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. ( )

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.

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

Re-reading this because I just bought the second book in the series, and don't remember this first one, which I read five years ago and gave four stars but no review. [Later: no, I can't believe I ever read this; I certainly would have remembered it.]

This book is remarkably original and more than a little disturbing. It is apparently the first half of the story; Seven Surrenders is the second. There's a list of characters at the beginning of the second book that would have helped me follow the first: the main characters all have several names. ( )

Didn't finish. It'd been on my TBR for a number of years, so I forgot why I'd added it, but...it's definitely not worth the read. ( )

To begin at the end: this book is far from a standalone novel, and I would only recommend it to those with a reasonable expectation of continuing to the later numbers of the Terra Ignota tetralogy. It opens a variety of plots and questions, but it supplies very little closure. Mostly, this volume accomplishes the presentation of a future world society and the definition of key characters within it.

The setting is a 25th century that I found a little improbably optimistic in terms of the perpetuation of our contemporary civilization, although there are increasingly explicit references to upheavals that have happened in the interim. The questionably reliable narrator is a sort of public slave ("servicer") with intimate connections to the global elite, and his conscious efforts to supply historical perspective mostly reference the 18th-century Enlightenment. It has really been a joy for me to read sf that is in overt conversation with Voltaire and de Sade!

Ada Palmer's future world supposes a formidable transportation network that makes the whole planet local. Ethnic phenotypes and nationalities have become merely ornamental, while public expressions of human gender are socially discouraged. Religion has been actively suppressed by universal legislation, with individual spiritual needs ministered to by non-prostelytizing "sensayer" professionals. The largest polities are a handful of Hives which adults join voluntarily.

The Hive with the greatest population is that of the Masonic Empire, distinguished by--among other features--its official and social use of Latin. This detail reminded me at once of the Martian language in the Church of All Worlds in Stranger in a Strange Land. The connection is more than incidental. Like Heinlein's touchstone work, Too Like the Lightning also concerns itself with sex and religion, and suspends much of its plot from the advent of a child with miraculous powers. In fact, there is an explicit allusion to Valentine Michael Smith (267).

The style here is however more Wolfe than Heinlein, where the fictional narrator's exposition assumes a hypothetical audience whose needs are different than those of the actual 21st-century reader. Palmer cleverly highlights this fact with a device that has apparently irritated some reviewers: The reader is conscripted to protest elements of the narrator's presentation, and given the actual verbiage of doing so, with these interjections distinguished by italic type and archaic diction.

The book is an ambitious and intricate start to a work I will certainly continue reading.

I am not sure how I feel about this book, it was good, but not great.
I think I was "Dear Reader" (ed) to death.
( )

Ended up quitting after 145 pages. I found I was forcing myself through in the hopes that the lack of direction and unexplained protagonist backstory (he's trusted by every important person and can speak all their languages but also has no secret motive) would stupendously be cleared away, but instead it all got murkier and more self-aggrandizing. There's a lot of good material in it but no real interesting plot or character and too many glaring holes in the world-building logic to accept all the meandering nonsense ( )

For awhile now I've been trying to make myself read this novel, as, when it first came out, it seemed like the epitome of the book that you just had to read, but which appeared to be really trying too hard. I still wasn't in the mood, but I decided that it was now or never to at least give it a try.

I had two main responses. One, this book tries to be so clever that you could stick a tail on it and call it a fox. Two, there was not one character that I really could give a damn about and, over time, that has become one of the few conventional elements I demand in a novel. A novella, not so much, as due to the shorter length I have fewer issues with a character mostly being a mouthpiece for the ideas that the author is playing with. What this means going forward is I'm not sure that I really want to read three more books of this stuff. Though I suspect that I'll give the second book a shot, considering the bomb Palmer sets off towards the end. ( )

I tried reading the audiobook version - perhaps a written version would have been better. I mostly listen to audiobooks while I'm doing something else, so I like to choose books that can hold my attention well enough to follow the story, but also interesting enough to keep me occupied when doing something boring or repetitive. This just didn't fit my needs, so perhaps one day I'll try a written version.

I found the language to be distracting, and could not relate well to the characters or the story. I think it might be interesting to read when I have more time to invest.

A science fiction story set in the far future where there has not been any wars for hundreds of years, religion is banned, and there are no longer any country borders. It is an amazing world that the author dives deep into. The story covers so much and has many interesting characters. While the plot is a little thin, the world is so rich that it is still very exciting to read. There are times where there are main plots hints, but this book is more about setting up the world, getting to know the characters, and not rushing anything. If you were looking for something very expansive, then this is it. ( )

Self-conscious and 18th/19th century stylistics -- I abandoned this one, like its similarly lauded brethren Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Quicksilver. ( )

Real review to follow? Astonishingly inventive and good and I cannot wait for the second part, damn it ( )

Part of me wants to give this 5 stars because there's so much I suspect will be excellent in retrospect once I've read the rest of the series. However, rating on the book as I experienced it the first time around, I give it 4 stars for a compelling world, excellent (although not simple) writing, and a slow boil plot that draws you in. I deduct 1 star because a lot of it is setting up things to come. ( )

I've never had to make this an issue before but too much world building even though parts of it are good. The characters and the plot are just passing thoughts while the discussion of philosophy is king. And then everything either got clumsy or felt forced in the last part of it. It was interesting but I felt like I was watching a train wreck. It was too easy to put this book down and I kind of wish I hadn't read it. ( )

I'm not entirely sure what to say about this. It's brilliant (I'm pretty sure), but it's just dense enough that I felt out of my depth reading it, and it kind of felt like swimming in the deep end almost the whole time. Which is weirdly enjoyable, because I haven't been challenged like this in a while. And it's the almost that kept me coming back -- I'd suddenly figure out what was going on and then not be able to tear myself away.

I did have to take breaks and read a couple of straightforward books in between because trying to figure out what is going on was so tricky. Also philosophy in general makes my teeth itch, but if you're going to play with us, you could do worse than messing about with the 18th c french.

No I didn't see the ending coming. There was a lot I didn't see coming. I love that the whole shebang felt true to itself and to its own rules. I despair about trying to read the second book because I know I won't remember enough of the first book to even start, and I'm not ready to reread this one soon.

Extra, extra kudos to your book designer -- beautifully laid out in all the best 18th c ways, and I've handled some of those, so I know of what I speak.

Grrr, argh. 5 stars for achievement, not necessarily my enjoyment. It's a hell of a book. ( )

2.5 stars. A big DNF for me. First the pluses: I LOVE the conceit of reading a history book of the future, and the audiobook narrator did a great job on the this book.
And now the rest...

I found the physical descriptions of most of the characters to be othering and off putting. Describing multiracial people by chopping them into their parts. African hair, Indonesian eyes, etc. And this is for EVERY character that gets a physical description.

The culture/future is very much a sort of utopia as imagined by white europeans in the 18th century. Nothing is left to the reader to intuit. If Voltaire is mentioned, three paragraphs of history about Voltaire follow. I wouldn't be surprised if the book gave equal time to 18th century explanations as to the story.

I also found the main character anachronistic. Using words with morals attached (like calling things perverted), casual sexism, and the big reveal of being a murderous, rapist, cannibal. Which felt like a cheap shot.

I wish this book were different. Not for me, and not a sci-fi book either. ( )

I can’t rate this. I am so conflicted. I hated a great deal of the experience of reading it, but it was also fascinating and challenging. In the end I didn’t care about anyone or anything, and was frustrated by the deliberate obfuscations. Top marks for being a novel of thorny ideas; but the execution leaves me cold.

And yes, I’ll probably read the sequel eventually so clearly it’s done something right.

Full review

I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.