The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer
Jan. 27th, 2019 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Will to Battle
3/5. Yeah, either you know what Ada Palmer is about by now or none of this is going to make sense.
It took me six months to finish this. To be fair, there has been something increasingly awry in my brain for about that length of time, rendering it difficult for me to start a book and read it straight through. (This is a great trial, let me tell you. I'm genuinely upset by how many books I have in progress at any given time). But also, this isn't really a novel? I mean, this entire series has been couched in enlightenment stylings and structures, rendering it odd to the modern sense of rhythm. But this book in particular flings a lot of science fictional and novelistic conventions out the window and strings together a lot of set pieces and philosophical dialogues with, I am not kidding, increasingly bizarre imagined conversations between the narrator, the reader, and Thomas Hobbes.
Either you're down for that or you're not. I mostly was – this is a kind of diverting batshit erudition that you just don't see every day. But also, it's becoming increasingly clear that the philosophical questions Palmer is interested in may be interesting to me, but only so far as they are an unusual frame for science fictional storytelling. And not because, say, I'm actually interested in thinking deeply about providence.
3/5. Yeah, either you know what Ada Palmer is about by now or none of this is going to make sense.
It took me six months to finish this. To be fair, there has been something increasingly awry in my brain for about that length of time, rendering it difficult for me to start a book and read it straight through. (This is a great trial, let me tell you. I'm genuinely upset by how many books I have in progress at any given time). But also, this isn't really a novel? I mean, this entire series has been couched in enlightenment stylings and structures, rendering it odd to the modern sense of rhythm. But this book in particular flings a lot of science fictional and novelistic conventions out the window and strings together a lot of set pieces and philosophical dialogues with, I am not kidding, increasingly bizarre imagined conversations between the narrator, the reader, and Thomas Hobbes.
Either you're down for that or you're not. I mostly was – this is a kind of diverting batshit erudition that you just don't see every day. But also, it's becoming increasingly clear that the philosophical questions Palmer is interested in may be interesting to me, but only so far as they are an unusual frame for science fictional storytelling. And not because, say, I'm actually interested in thinking deeply about providence.