lightreads

The 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.

Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota)

4/5 (this is me leaving some room for the rest of this series). I read this months ago while traveling, and also explaining this book takes many many words, so let me shorthand. Futuristic post nation state post organized religion sorta post gender science fiction about powerbroking and politics and miracles. And really, really awesome. Have some bullet points.

• I think the SF field is going to bend around this series, once it's done. Just a feeling. And I'm personally looking forward to all the books that are going to be fans of this series and arguing with this series and really mad at this series. Not just that I think some of those books are going to be good books, but also that I think it will all take us through some philosophical territory that I'm looking forward to.

• Remember how I complained that the linguistic gender stuff in Ancillary Justice was fun but kinda pointless? Yeah, this book is set in a culture where the polite pronoun for everyone is ungendered, and it is doing so much stuff with that, I probably lost track. Our narrator plays with gender occlusion and disclosure in hilarious and pointed ways. You end up in the end with a pretty clear idea of who is supposed to be what gender, but very little certainty that you are right, but a lot of certainty that being right is so not the point. Because fundamentally, gender in this book is about performance of a gendered role – often a gendered stereotype – and the narrator is therefore generally uninterested in what is actually in people's pants. It's great, and I look forward to future developments, and I also think this Strange Horizons reviewer really did not get it (that review does give a much more detailed picture of the worldbuilding than I do, though, along with what I consider a spoiler).

• This book fucks with genre. It's science fiction that uses the word "miracle" with deliberation. And the miracle in question – animating objects like toy soldiers with a touch – is jarringly weird in this secularized, very sciency future. I struggled with this for a while, until a twist introduced a particular kind of ridiculously terrible, over-the-top violence into the book, into this society that barely knows what murder is anymore, and I went 'ah' and started looking for other pieces that don't fit. That break the pattern in your head, break your assumptions, make you uneasy and unhappy the way the word "miracle" made me uneasy and unhappy. If this society makes it through the whole series intact, I am going to be very very surprised.

• I laughed. Out loud, unexpectedly, and very ungracefully, in the middle of a sidewalk. It was at the word "Jehovah." Oh, how I laughed. You'll know it when you see it.

• A lot of specfic set in the future is anchored unmistakably in the twenty-first century. Like there are two points in history – today and the speculated future – and the only work of worldbuilding is to draw a line from here to there. This book draws its line instead from the nineteenth century (mostly), which makes for an entirely different and richer experience of created history. Not a totally new idea – Robert Charles Wilson tried this in his Julian Comstock, but this is far more successful.

Next book in December, please and thank you.