James Nicoll Reviews

Yoon Ha Lee’s 2018 novella Extracurricular Activities is a space-opera espionage adventure. Set in the Hexarchate, it is a distant prequel to Lee’s Machineries of Empire series.

Shuos Jedao is a cunning adventurer, expert marksman, and all-round man of action. The Hexarchate he serves is an unpleasant authoritarian regime that, like so many other governments, rewards high-performing employees with yet another dangerous assignment. Jedao’s remarkable achievements win him an equally remarkable assignment.

The Hexarchate is by no means the only government in the universe. As much as it hates to recognize the existence of rivals, practicality demands that it engage in both trade and diplomatic relations. Efficiency suggests that traders and trade envoys be multi-purpose: traders, envoys, spies, perhaps even operatives and assassins. Humble-seeming merchant ships like the Moonsweet Blossom may also be (and in fact are) carrying out vital espionage. 

Soon after Merchanter Moonsweet Blossom arrived at Du Station in the Gwa Reality, the Hexarchate received a brief emergency signal from the ship. Since then, silence. Someone has to venture into foreign territory, figure out what happened to the ship, retrieve any crewmembers who may still be alive, and return to the Hexarchate to report. It just so happens that Moonsweet Blossom is under the command of Jedao’s old classmate Meng. Obviously Jedao is the right person for the task. 

Jedao does not speak more than a few phrases of Tlem Gwa, Du Station’s lingo, but that is the sort of impediment above which intelligence agents are expected to rise. Alas, Jedao’s briefing was by its nature incomplete. What the Hexarchate does not know about the events at Du Station could ensure the failure of Jedao’s mission. From the Hexarchate’s viewpoint, this would be just another casualty of undeclared war, as all its subjects are considered expendable. 

~oOo~

In some ways, Jedao is like James Bond or Dominic Flandry. He’s a dashing man of action who does not let the evils of the Hexarchate deter him from doing his duty. Others may quibble about ethical niceties (at least until the secret police torture them to death), but Jedao has a job to do and he does it. 

Unlike either Bond or Flandry, however, Jedao [1] is going to undergo significant learning experiences between this story and the Machineries of Empire. Thus there is a certain level of dramatic irony (apparent only to those who have read the other books in this setting) as Jedao performs his duties without any concern for the rightness of his goals or of his methods. 

Not that Jedao will ever stop leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, but in the other books he does at least feel some qualms about doing so and has better reasons than just following orders. 

This is a novella, with less focus on the arcana of Hexarchate technology, which lack was just fine with me. This was fun read. Lee’s prose is, as always, a delight. 

Extracurricular Activitiesis available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), and here (Chapters-Indigo).I did not find it at Book Depository.

1: Also unlike Bond or Flandry, Jedao has a domineering mother. I found myself thinking that the Bond franchise would have been much improved if from time to time (in mid-mission, naturally) Bond got concerned phone calls from his mother asking when he was going to provide her with grandkids.