Created by Aster Anspacher on Thu, 03/27/2025 - 10:35
Description:
Nona the Ninth is the third book in the critically acclaimed sci-fi series, the Locked Tomb.
About the Author: Tamsyn Muir was born in 1985 and is a New Zealand writer. Although she has written several short stories since she began her career as an author in 2011, Muir is most known for her (at the time of writing this) only series of novels. Known collectively as The Locked Tomb Series, it consists of books Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth, and the yet to be released final book--Alecto the Ninth. Among many other nominations, Muir won the Locus Award for Gideon the Ninth.
Muir married classicist Matt Hosty in 2014. She describes their marriage as completely platonic, and she herself identifies as a lesbian. These types of deep and complex relationships are something Muir heavily explores in the Locked Tomb, often blurring the line between the platonic and the romantic. Muir also emphasizes queer characters, with most of the cast of the Locked Tomb being openly queer. Part of this representation is Muir’s way of essentially queering the Bible.
Muir has openly stated that her works are heavily inspired by Catholicism. She describes herself as someone fascinated by the religion, although she herself is not a member of it. Most of her characters map onto characters from the Bible in some way or the other.
Plot Summary: Nona the Ninth consists of two plot lines. One that directly follows the events of the first two books, focusing on the new main character of Nona. And the other, which follows Harrow (one of the first main characters we were introduced to in Gideon the Ninth) as she is led through the memory of the universe’s death, second genesis, and resurrection by the series’ God.
In order to keep this analysis from becoming its own novel, I am focusing on this second plotline only, meaning I am not going to summarize the long winded plot of the first two books and Nona’s first storyline.
Plot relevant to my analysis is the background concerning God and the universe. The God of the Locked Tomb has many names—including the Resurrector, the Emperor, Creator, First Reborn, Emperor Undying, Necrolord Prime, and the King Everlasting, to name a few—but for the sake of clarity, I will refer to him solely as his actual name: John Gaius.
Originally, John Gaius was a normal human man who lived on Earth, working as an accomplished scientist—the genesis of the Locked Tomb series takes place in our own universe, just a hundred or so years in the future–-when he was one day bestowed with extraordinary necromantic powers which essentially allowed him to control life and death as he wished. As his powers manifested, he would go viral and become a Jesus like figure in a world falling apart due to climate change and war. He experimented with his powers, healed people, and had a collection of friends who acted as his disciples. John Gaius’ powers made him the target of social outcry as well as worship, and caught the attention of many world leaders. While they originally tried to persecute him, Gaius warded them off with a show of his power.
Eventually, a country came to him with a proposal: He would puppet the body of their leader (who the nation and the rest of the world were unaware was dead) and in return would receive essentially whatever he wished. Gaius accepted and walked away with several billion dollars and, more importantly, a nuclear bomb.
As all of this is occurring, a company has begun producing spaceships to evacuate the dying planet. However, this FTL (faster-than-light) company plans to begin by sending out only twelve ships. After learning about this, John Gaius decides they need to be stopped, believing it is a hoax, and only those twelve ships will be made and sent out, carrying the richest of the rich and leaving everyone else behind to perish. John and his friends become determined to save the planet themselves, using John’s powers. After obtaining and presenting world leaders with evidence that FTL may not be what it claims, John is disgusted at their disregard. He realizes he needs to lean into what his opponents have been calling him this whole time, a cultist, to obtain more followers, and so officially begins to call himself the first necromancer.
After seeing thousands of new people join Gaius’ following, the governments sends troops to combat him. Around the same time, five people die on site near Gaius, and he discovers he can absorb the energy produced by death to become more powerful. Following this discovery, Gaius takes a gun and kills everyone within a one-kilometer radius of himself, absorbing their energy and using them as puppeted troops of his own.
Gaius then finds definitive proof that FTL only plans on sending the first wave of twelve ships, evacuating only the most obscenely wealthy who can afford a ticket. Again, he attempts to alert world governments, but FTL simply speeds up the timeline of their plan, and John decides he’s going to have to take matters into his own hands. He contacts the government whose president he is still puppeting, and tells them that if they do not stop FTL he will release not just his own nuclear bomb he acquired from their deal, but that he also currently has their president’s finger on the nuclear launch button, meaning if they do not comply, they will be perceived as the aggressors in an all out nuclear war.
Eventually, some of Gaius’ followers catch wind of this and turn on him. A shootout begins in his lab, and most of John’s friends are killed. Locking himself in his room, John launches both nuclear bombs, beginning a chain reaction across the planet. The resulting deaths carry enough energy to ascend Gaius to demi-godhood. But still, the FTL ships are currently launching, and John is determined to stop them. With his new power, he reaches out and kills anyone else still living on Earth, then reaches into the Earth itself, recognizing that the planet has a soul of its own, so incredibly massive and powerful that human souls are nothing in comparison. Although he tries to fully absorb the Earth, he finds his human body is unable, and so after absorbing about half of its power, he creates a brand new person out of his own flesh and bone to be his companion, and house the rest of the Earth’s soul. It is at this point that he finds out his powers were originally given to him by the Earth, in the hope he would use them to save the planet and its inhabitants. Instead, he has killed everything and everyone, and repaid the Earth by taking half of her power and trapping the rest in a human form.
Still, the FTL ships are leaving, having made it past orbit. Gaius reaches out with his now God level powers, killing the souls of the rest of the planets in the solar system and the Sun, as well as any other space travelers, in an attempt to stop FTL. But to his dismay, they manage to get away in time, never to be seen again.
With that goal now out of reach, Gaius decides to resurrect the solar system in his own image. He renames the planets and Sun, as well as replaces the names and memories of all the inhabitants he would go on to resurrect on Earth (he never resurrected more than millions of the ten billion people on Earth). He resurrects his original friends, renaming them and wiping their memories like everyone else, and then ascends them to
Lyctorhood (essentially a demigod state of necromancer). After this, John Gaius becomes God of the solar system, now called the Dominican System, and reigns for ten thousand years, through the events of the current day in Gideon, Harrow, and Nona.
Nona the Ninth and the Bible:
As mentioned previously, there are two plotlines interwoven in Nona. The chapters in which John Gaius tells Harrow the truth about the universe’s beginning is distinguished by chapter headings of “John #:#” set up in reference to the Bible.
John Gaius begins as a less powerful, mortal Jesus figure. He is often called Teacher, and he spends his days healing the sick and performing miracles. Gaius is self aware of his own parallels to the Bible, as depicted in this quote:
“He said, But when you're doing the whole Go, my child, your knee cartilage is fixed, you're going to get a lot of visitors. I had to turn people away because I had to eat, I had to sleep, even though I didnt want to. M— had brought in her best friend, the nun, and I was worried I was going to get the Antichrist bit from her too, but she was just like: stop doing this! Read your Bible! This was Christ’s whole problem!
I was like, What are you talking about, Jesus cured the lepers and everyone was all, Hooray, thanks man. M—'s nun was all, Are you kidding, Christ never said no and never asked anyone to pay and got way too much attention and brought the heat down on everybody.
Christ didn't keep to office hours, she said. Don't do that.
He said, So we limited Jesus stuff to one hour a day, and I always had to eat breakfast.” (Nona, page 190)
Here, John not only recognizes that he has become a Jesus figure, but he is drawing on Jesus’ experiences in the Bible as something he can learn from and expand on. He is confident not to make the same mistakes that led to Jesus being killed.
However, John Gaius does not reflect only one character from the Bible. He also, most obviously, is a parallel to the God of the Bible. Besides literally being a God nd being called God, he is an immortal, all powerful being which is worshipped and feared by the masses, just like the God of the Bible.
All of the chapters in the John storyline of Nona begin with a reference to the first lines of Genesis, mirroring God’s creation of the Earth with John Gaius’ destruction, resurrection, and rebuilding of it.
The Bible begins as such:
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” (Gen 1:1)
John’s chapters all begin with “In the dream” in reference to “In the beginning,” and often focus on the description of water, the Earth, and the power Gaius has over it, such as in this example below:
“In the dream the waters kept rising. They started making a hut at the top of the hill. Bodies were bobbing up and down in the water. He was scared of that--he was always scared of the water--and he made the waters go away for a while, and he raised up some parts of the earth that had been covered by sea.” (Nona page 219)
Notably, after killing everyone on Earth, John Gaius makes an entirely new person out of his own ribs and flesh before going on to eventually resurrect his friends/disciples (also called his saints) and then in batches, other people, saying:
“But I needed a house to put you in, if I wasn't going to put all of you in me. I made you one on the fly... I wasn't even thinking... I ripped half my ribs from my body and made you from the dirt, my blood, my vomit, my bone.” (Nona page 408)
This is an obvious reference to God making Adam a companion out of Adam’s rib, but in this case, interestingly, John Gaius is playing both roles at once. The Bible passage Nona is taking from reads as such:
“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.” (Nona page 408)
In Nona, John Gaius is awake and aware of the process, forcibly removing his own ribs in his attempt to create his companion and a house for the rest of Earth’s soul. Seeing as Gaius holds half of Earth’s soul (and therefore power) and she the other half, they are assumedly equal matched–indeed, the Earth is the only thing Gaius truly fears after his ascent to godhood. In the Bible, it is less clear as to if Eve is Adam’s equal, as it is retold twice, once stating her his equal, and once stating that she is beneath man. Either way, however, it is clear she was made for Adam and, therefore, men in general.
When John Gaius makes a body for the Earth, he creates the first female body that comes to his mind, that of a Barbie he owned growing up. While this reveal lends to the comedic aspect of the book, it is also a note on the commodification of women, and lack of agency and objectification forced on them by men. Muir uses the classic story of Adam and Eve here to show how this is ingrained in society and its history. She also takes it as an opportunity to change Eve’s story–as the Earth in The Locked Tomb is a being of rage, determined to get her vengeance on the man who did this to her.
Besides the many characters mirrored from the Bible in The Locked Tomb (only a few of which I have mentioned here), Muir also parallels Biblical events. John Gaius' destruction of the Earth mirrors the Biblical God’s wrathful flood in Genesis.
Genesis makes it clear that God is destroying the world because of his anger and grief over how wicked all of humankind has become:
“The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” (Gen 6:5-7)
John Gaius, similarly, wiped out the people on Earth due to his anger at how the world was being destroyed–in this case by climate change–and at how wicked the wealthy and the people with the most authority were in his eyes. This is similar to a quote from Revelation: “The nations were angry, and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small— and for destroying those who destroy the earth.” (Revelation 11:18)
The destruction of those destroying the Earth is the leading cause behind John Gaius’ actions. Gaius also directly references the flood in reference to his destruction of Earth:
“He drew his gaze away from her--his black-and-white, cthonic stare--and looked out over the dunes. He said, ‘But that’s the grace of it, Harrow. If I’m God, I can start over. The flood, you know? You can wash things clean. It gets dirty again, you clean it again. Like those old power-washing ads. Spray and walk away, right?’” (Nona page 435)
Again, Gaius is taking these past Biblical stories and learning from them, growing from them, using them to help construct his own identity of godhood.
Lastly, the resurrection that John Gaius performs is, unsurprisingly, a reference to the Resurrection in the Bible:
“They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection.” (Revelation 20:4-5)
Nona specifically mentions that God resurrected people in batches, over long periods of time, such as stated above in the Bible. John Gaius, the Resurrector, acts as Christ here:
“You resurrect some of them. You wake up fewer still. You start out with a few thousand, then, later, some hundred thousand, then millions, but never more than millions. You teach them how to live all over again. You teach yourself.
You work out how to repopulate the installations on each planet-or to finish the work begun before the bombs, or to improve on it. It's easy. You're God.” (Nona page 434)
All of this is only a very small part of the story of The Locked Tomb, and its many Biblical references. I attempted not to include spoilers beyond what was necessary, and I highly recommend this series to anyone interested, whether it is for the Biblical references or just a good book in general.
Intertextual Analysis: The Locked Tomb, while most prominently a sci fi, mixes fantasy and comedic aspects into its narrative as well. Especially in the creation story I have talked in depth about here, we get a mix of the modern day with the Biblical. The mix of genres and different time periods with the abundant Biblical references and storytelling style creates an extremely unique new narrative compared to the average Biblical retelling.
The Locked Tomb also combines multiple important Biblical figures into one very human character in John Gaius This allows for a complexity that isn’t there in the Bible, most of the characters not being given much personality. While John Gaius is God, he also makes dad jokes and would be a very average person without his immense powers. The power that he was given led to him becoming an extremely flawed God who is eventually revealed to be the main antagonist of the series.
The series also explores queerness in Biblical figures, including God himself, his daughter, her mother, several of God’s disciples, and many of the other significant characters. This second telling of Genesis and the following Biblical events is almost entirely queer, explicitly including queer people in opposition to the original source material which excludes them, and is also used by some to persecute them. This sort of reversal acts as a type of reclamation.
Reclamation is a theme explored in several ways through the series, most notably (along with its queer aspect) through explicitly portraying God as the antagonist, who forcefully took away the agency of billions of people. The question of agency is very significant throughout the series, and it is very clear that John Gaius not only took away the agency of billions of people in the past, but continues to do so by keeping them under his control and hiding away any evidence of the past.
In Harrow the Ninth, we are introduced to The Blood of Eden: a resistance group in the series that fights back against God, trying to reclaim the memories of the past and their own agency. Most of our protagonists end up joining this resistance group at one point or another. Assumedly, the fourth and final book will result in John Gaius’ well deserved downfall.
Sources Cited:
Contributors. “John Gaius.” The Locked Tomb Wiki, Fandom, Inc., 2025, thelockedtomb.fandom.com/wiki/John_Gaius#articleComments. Accessed 3 May 2025.
Connor, Olivia. “Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb: The Power of the Uninformed Perspective - ImaginAtlas.” ImaginAtlas, 22 Mar. 2023, https://imaginatlas.ca/WORLDBUILDING-IN-THE-LOCKED-TOMB-THE-POWER-OF-THE.... Accessed 3 May 2025.
Connor, Olivia. “Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb: The Power of the Uninformed Perspective - ImaginAtlas.” ImaginAtlas, 22 Mar. 2023, https://imaginatlas.ca/WORLDBUILDING-IN-THE-LOCKED-TOMB-THE-POWER-OF-THE.... Accessed 3 May 2025.
Muir, Tamsyn. Nona the Ninth. Tordotcom, 13 Sept. 2022.
Metzger, Bruce Manning, and Roland Edmund Murphy. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. Oxford University Press, USA, 1991.
Images Used:
1 Nona The Ninth book cover
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nona_the_Ninth
2 Author Tamsyn Muir at a book signing event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamsyn_Muir
3 Image of Jesus healing a begging blind man
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=361967&picture=jesus-guerissant
4 Novi Belgii Novaeque Angliae Nec Non Partis Virginiae Published by Nicolas Joannis Visscher, Dutch, 1651–55
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/384845
5 Noah's Ark (1846), by the American folk painter Edward Hicks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah%27s_Ark
6 Jan Luyken's illustration of Matthew 24 verse 40, from the 1795 Bowyer Bible, which proponents take as a reference to the rapture