Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
Edit: Oh yeah, I forget. Man is this book badly advertised. At least to me. They plaster the dang "Lesbian Necromancers in space!" everywhere and it's just kind of false advertising. Yes, there's necromancers, yes they are (briefly) in space and part of a space empire, and yes, one of them is very much a lesbian an the rest ambiguously so to various degrees... but... it barely matters. It certainly doesn't matter enough to be the main part of the tagline. Sure, Gideon does a lot of lusting over the hot girls, but after that tagline, I was expecting a lot more romance and possibly sex scenes, which have only very rarely interested me in books. Shouldn't have focused on that part of the book, I can only imagine someone who wanted more of that would have been disappointed.
Point. Though I'm not sure it's badly advertised so much as falsely advertised.

The advertising and pitch, including the jacket blurb, present the novel as 'lesbian necromancer Maze Runner' which, as a variant on the typical YA battle royale approach would certainly be a thing that could be very popular (and actually, I can think of a good half-dozen webtoons that do exactly this, minus the 'lesbian' part). The actual book is...something very different in a much more experimental and weird way (and the sequel takes this to exponential extremes). I don't think Gideon the Ninth succeeds (and I am of the opinion that Harrow the Ninth is a catastrophic failure), but I certainly don't begrudge Muir taking such a big swing into the weird fiction space. However, I do think the publisher took a book that has at best niche appeal and presented it as a mass market item based on the ability of 'lesbians!' to ride certain politically resonant trends in the YA and YA-adjacent space (Gideon the Ninth isn't a YA novel, but it has enough structural similarity to one to have been marketed that way) and sold a lot of books that way.

In some sense, the story of the Locked Tomb trilogy is more interesting as a phenomenon of how speculative fiction is marketed in the 2020s than anything about the books themselves.