Terra Ignota: Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer

Terra Ignota, Book IV: Perhaps the Stars: A Narrative of Events begun in the year 2454
by Ada Palmer

After no small delay, Terra Ignota finally comes to an end. This four-book series by Ada Palmer was about an attempt at a utopian future, a world that was better than ours but still flawed. At the end of book III, the flaws reached the breaking point of war finally breaking out, and the last book, Perhaps the Stars, chronicles the war and what came after. There are a lot of different ways you can think about these books, and I'm just going to highlight a couple that stuck out to me.

 

Originally published: 2021
Acquired: April 2022
Read: August 2022

Orson Scott Card has a concept he calls the MICE Quotient: stories are about milieus, ideas, characters, or events. Once a story sets out its flag as one of those things, he argues, it needs to stick to it, because it's created a pact with the reader. If you write an idea story—there's a problem that needs to be solved—the story can't end without that problem being solved. Now, like all writing rubrics of this kind, it's certainly an oversimplification, and I especially wonder if it's fair to apply a system that I think Card devised for discussing short stories to a story that is over two thousand pages long now that it's complete.

For me, Terra Ignota was a milieu story. If you go back to my review of the first volume, the thing that fascinated me most was the world itself. I like the idea of how nations might have to be redone when people can travel around the world almost instantaneously; I would have happily heard no end of detail about this. Now, I don't know if Palmer saw herself as writing a milieu story, but the milieu is what drew me in here. (It's definitely, though perhaps to a lesser extent, an event story as well.) The times when the series has worked less well is when it moves away from this: I struggled with book II a lot, because that volume "revolves around the political, sexual, and political/sexual intrigues of the Hive leaders... and I just really don't care about this at all. I kept losing track of who did what to whom, and I wasn't incentivized to spend the time to care." It felt like the series had suddenly lurched into being a character story, but I didn't care about these people very much, except as a vehicle for exploring the world. (Think of the Oz books here: Dorothy isn't a deep psychological portrait of a little girl, but Dorothy doesn't have to be; she just has to be a character capable of letting us see what Oz is like.) Which is to say, I feel like these books expect me to care about Mycroft Canner in particular much more than I ever did. I liked Mycroft as an unreliable guide to the future, but I never really cared about him.

So, the way this book begins is quite excellent. It had been almost four years since I had read book III, so my memories were quite fuzzy, but I soon oriented myself enough to enjoy what was going on. We were in a world at war... but a world that had not known war for centuries, and a world poorly organized to conduct it. How does war come to utopia? This is the focus of the early chapters, which are mostly told from the perspective of the Ninth Anonymous, Mycroft's successor as chronicler of events. It's lovely stuff, well thought out and well told, about human resourcefulness, about humanity at its best and at its worst. Our main viewpoint is people who are trying to not take sides, but to simply make the world a better place for everyone involved, in spite of it all, and it works really well. It was a milieu story, maybe crossed with an event story: what is utopia like when it's at war?

But, at a certain point, Mycroft comes back, and with him a whole slew of characters and conflicts that I struggled to engage with. Now I was in a character story again, and I just didn't care about these characters. Unfortunately, this material is quite a bit of an 800-page novel, and by the time the book went more milieu-focused again with the coming of peacefall, I was much less invested than I had been at the beginning. So I am glad I read this series all the way to the end, but I am not sure I ever really got the set of books I imagined I was getting when I read and enjoyed book I.

Okay, other thing to think about. These books are complicated, and are filled with small details. The way they were released and even more so the way I read them worked against my appreciation of that: I had a seven-month gap between books I and II, an eight-month gap between II and III, and a four-year gap between books III and IV. Were one to read them (relatively) straight through, I think one would appreciate them more. I also think they would benefit from a reread; Palmer is up to so much here that's not apparent right away, and small clues can portend big things. Or small clues can be big things: about halfway through book IV, I discovered the Terra Ignota subreddit, which has been doing a chapter-by-chapter reread of the whole series, and was most of the way through book IV when I found it. I began reading the commentaries from the posters there, and realized there was so much I was missing because I wasn't noticing it; this discussion in particular (note: contains massive spoilers) revealed that something hugely significant to both the Ninth Anonymous and Mycroft had happened, and I had failed to understand it or even notice it. Now, that's on purpose, I think, but man.

So these books were never quite what I wanted them to be... but what they wanted to be might be something quite extraordinary that I haven't given a fair shake to. I almost never reread books. Who has the time? But clearly at some point I am going to need to reread these. I glimpse greatness when I read Terra Ignota. My failure to see it might be the books' fault, but I can't shake the feeling that it's my own.