband wash his wife's feet. Babette preparing a feast, the likes of which had never been seen in her dour little town, and foreclosing options to herself out of love for the sisters she works for. These were books and stories about real life: about the ways that the world is dark or difficult or nearly goddamn unsurviveable and also the ways that the sacraments carve out moments in time that are devoted to beauty and reverence and connection maybe to the divine but also to other people. I think the main thing I took away from that class is that yes, the sacraments are things that are about God, but the sacraments are the things we can also do to and for other people, a specific way we can give of ourselves. Gideon the Ninth and the books that come after it fit perfectly into the canon created for that class. I cannot think of a not-actually-religious book that emphasizes the salvific nature of the sacraments--baptism, eucharist, marriage, all of it--in the same way as these books. Not just because they are about the divine, but because they are about other people.

This is not an accident. Tamsyn Muir has, I genuinely think, read everything: the Bible, Augustine, probably some of the early Christian heresies, the entire internet? And so as you're reading her book, you fucking realize this--you're like...did you read Judith Butler? Or else why is Harrow saying that she is undone without you when that is a direct reference to one of my favorite of Butler's essays about grief and action? Is this meant to be a callback to Peter's denial of Christ at the crucifixion? The answer, as far as I can tell, is yes yes yes! When I took writing classes with Kate Zambreno in undergrad, she talked all the time about "voluptuous citation" and these books are nothing if not a citation so voluptuous, so dense, so teasingly, lovingly rococo they have to be in space to hold it all together.

And lest you think this is all div school nerd season and fighting with/about bones I am here to tell you that these books are also so, so much about feelings--friendship, and love, and reliance, and grief, and opening up your bristly little self to the help and love that people are trying to give you. They are about being undone without one another, and about the ways that the people you love become parts of you, and the very excellent thing about science fiction is that here, that is literal. I think this is what gets me the most about these books--we do, eventually get to meet God, but when we do, it's immediately clear that he isn't where the holiness of these books comes from--it's from the relationships between the characters, the ways they care for one another, are vulnerable to one another, the way two girls from the coldest planet in the system find a way into family.

One flesh, one end, bitch.