Code and Codex

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 Republics own lingua rubra, which has reality-altering properties, are forbidden. Nevertheless, there are discrepancies. The Censorates 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 anyones eyes. Moreover, Aurelias mastery of lingua rubra lets her force anyone who can understand her to follow her orders. Valentina, sold to Aurelias family as a child to be Aurelias 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 isnt enough for Aurelia. She wants to control and deploy the Censorates 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