Ada PalmerRecensioni

I got 70% of the way through this book and then dropped it for months because life was hard and it's a book you have to be in a certain mood for

Reminds me a lot of the last few books in enders game, where all the setup gets to talking about the people and the religion. I actually would have preferred more interpersonal and less religious, but it could have been worse. Very lyrical, not so many characters I can't keep track and some great quotes

Immediately bought the 3rd book audiobook but we'll see when I read it

Just innovative unlike other books I've read

Complex, futuristic world filled with interacting characters whose motives are hard to understand. The narrator is admitedly unreliable. A tiny bit of magic, the rest is futuristic and surprising. No nations left, religion rejected, morality left to self-chosen groups who all have differing ideas. A hard read, but a deeply intriguing one.½

Too Like the Lightning is such a niche science fiction book and it happens so rarely that I am truly amazed by such an original work. Ada Palmer has clearly put an immense amount of work into this book. She is a historian and an erudite in general, especially in philosophy and religious studies, so this was such a treat. But, to say that this book was an easy read would be a lie.

This is a kind of book to discuss in seminars at university, to be reread and written about, as there are so many layers to unpack. Palmer purposefully builds a universe which is both a dystopia and a utopia. It is a sandbox universe for me, not realistic or believable, but intriguing as a thought experiment.

The world we read about is the one where people don't live in nation-states but in "hives" of their own choosing. Hives are huge, almost like continents, with capital cities connected with super-fast travel networks. People don't live in families but in groups they choose based on their preferences and vocation called "bash'es". Following religious wars in the 22nd century, organized religion is the ultimate taboo. Instead of religion, the human need for spirituality is "taken care of" by spiritual advisors, sensayers.

The part I struggled the most with about this book was the style. The narrator of the book is a convict, who in the 25th-century future lives his punishment by doing public service. (The nature of his crime was shocking to me, completely unexpected.) Mostly he is a servant for people in high offices, so he seems to be the perfect person to retell the events we read about. However, he is telling this story in the manner of 18th-century literature which makes it difficult to follow in the context of futuristic sci-fi. But, the most confusing part was the novel's treatment of gender, and this was done on purpose. In this world gender is considered obsolete, everyone is referred to as "they". However, Mycroft is using gendered pronouns, but not always "correctly" or as expected. It takes a while to get used to this, especially because Mycroft is not always a reliable narrator, as he claims himself very early on (so not a spoiler).

Books like this can feel gimmicky and pretentious and this one does, too. You truly can have too much of a good thing. I feel it is asking a tremendous effort from the reader, but the payoff is not that great. This is still an intriguing read, esp. for lovers of heavy politics and philosophy. I wonder if sequels redeem this heavy start, but have no time or patience to go there just yet.

Well, I have a lot of feelings about this book. I was fascinated by the world building, but felt it got in the way of the story, which didn't really start until page 200, and got dark and weird pretty quickly. I appreciate that this was written by a history professor, but overall, this book got bogged down in histories and philosophies and I cannot even give it stars because It does not fit into a simple 5 star category.

Affektion er kodeordet her. Although the ideas seem interesting, I have a really hard time with the contrived narrative choices. It reminds me a bit of Babel by R F Kuang in that I find the artificial framing very off-putting.

The first book in this series was quite good, but they went slowly downhill, until this unreadable one

Not a complete book, but part 1 of 2.

I have been staring at the blank white box on the screen because I don't quite know how to review this book. It was less a reading experience and more an ensorcellment. This inventive, disturbing novel set in an ambiguous utopia is so very, very well-crafted, offering the dual pleasures of enjoying an ambitious science fiction story and enjoying the narrator tell that story.

Mycroft Canner is a convicted criminal in a world that has done away with incarceration (and organized religion, and nation-states). Also, there's possibly magic? And political conspiracies are afoot? Palmer drops us in this inventive and immersive future, but she tells it slant. We soon realize that Mycroft is not just an unreliable narrator with a mysterious past, he is totally bonkers. As a reader I was increasingly unsettled by the layers of creepy, gossamer subtext (its webs surely spider-infested) yet totally charmed by Canner's manic, sententious prose, complete with back-and-forth arguments with the imagined reader and supercharged similes that would be at home in a SF retelling of Paradise Lost.

I also feel that for a trippy, literary SF novel, Too Like the Lightning delivers good storytelling. Every scene advances the story, and there's a convoluted mystery story that's resolved with some surprising but fairly satisfying reveals. I found it to be a page-turner, although tastes may vary.

Most of all, I think this novel is brave, and charts a way forward for writing socially-conscious fiction that isn't overly earnest or stylistically conservative. Mycroft Canner is an uncomfortable mind to inhabit, and plenty in this book tends toward the lurid and salacious - but this book doesn't feel like a prurient read; we never get the sense that Palmer is leering at her own characters or glorying in her book's most shocking moments. She writes too well for that, skillfully juxtaposing utopia and horror, dark and light. She's getting something right in a genre that plenty of authors before her have failed at, becoming too enamored with their own monsters.

My favorite book so far this year - highly recommended.

Several hours after finishing the book, I am overwhelmed and happy. Terra Ignota series is such an impressive literary achievement – ambitious, challenging, intricate.

Like all great sci-fi, Perhaps the Stars is a novel of both BIG IDEAS and characters that pierce your soul. I find it impossible to fit all my impressions into one review. But here are a few thoughts:

It is rare (in my experience, at least) that a book packed with philosophy, metaphysics, and ideas about the future of society and humanity is also emotionally exhausting. I had to take a break after nearly every chapter to take a few deep breaths or do something else for a while.
- The writing is consistently sublime.
- I loved how the Greek mythology, the Iliad and the Odyssey were integrated into the narrative.
- I loved 9A’s narrative voice (and 9A, of course).
- I have mixed feelings about the big reveal/the root of the conflict. While I was immersed in the book, it made sense. Now I find myself wondering why such a conflict would exist in the first place, the two goals should not negate each other, not in the future as Ada Palmer describes it. (Unless you are fanatic, of course…)
- The ending is beautiful! I went to a very happy place after finishing the last page.

First read: I honestly don't think I can review this properly until I've read the second book. Utterly bewildering.

Second read: Yeah wow holy shit I don't need to read the second book to give this five stars. Weird, bewildering, creepy, overflowing with ideas, more thought-provoking than most of the books I've read this year combined.

Series review: bursting with ideas, dizzying, really epic, believes in my intelligence but doesn't assume I have a classics degree, probably assumes I have a liberal arts degree which I do and it helped, bewildering, unsettling, rarely gross, deeply humane in a time when I really need that from the books I read.

If you can't finish a story in 450 pages...maybe don't write a book?

Don't get me wrong, this book is mostly fine, apart from featuring exactly zero likable/sympathetic/compelling characters. But when I buy a book I have certain expectations, first and foremost that it tells at least one complete story. I don't have anything against series, but this is something else. This is like when something is marked as free but when you read the fine print it's actually exorbitantly expensive. Actually, its not like that, because if it's in the fine print it's at least possible that you can find out before you buy in. Not so, here. This is 450 pages of build-up, no resolution until -- surprise you shell out again for another brick of book, which, I guess, might include some sort of conclusion. But fool me twice, right?
Reader, this is not a book. This is a scam.

Brilliant.

Loving this series. I'll have to pick up the third book soon. It's a lot of concepts and plot to wade through but it's definitely worth it.

I think I really summed it up when I explained: "it reads like assigned reading for an undergrad philosophy course. The really cool one, with the professor everyone adores, but still."

Palmer has always been clearly been using her work as a vehicle for important cultural conversations, but that was paired with awe-inspiring world-building in Too Like the Lightning and a careful deconstruction of all of the holes in her world in Seven Surrenders. In The Will to Battle, nearly 300 or 350 pages are devoted entirely to dialogue, about half of which is between the narrator and either (a) the reader, (b) Hobbes or (c) other dead people as imagined by the narrator. It's important work about what it means to be a civilization, how to balance improving this world versus dreaming of bigger ones and what we as citizens in a global society owe each other. I think it may also be doing work holding up either end of the quartet in which it's placed (time will tell), but it's not really functional as a stand-alone novel.

I'm not really sure what to make of this last entry in the Terra Ignota quartet. Some parts were absolutely brilliant -- the way that war spirals out into tiny fractal battles with the motivation behind each becoming increasingly personal and complex. I loved the way that Palmer as a historian thinks about not just technological changes but how government, family structure and social mores will change in 500 years. As she reminds us, the American Experiment is not yet 500 years old and there's no reason to believe that 500 years in the future people will continue to idealize democracy and free speech, as dear as that is to us today.

I loved the tension between: do we do everything we can to dream of a better world, or do we work incrementally on this one? I thought that ultimately, after The Will To Battle being overly sympathetic to the Masonic Empire, Palmer in this book shows more of the nuance between these sides and ultimately the arc for the original Saneer-Weeksbooth bash and for Carlyle Foster are pretty satisfying.

But there's just too much in this book. There are three pieces that just don't really fit and I feel bad because I think they're really Palmer's favorite parts: The Homeric references, JEDD Mason and Mycroft. Each is central, but ultimately distracting. Perhaps the least clear complaint is Mycroft -- part of what made Terra Ignota stand out is a literally criminally insane, unreliable narrator, whose scandalous secret past is definitely scandalous. But by the third book, Mycroft's deification of JEDD Mason and commitment to the monarchy of the Masonic Empire was starting to really dilute the richness of the setting. Palmer's responded to this criticism by saying that it's just the lens of reading via Mycroft and that readers can read past him. But she had a rich opportunity to provide a foil for his narrative with 9A, and instead 9A too became a JEDD cultist. I think this is simply a theory of mind failure -- as the reader, I cannot completely see past an unreliable narrator to pick up clues from a highly complex setting from only seeing first person narration from said highly unreliable narrator. Also, Mycroft's schtick is that he really is an unforgiveable person and I think Palmer got wrapped up in her own creation and ultimately found him sympathetic in a way that I did not find deserved.

So complex world-building interesting philosophy futuristic homeric retelling morally complex unreliable narrator exploration of novel divinity = too many things to fit into a quartet

I gulped this book down after finishing Too Like The Lightning. It honestly stood up to binge reading. I thought I had Palmer's number this time through -- and in some ways I did in that twists were less shocking than they'd been in the first book -- but this still managed to be a genuinely thrilling book with a lot to think about.

Here's my final warning: I was the first person in my group to finish Seven Surrenders. Friends don't let friends read Ada Palmer alone. This is the sort of book that you need a buddy to digest with.

Every year, I get super behind on reviewing books because I read something that I just can't capture in words. Too Like The Lightning was that book this year. Not that I don't have things to say about it: I went a month where it was the only thing I could talk about. But I don't have anything intelligent to say in under 20,000 characters.

I might stick to what Jon told me to convince me to read it: Too Like The Lightning is the first book in a long time to truly thrill me. It's a view of the future told by someone who really gets that the future is the future -- as far from us in mores and habits as the Victorians on the other side -- not just Now but with flying cars. Palmer really feels out how things will change, and then layers on top of her fascinating setting, compelling, flawed and unreliable characters. And then, like an Escher drawing of stairs twists, and twists, and twists all somehow staying in the same place.

It is NOT for everyone. I wish I had been warned about just how over the line the content gets sometimes, but (except for one chapter at the beginning of the sequel) it's almost all purposeful to get the reader to question what our boundaries and morals are and why and what's a product of our moment in time.

This series has become a struggle or me.

I liked the complete worldbuilding of the first one, the social and philosophical and sociological questions/commentary/imagining... up to a certain point. So I gave it four stars. Is it believable that in ~350 years gender will have been (all but) banished from the world? Religion (in any real sense) as well? Amongst other things, the suspension of disbelief began to crumble for me during the second book. Three stars. In the fourth book, it just doesn't make sense anymore. Two stars.

Same thing with the highly stylized, verbose, melodramatic prose/description/"acting." It was "period" in the first book, a bit grating in the second, and for the third, I am just forcing myself to slog through it, chapter by chapter.

Same with JEDD/Jehova/etc. vs. The Peer/God/etc. And so on.

I continue to enjoy this series and will read the third book. But. With this second book the style really began to wear on me. The faux-seventeenth century style --the page-long paragraphs of description of motives and emotion, all constantly fraught and fragile, the world-falling-apart-while-everything-of-consequence-takes-place-in-breathless-exchanges-in-a-boudoir, taking the Enlightenment idea of ideas mattering more than anything...-- this all begins to wear.

Holes in the ideas presented begin to grow massive (the whole world really banished gender? religion? and only a building of people in Paris are subverting this? Even after the 'Church Wars' this seems impossible to believe. That and 20 murders a year, worldwide, brings the entire system to its knees? Even in this future utopia that seems a stretch. And where are e.g. South America and Africa in this? And, for that matter and despite the nod to them, Asia and South Asia?)

But, complaints aside, in this are a lot of interesting ideas and questions, propositions even, continuing the first book. Weaknesses and warts, I still like this.

What a train wreck. Why did I finish this entire series?

See my review in 1st book of series.

See my review in 1st book of series.

This fourth book of Terra Ignota provides a conclusion worthy of what has come before. It is longer than any of the previous volumes by at least 50%, and it involves more narrative lacunae and changes of style. It does not resolve all of the enigmas raised in previous books, nor even those opened within its own pages, but it does complete the story and give it greater context and significance.

Terra Ignota has an unreliable and culpable narrator addressing himself to a posterity even further removed from the (actual) reader, but represented by a Reader character whose identity is in some measure disclosed at the end. It entertains metaphysics, and it vaults into the very highest political arenas of its imagined world. For these reasons and others, it has invited comparison to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, and Ada Palmer has admitted to her admiration for Wolfe's work. There is an especially Wolfean development in this final volume when the narrator A9 is retroactively revealed to have sacrificed their own life and physical substance for the resurrection of the earlier narrator Mycroft Canner. Poignantly, Wolfe died in 2019 as Palmer was finishing Perhaps the Stars, which has for a recurring theme the ways in which the death of a writer is neither the death of the author nor the death of the story.

I feel petty to notice it, but there is grammatical tic that recurs through all the volumes of Terra Ignota: the use of nominative pronouns where objective ones are called for in subordinate formulae at the tail end of sentences, like: "Who knew that such things could happen to we who had accomplished so much?" As I saw this oddness repeat, I grew to wonder whether it was Palmer or Canner who was to blame, and if the latter, what it could portend. It certainly seems wrong that the academically-accomplished writer of these books should have included such nonstandard English as mere error.

The scale and complexity of these books are impressive. They are still new, and I think that they will have staying power to gain in popularity and acclaim, like the Book of the New Sun and Herbert's Dune books. Attempts at scholarly criticism and substantial intellectual response began already after the release of the second book Seven Surrenders. I was not surprised to find out that there is a fan wiki to attempt to trace the sometimes bewildering details of character, place, and plot, but disappointed to discover that it is still sparsely populated.

I would advise prospective readers of Terra Ignota to view the four books as a single work and avoid setting it aside between volumes--perhaps especially between the third and fourth books where there was in fact a delay in publication. Do not skip past the fanciful-seeming publication conditions and dramatis personae front matter in each book. These supply important (p)reviews of the social structures, factions, stakes, and characters. If you've never read Homer, or if it's just been decades, consider reading an encyclopedia article for an overview of the Illiad and the Odyssey. Ditto for Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan, and perhaps Voltaire and Diderot to boot.

There was less discontinuity between the second and third volumes of Terra Ignota than I had expected. Narrator Mycroft Canner's exposition is less polished, more raw (and unreliable) for reasons that become evident near the end of The Will to Battle. The book's title references a quote from Hobbes' Leviathan XIII which is supplied as an epigram, observing that war is in effect when that will exists, not merely when it is expressed through actual combat. As the previous volumes established that this one would be, it is concerned with the re-invention of war after multiple human generations of global peace.

There's a blurb from Cory Doctorow on the cover of The Will to Battle that touts the plausibility of Too Like the Lightning, which I would not really number among Terra Ignota's virtues. But I would agree with his other adjectives: "intricate" and "significant." You can tell Palmer is a professional historian, because her 25th-century future doesn't start today: it starts in antiquity, and the characters think about the 18th century far more often than they do the 20th or 21st.

In this third book, Palmer's references to literature and history are as manifold as ever, but Leviathan and Homer's Illiad stand out for the extent to which they are presumed and explicitly referenced by the text. Each contributes an actual character into the mix. Palmer's Achilles Mojave is (in some still mysterious but actual sense) the ancient Achaean, and a spectral Thomas Hobbes joins "the reader" in the frame conversation with Mycroft that occasionally obtrudes on the narrative.

This chronicle--more "secret" than the one of the prior books--affords some more empirical precision regarding not only the dates of the events chronicled, but the dates at which Canner is supposed to have written about them, along with the in-world composition of the first two books. (Curiously, The Will to Battle begins punctually on the 550th anniversary of the reception of Liber Legis.) Palmer pulls a breathtaking stunt with narrative voice at the beginning of the final chapter that I can't help but remark yet refuse to spoil.

Because of its complexity and hectic pace, I think too long a hiatus between volumes can pose a problem for readers of Terra Ignota. I was honestly a little worried after just a few weeks when I came back to The Will to Battle. But I was happily impressed by the "Seven-Ten List for Our Changing World" in the front matter as an excellent refresher on characters and plot as they had been left at the end of Seven Surrenders. I will charge on to Perhaps the Stars before the month is over.

How on earth can I give a book five stars and at the same time say I didn't enjoy reading it? Well, here goes. I am just not interested in philosophy or theology, and that's what this book is about and spends pages and pages and chapters and chapters talking about.

And yet I was completely hooked by the society which had achieved 300 years of peace by renouncing nationality, gendered language and expression, and religion (sort of). The story takes place at the moment when the whole system is coming unraveled as people discover that their happy life was based on a complex mix of deception, murder, and politics. The large cast of characters shifted continually in their identities and relationships, not to mention horrible crimes and apparent supernatural powers. It did keep me reading, but I'm fairly certain I can't do two more books.