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.

Review: The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer

Trade paperback, 432 pages
Published 2018 (originally 2017)
Acquired July 2018
Read August 2018

Terra Ignota, Book III: The Will to Battle: A Narrative of Events of the year 2454
by Ada Palmer

The Terra Ignota books are odd. Great world-building, and in the case of this one, absolutely compelling reading. But if you asked me what happened that occupied over 400 pages, I would be hard-pressed to explain. A lot of people talk to each other about things, and it often feels like minor events are given lots of coverage, and important events happen offscreen, only by implication. Like, this one is about the world preparing for war in light of the revelations at the end of book III, and I loved the scenes of the world council meeting and debating the issues, complete with lots of juicy procedural detail. And then there are the 2454 Olympics at the end, which leads into some great developments. The role of the Utopians in the war is fascinating and excellent, and the end of the book is tragic and leaves you waiting for the next one so much. (Which is delayed. After three installments in two years, there's a two-year gap between the third and fourth installment. Understandable reasons, though.)

But what actually happens in the middle? Lots of people talk about J. E. D. D. Mason, people talk about other things... and... uh? I don't really know, which makes me wonder if the book really had to be this long! Plus there are so many characters, and Palmer just throws you back into their world-- I had forgotten who a lot of them were in the eight months since I read Seven Surrenders. Thankfully a lot less time is spent on Madame and her brothel, which really dragged down Seven Surrenders.

Still. What a great book. Utterly unlike any science fiction I've read in a long time, and with some great moral questions at its center, and Palmer has a way with deploying unexpected developments that seem completely natural in retrospect. I'm eager to see where this story goes in book IV, and how it can possibly be pulled together. Sticking the landing on this one will certainly be an incredible feat.

Review: Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer

Trade paperback, 384 pages
Published 2017
Acquired November 2017
Read December 2017

Terra Ignota, Book II: Seven Surrenders
by Ada Palmer

I really loved book I of Terra Ignota, Too Like the Lightning, and ranked it first on my ballot for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Had Seven Surrenders landed on the ballot for 2018, though, I don't think I would have ranked it so high. The joy of Too Like the Lightning was in the world it built, but the way Seven Surrenders develops swerves away from that aspect of TLTL. Palmer's semi-utopian future has "Hives" instead of nations as we understand them, voluntary associations, because in an era of instantaneous global transportation, who can enforce the borders of a traditional nation-state? But instead of focusing on the societies, Seven Surrenders doubles down on the people. A lot of the novel 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. I feel like Palmer is creating a commentary here-- our societal aspirations will founder on the personal desires of the powerful-- but though the focus on personal lives might be justified, that doesn't make it interesting.

The answers to the mysteries set up in TLTL are mostly interesting and satisfying, and the book's end promises an interesting set-up for book III. I will read The Will to Battle, but hopefully it's more in tune with what I enjoyed about book I.

Hugos 2017: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

Trade paperback, 448 pages
Published 2017 (originally 2016)
Acquired and read May 2017

Terra Ignota, Book I: Too Like the Lightning
by Ada Palmer

I feel like it's been a long time since I was reading a book so much for the world in which it took place-- maybe Hyperion? Ada Palmer is a professor of history, and has spun a fascinating world, a future where the speed of travel means that nation-states based on geography became meaningless, religious wars led to the outlawing of organized religion, and public performance of gender has become taboo. Every couple chapters brings a new and interesting insight, and Palmer works in her exposition by having her narrator address the audience he imagines will read the book five hundred years hence, who might not know all the details of his time, allowing those of us four hundred years behind him some needed clarifications as well.

The book has a dizzying array of characters and a complicated plot, which sometimes made it hard going to me. Even once I got to the end, I wasn't really sure what the focus of the book was supposed to have been: the last chapter drops in some pretty dramatic revelations, but they feel immensely distant to what the rest of the book has been about, even though it was about many things (a kid with miraculous powers, a break-in with unclear motivation, a global power grab). And I found the narrator a little hard to get hold of. I know this is deliberate, and details are slowly dolled out about him, but I still don't know what motivates him. He seems to do a lot of different things, but what does he want to do, and what does he think about what he does do? I know less than I feel I ought to after 400-plus pages.

That said, these feel like quibbles because I really did enjoy the experience of reading it so much. Palmer is imaginative, and her ideas compelling; this world feels both plausible and alien, and given that history is plausible and alien, this seems exactly right. I particularly liked the characters of Carlyle Foster and the Major; I hope we see more of them in the book II that is necessary to finish off the story of this one.

This is the first of the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Novel I've read; I'll be curious to see how the others stack up to this one. There are ways in which it will be hard to beat!

Next Week: The beginning of a cross-time saga in The Three-Body Problem!