Revenant Gun

Revenant Gun is a science fiction novel by the American writer Yoon Ha Lee, published in 2018 and the third book of the Machineries of Empire sequence.

The novel opens with Shuos Jedao awake and nothing as he remembers it: he is a teenager and a cadet, he is in the body of an old man, and he is in command of an elite military force, while being the most feared and most hated figure in the galaxy. He carries orders from a hexarch whose service he would not have chosen. The setting is a society in which the technology and the calendar are the same thing, so that the way the state keeps time determines what its weapons can do, and the people who govern it are the ones who decide which days exist. Lee writes about a military culture with a mathematical religion, and the sequence is as interested in the arrangements inside the command structure as in the battles.

The two earlier books, Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem, set up the conflict this volume resolves.