Code and Codex
Yoon Ha Lee
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 978-1668059975
Saga Press, October 2026, 304 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month it’s time to put on your thinking caps, open up your dictionaries, and prepare to alter your conceptual framework of etymological reality—that’s right, we’re diving deep into the lakes of language in Code and Codex by Yoon Ha Lee!

So, before I get into the meat of the review, I have to be very clear up front—this is a book that requires your undivided attention and is going to expand your vocabulary in ways you’ll probably need to stretch for. This is a book written by someone who loves words, as well as shifting perspectives, temporal hijinks, corkscrew metaphors, and esoteric ephemera, so don’t expect a light beach read. Seriously. You will need to put in effort to keep up, but for those willing to do so, it’s totally worth it.

Okay, now that I’ve scared most of you off, let’s talk about why I absolutely loved Code and Codex.

The plot synopsis you see on the official publisher page is, I won’t say, “watered down to avoid scaring people off,” but it definitely does not do justice to the actual story Yoon Ha Lee has crafted. The bulk of the chapters are told from the perspective of Valentina, a censorship commissar in The Censorate, a galactic empire that cements its power by controlling the very transmission of information itself while ruthlessly exporting its own language as a vehicle of subjugation. Val serves as the Swan, an assassin leader of linguistic redactors, subservient only to Aurelia, the Peacock, whose panopticon gaze can gaze out through any of The Censorate’s subjects’ eyes, and whose words can rewrite reality itself. Unfortunately for Valentina, Aurelia also desires the power of the Basilisk, an ancient, imprisoned military commander capable of killing anything he sees, and who recently made his escape from his black hole prison. Aurelia is used to getting her way regardless of what it costs others, so Val must track down the Basilisk and bring him to heel, no matter what Valentina privately thinks of the wisdom of this course of action.

Oh, and all of this takes place amidst an empire that runs on eldritch organization of information, conceptual battles against absence itself using spaceships made of ink and paper and forbidden words, and what may or may not be a secret order of AI servants working towards self-actualization. There’s also a winged cat with an insect-eating problem, sentient other starships (not the book kind), unreliable narratorship sprinkled heavily between seemingly unrelated vignettes that nevertheless reveal critically important story beats, and a twisted set of romantic relationships that most closely resemble a Mandelbrot set, so I guess what I’m trying to say is there is a lot going on here.

Reading Code and Codex reminded me a lot of Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire mashed up with China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, in that there is an obvious meta-textual story being told about the weight of empire and tyranny, but there is also an unabashed love of words and how they can be arranged in ways most people would simply never consider, all in service to present the reader with a fantastic (in the original sense of the word) landscape that is simply A Thing That Is Normal To Those Who Live There. The world-building in this book is absolutely sublime in how ridiculously baroque it is and the contortions it crams language into, but at its core, everything bends towards a very simple and timeless tale of control, desire, love, and loss.

Unfortunately, while I could continue waxing poetic about the many, many layers of Code and Codex, I am limited in the amount of words I am allotted (much like The Censorate’s linguists), and I also don’t want to spoil anything about the journey, so all I can finish with is this.

Yoon Ha Lee has crafted something thornily transcendent, an embrace of letters and literacy that cannot be fully comprehended in a single reading. This is a book that rewards the patient excavation of meaning, a statue chiseled piece by agonizing piece from building blocks we all have access to, and it is absolutely worth the time spent uncovering its manifold depths. If you put in the work this piece demands, you will be rewarded.