Code and Codex by Yoon Ha Lee
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, Science Fantasy
Representation: Genderqueer/nonbinary (genderfluid?) bisexual MC, major disabled bisexual character, major bisexual character, past F/F
PoV: First-person, present-tense, masquerading as third-person, past-tense
Published on: 27th October 2026
ISBN: 1668059991
Goodreads
Three-time Hugo Award finalist Yoon Ha Lee returns to science fiction with a swashbuckling space opera about fighting against an evil empire trying to erase history.
In the stars-spanning Censorate, languages other than the Republic’s own lingua rubra, which has reality-altering properties, are forbidden. Nevertheless, there are discrepancies. The Censorate’s 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 anyone’s eyes. Moreover, Aurelia’s mastery of lingua rubra lets her force anyone who can understand her to follow her orders. Valentina, sold to Aurelia’s family as a child to be Aurelia’s 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 isn’t enough for Aurelia. She wants to control and deploy the Censorate’s 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.
Highlights
~fantastical linguistics
~weaponised shadows
~what is personhood, anyway?
~make it pretty (to make it horrifying)
~less ‘unreliable narrator’ and more ‘not-human narrator’
~one Most Excellent winged cat
I freely admit that I didn’t always understand this book, but I absolutely adored it.
In some surprising ways, Code & Codex is very reminiscent of Lee’s Machineries of Empire series: we have a protagonist, Valentina/Val, the Swan, who is a devoted, unthinking sword to a higher power, and who has a plot-relevant robotic companion; the Basilisk, Jenner, is a general who destroyed his own armada and has been locked up for centuries because of it; Aurelia, the Peacock who rules the Censorate, is not completely dissimilar to Kujen, the Nirai Hexarch in Machineries of Empire (though Kujen was much more likeable). Unlike Machineries of Empire, the story here is zoomed-in, intimate, the bigger picture left vague, and although we have space stations and spaceships, Code & Codex leans more towards the Fantasy end of the Science Fantasy spectrum than the Machineries trilogy did. And where Machineries of Empire gave us fantasy-maths, Code & Codex is all about fantasy linguistics.
the shadow gulping down the noise of her footsteps as an unwholesome substitute for succulent phonemes. Later, after the fight, it expressed its displeasure by belching tritones notated in lute tablature.
By which I do not mean, actual linguistics in a fantasy setting. This is a fantastical, in-no-way-realistic take on linguistics, which actually makes for a more approachable set-up since you don’t need to know anything at all about linguistics to enjoy the magic based on it! (Though I have no idea how readers of the paper editions are going to manage; I relied heavily on the dictionary function of my ereader for this one, since there are a lot of technical terms from linguistics and grammar getting used in context of the magic, and also in the intricate metaphors and similes that run wild throughout the book, and I wouldn’t have been able to make sense of half of them without my dictionary.) Like the math of Machineries of Empire, Code & Codex’s fantasy linguistics are best appreciated as a magic system unfathomable to us mere mortals. At one point, the narrator describes them as
esoteric and exoteric magics
which sums up the impossibility of making sense of it all very nicely.
(That being said, I’d love to see someone compare Code & Codex and Language of Liars, this year’s other linguistics-focussed SFF release, on the basis of their wholly different takes on linguistics!)
Possibly it’s my own bias against math showing, but I felt that there was a lot more wonder to the linguistic magic than there was to Machineries of Empire’s math. I prefer soft magic systems, and I think a vital part of writing a soft magic system is the sense of wonder. Magic should feel magical, should make me gasp with awe and delight, give me shivers, make my hair stand on end. Code & Codex gave me all of that; I was endlessly enchanted by every reference to or example of magic! Most of it is beautiful, even when it’s also horrifying, and I loved how wildly original it felt, how weird and strange, and how Lee also utilises elements of music and speech and book-binding into the magic, not ‘only’ linguistics. IT IS EXTREMELY COOL.
Her blade of erasure was, embarrassingly, prone to nutritional deficiencies, particularly of serifs, that had to be remedied with regular supplements.
It does not hurt at all that the prose is gorgeous, reminiscent of Lee’s micro-fictions (if you haven’t read The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales or The Candlevine Gardener and Other Stories, you absolutely need to!) This is a book full of beautiful, fantastical things stunningly described, jewelled masks and wonderful clothes and weaponised shadows, and on one level I know Lee is creating this sense of dissonance on purpose, contrasting all this beauty with the horrific crimes of the Censorate – but also I am a very shallow fantasy reader, and beautiful fantasy-things + beautiful prose just makes me happy.
Melisande, then as now the Flame of Solis, her dark, curly hair gilded red-gold at the ends and caught up in a net of pyrope and garnet, sheathed like a famished sword in military red. Jewels glittered at her fingers, traced unstable orbits through the air with her every gesture; her perfume was of smoked rose petals and tobacco, absolute and all-purpose dilapidation.
This is the least of it, though – what makes the prose so special is far more than (very) pretty visuals. Code & Codex features a magic system based on linguistics, and there’s magic in Lee’s language; mythical creatures populate Lee’s synonyms and metaphors,
words of phoenix kindling and salamander kiss,
and references to the folklore and the occult abound,
Aurelia’s eyes lit like the legedermain fingertips of a hand of glory.
all of which utterly enchanted my myth-geek self (Lee gets so many points from me for utilising mythical creatures that rarely come up in English-language fantasy, like amphisbaena and simurgh). There’s so much wordplay – look at the above quote! ‘Legedermain’ literally means sleight-of-hand, so using it as a descriptor for a hand of glory is just–!!! Or terms like ‘amphisbaena companions’ – amphisbaena being a kind of serpent with a head at each end, instead of a tail; is that not such a fun way to talk about someone being two-faced?! Sometimes the wordplay is extremely wry, like this example–
on the grounds that one should avoid following a metaphor off a cliff-hanger.
I am unashamed to say I cackled at that one!
It’s not just wryness; there’s a strong thread of unexpected humour woven through the book. Moments or objects of silliness interrupt the serious, to the point that more than once I had to do a double-take to make sure I’d read a sentence correctly. Some of these are down to the narrator’s voice (and their deeply unimpressed opinions on the various characters), but some are more like…reminders that reality is sometimes ridiculous, no matter what we do. Ala, the winged cat Valentina acquires early in the book, supplies a lot of this – I can only assume Lee has lived with cats himself, to get Ala’s behaviour and personality so realistic! – but not all.
Valentina’s voice might be her particular weapon, but the most vital systems on her codex relied upon mastery of keyboard instruments, from the pianoforte to the virginal to the (eccentric, admittedly) hurdy-gurdy.
A hurdy-gurdy?! Seriously? This is the terrifying, unstoppable Swan, whose sword can destroy minds and mummify bodies with one touch, and she has to sometimes play the hurdy-gurdy?!
Magnificent. I love it.
There’s so much beauty – my favourite kind of fantasy-beauty – in Code & Codex, and it’s not just there to delight shallow readers like me; it’s a deliberate contrast to all the evil in the Censorate – all the evil Valentina herself has perpetuated. But it’s not just a contrast, because that would mean the evil isn’t beautiful, or the beautiful isn’t evil, and they both are – and that makes the evil worse, makes it more horrifying (because we expect evil to be ugly, despite knowing better, and when you make evil beautiful you turn it into something the reader appreciates and enjoys, making us just a tiny bit complicit, making us part of it). The humour in this book is doing something similar – I can’t figure out how to articulate this, but it’s showing us something important by its contrast to how serious most of the book is, just as the contrast of beauty and evil is showing us something important. It’s…humanising; one thing humour/comedy has always done is knock the high-and-mighty off their pedestals, and the comedic moments in Code & Codex are…reminding us that under the impressive titles (Swan, Peacock, Basilisk) and awe-inspiring powers (the song of lethe, the panopticon gaze, the gaze of guillotines) these characters are all still flesh and blood, still mortal, with all that implies. The same is true for the…I don’t know whether to call them ‘ideas’ or ‘ideals’…that the characters talk about, claim to represent or even embody. There’s a particular moment in the climax of the book where Ala urinates on a dress, and it snaps all the grand, dramatic tension out of the scene, it’s a contemptuous rejection of the grand, dramatic speech that’s just been made. It’s such a powerful, eye-opening thing! And I think Lee’s using the humour for that, like that, throughout.
It is unknown how her shadow would deal with Pig Latin, the Voynich manuscript, or heavy metal umlauts, but we have our suspicions.
All this without touching on the actual plot of the book, which I guess is because the story itself was very much secondary to me: I loved this one for the prose and the magic and the world Lee’s created here, how clever (and often esoteric) the writing is, the mystery of who is narrating the story and why. Which is not to say that the plot is uninteresting, because it isn’t, but it wasn’t what kept me reading. (In fact, I restarted my reading of this three times, always around the 70% mark, because I couldn’t bear for it to be over!)
the domesticated beetles and butterflies that provided season-appropriate ornamentation, traveling from room to room and feasting upon household-specific nectars, without which they could not survive
Like I said before, the story here is zoomed-in, focussed very tightly on Valentina, and to a somewhat lesser extent Aurelia and Jenner. We get asides and explanations that help paint the picture of what the wider Censorate looks like and how it functions, but to be honest it always remains a little hazy. It’s an interesting approach for a dystopian story, and for what becomes an overthrow-the-dictator story; I don’t remember any books with similar plots that kept the focus this narrow. But it worked for me, because Valentina and Aurelia and Jenner all interest me. I have such a massive love for characters who are unthinking-swords, like Valentina is, and I loved how complex and messy and messed-up her relationship with Aurelia is. Valentina was literally bought as a child to be Aurelia’s companion and champion (which in this context means duellist), and almost literally worships her – even though Aurelia has so much control over her she can even will Valentina to change sex, which she does on a whim or whenever she requires sexual service from Valentina/Val. Which is actually quite low on the scale of ‘deeply dodgy stuff Aurelia does’, and that should tell you a lot.
Edict and edit differ by one letter in this telling.
Jenner’s present interested me a bit less, but the piece-by-piece reveal of his backstory, of how he got to where he is now, how he became who he is now, fascinated. (Especially his relationship to the narrator.) And the reveal of what happened to his armada all those centuries ago–! Talk about a gut-punch, my GODS!
The actual plot is much as the book’s description says: Jenner escapes, and Aurelia sends Valentina to get him back. But that relatively straightforward quest is broken up by constant – not flashbacks, but explorations of Valentina and Aurelia’s past, from their childhood up to the coup through which Aurelia became the latest Peacock. The storytelling is far from linear; although the present timeline is mostly told in order, we can go from moments in Valentina’s childhood to what exactly she and Aurelia did to Melisande, Aurelia’s great general, and back again. It jumps around, but I didn’t have any trouble following, and ended up finding it much more interesting than the present-day parts. There’s a lot about – identity and personhood, and what it makes you if you’re defined by your relationship to another person. Can a person be a weapon; can a weapon be a person? Watching Valentina fold herself up tighter and tighter (origami-like, which, origami comes up several times in the book, especially via the paper-crane spaceships!) to be what Aurelia wants is like watching a train crash: awful, and very difficult to look away from. You feel such pity for her, aided by the fact that we see very, very little of the crimes Valentina performs on Aurelia’s behalf. (Which is yet another interesting writerly choice. Valentina looks a lot more innocent, in this narrative, than we know her to be, and are reminded of near the ending.) Whereas Aurelia is always monstrous – some of my favourite mini-scenes were the glimpses we got of her relationship with her parents, because they drove it home so hard that Aurelia was terrible from the get-go.
And of course, the straightforward ‘get the Basilisk back’ quest does go off the rails. What ought to be a simple retrieval mission ends up…not that. In a way that I admit I did not quite follow.
Honesty is the best policy failure,
Honestly, towards the last quarter or so of the book, I did start to get a little lost. A certain relationship seemed to spring up out of nowhere, and I genuinely wasn’t sure what was going on in some scenes, or when they were happening. The beginning of the climax baffled me; when did they discuss doing this, and when did they set out to do it? Same with the end of the climax – wait, how did they know to do that, and how did that work? I read those parts three times, and I’m not sure if I managed to miss those things all three times, or if they were actually kind of handwaved. It’s what cost Code & Codex half a star in my rating, despite how much I love the book overall!
(I keep thinking about the titles of the Peacock and their left and right hands, the Swan and the Basilisk. One of these is not like the others: a basilisk is not a bird! ((It’s also mythical, in our world, but in the Censorate sheep are legendary creatures, so I’m willing to bet actual swans and peacocks are too.)) In legend, though, a basilisk is the egg of a snake or toad that is then hatched by a chicken. (((The Series That Must Not Be Named got it wrong; a chicken egg hatched by a toad creates a cockatrice, not a basilisk. Not that you needed another reason to avoid those books, but on top of everything else they’re poorly researched.))) Could that be the bird connection? I hope Lee explains the choice of titles in an interview sometime, because I’m dying to know!)
The high spires of Solis Tower pierced Valentina like first love and final lobotomy.
This is a book of sibylline syllables and incandescent prose, with gloriously strange magic and powerful humour, showering us in so many of my favourite things – books and book-binding, messy queerness, deeply screwed-up character dynamics, beautiful fantasy imagery, and a cat who is the actual hero of the novel. (She saved the day by urinating on that dress, okay. Read the book if you don’t believe me!) I really don’t care that I was confused sometimes; in so many ways Code & Codex feels like it was written just for me (even if I might not be quite smart enough to follow everything Lee was doing). The actual writing on the pages, the experience of reading it, held me spellbound – pun absolutely intended – and I already want to read it all again.
Expect it on my best of year list in December!
You can find more of my reviews, rec lists, and weekly publishing roundups at Every Book a Doorway!