Book Review: Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
A utopian SF novel that is bolder in concept than execution.
Tor Books, 2016, 432 pages
Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets.
Carlyle Foster is a sensayer - a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.
The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labeling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.
And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destabilize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life.
Too Like the Lightning is one of those precious darlings of the literary SF community. It was nominated for a Hugo in 2017, and gets much love for the author's obvious writing skill, imagination, and erudition.
I did not love it. Honestly, I didn't even like it very much, despite my appreciation for its craft.
Also be warned that it is the first of a quartet of books, and Too Like the Lightning was originally written as the first half of one book, which was split into a duology. So if you do like it, it ends just when things start getting exciting.
If there is one thing that most futuristic novels tend to fail at, it's imagining a future that's really... futuristic. Oh, it's easy to imagine advanced technology, and new geopolitical alliances, and even aliens, yet even in literary SF, most far futures are some combination of authoritarian dystopias like those written at the dawn of the SF era, global hypercapitalist cyberpunk hellscape, Star Trek Liberal Space Democracy with aliens, post-apocalyptic monoculture... you get the idea.
The world of Too Like the Lightning is genuinely imaginative, trying to create a world that would be as strange and unfamiliar, yet still human, to us, as our world would seem to someone from the 1500s. A comparison that the novel's narrator makes repeatedly.
In many ways, the 25th century seems utopian. It's a post-scarcity world that has "solved" many of the problems of earlier eras. Poverty is gone, wars are seemingly relics of history, crimes are quickly solved, most people are free (for some value of "free"). But people haven't fundamentally changed. Nation-states have been replaced with non-geographic "Hives" that citizens join voluntarily. Public religious expression, and especially proselytization, has been outlawed after the Church Wars, but people are still allowed to be privately religious, with the help of "sensayers" who are basically ecumenical priests (but you can't call them that). And there is still political and economic competition, crime, and violence.
There are so many weird and interesting bits of worldbuilding here. "Freedom of speech" as we understand it no longer exists, though the citizens of this far future would not call themselves censored. Information is almost universally free, but everything is tracked, labeled, and monitored.
Referring to anyone in a "gendered" fashion is worse than gauche - when "he/she" is used at all (which is considered crude) it's almost completely disassociated (in theory) from biological sex. "They/them" is the universal pronoun. But if this sounds like a transgender utopia, the tabooing of sexual identity actually suppresses as much as it liberates. People clearly still recognize the differences between sexes, and adopting gendered expressions is now transgressive.
The Hives are a mix of old corporations like Mitsubishi, a pseudo-Roman empire called the Masons, and various other cults, intellectual movements, and historical remnants. In addition to being citizens of a Hive, everyone is a member of a "bash," a kind of extended family united by common interest rather than blood.
It's also jam-packed with Ada Palmer's area of expertise, Enlightenment philosophy. The references to Rousseau, Voltaire, and of course, the Marquis de Sade, are not incidental, but make up some of the core philosophical debates in the book. How does a book about the 25th century come off as "futuristic" while wallowing in 18th century philosophy? With lots and lots of worldbuilding. This packaging of infodumps in dialogs and weird futuristic setting and occasional bad sex scenes is somewhat reminiscent of Neal Stephenson, so I should have really liked this book.
I didn't.
The intricate political games bored me. The plot went in seven different directions. The narrator, Mycroft Canner, is a convict whose sentence is basically to be a literal public servant, and he's constantly breaking the fourth wall to address his "readers" in 19th century speech modes and apologizing for using vulgar gendered references (which he often does in ways that are predictably confusing, as his "hes" and "shes" only sometimes correspond to the biological sex of the person he's referring to), and also for misleading us. He's a very unreliable and frequently annoying narrator.
Eventually we learn the nature of his crimes (they're horrific), and yet he's a seemingly benevolent, obsequious fellow who's devoted to protecting the MacGuffin of the story, a young boy who for some reason has godlike powers over matter and, apparently, life and death.
So we follow Mycroft through his many different encounters with people who want to use him, people who abuse him, people who find out his secret and want to kill him, as Mycroft tells us about his world. Taken individually, it's all kind of interesting, but it's like a dump of worldbuilding and random encounters. The kid, Bridger, never quite makes sense until the end where we have a weird mishmash of "Sci-fi gods are just super-advanced beings" and "No, they're actually divine."
Too Like the Lightning resembles several other futuristic transhumanist novels I've read that are so jam-packed with Big Ideas that I got lost trying to follow the story. When eventually a Big Thing is about to happen, the book ends, to be continued in book two. I doubt I will read it.
My complete list of book reviews.
Tor Books, 2016, 432 pages
Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets.
Carlyle Foster is a sensayer - a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.
The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labeling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.
And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destabilize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life.
Too Like the Lightning is one of those precious darlings of the literary SF community. It was nominated for a Hugo in 2017, and gets much love for the author's obvious writing skill, imagination, and erudition.
I did not love it. Honestly, I didn't even like it very much, despite my appreciation for its craft.
Also be warned that it is the first of a quartet of books, and Too Like the Lightning was originally written as the first half of one book, which was split into a duology. So if you do like it, it ends just when things start getting exciting.
If there is one thing that most futuristic novels tend to fail at, it's imagining a future that's really... futuristic. Oh, it's easy to imagine advanced technology, and new geopolitical alliances, and even aliens, yet even in literary SF, most far futures are some combination of authoritarian dystopias like those written at the dawn of the SF era, global hypercapitalist cyberpunk hellscape, Star Trek Liberal Space Democracy with aliens, post-apocalyptic monoculture... you get the idea.
The world of Too Like the Lightning is genuinely imaginative, trying to create a world that would be as strange and unfamiliar, yet still human, to us, as our world would seem to someone from the 1500s. A comparison that the novel's narrator makes repeatedly.
In many ways, the 25th century seems utopian. It's a post-scarcity world that has "solved" many of the problems of earlier eras. Poverty is gone, wars are seemingly relics of history, crimes are quickly solved, most people are free (for some value of "free"). But people haven't fundamentally changed. Nation-states have been replaced with non-geographic "Hives" that citizens join voluntarily. Public religious expression, and especially proselytization, has been outlawed after the Church Wars, but people are still allowed to be privately religious, with the help of "sensayers" who are basically ecumenical priests (but you can't call them that). And there is still political and economic competition, crime, and violence.
There are so many weird and interesting bits of worldbuilding here. "Freedom of speech" as we understand it no longer exists, though the citizens of this far future would not call themselves censored. Information is almost universally free, but everything is tracked, labeled, and monitored.
Referring to anyone in a "gendered" fashion is worse than gauche - when "he/she" is used at all (which is considered crude) it's almost completely disassociated (in theory) from biological sex. "They/them" is the universal pronoun. But if this sounds like a transgender utopia, the tabooing of sexual identity actually suppresses as much as it liberates. People clearly still recognize the differences between sexes, and adopting gendered expressions is now transgressive.
The Hives are a mix of old corporations like Mitsubishi, a pseudo-Roman empire called the Masons, and various other cults, intellectual movements, and historical remnants. In addition to being citizens of a Hive, everyone is a member of a "bash," a kind of extended family united by common interest rather than blood.
It's also jam-packed with Ada Palmer's area of expertise, Enlightenment philosophy. The references to Rousseau, Voltaire, and of course, the Marquis de Sade, are not incidental, but make up some of the core philosophical debates in the book. How does a book about the 25th century come off as "futuristic" while wallowing in 18th century philosophy? With lots and lots of worldbuilding. This packaging of infodumps in dialogs and weird futuristic setting and occasional bad sex scenes is somewhat reminiscent of Neal Stephenson, so I should have really liked this book.
I didn't.
The intricate political games bored me. The plot went in seven different directions. The narrator, Mycroft Canner, is a convict whose sentence is basically to be a literal public servant, and he's constantly breaking the fourth wall to address his "readers" in 19th century speech modes and apologizing for using vulgar gendered references (which he often does in ways that are predictably confusing, as his "hes" and "shes" only sometimes correspond to the biological sex of the person he's referring to), and also for misleading us. He's a very unreliable and frequently annoying narrator.
Eventually we learn the nature of his crimes (they're horrific), and yet he's a seemingly benevolent, obsequious fellow who's devoted to protecting the MacGuffin of the story, a young boy who for some reason has godlike powers over matter and, apparently, life and death.
So we follow Mycroft through his many different encounters with people who want to use him, people who abuse him, people who find out his secret and want to kill him, as Mycroft tells us about his world. Taken individually, it's all kind of interesting, but it's like a dump of worldbuilding and random encounters. The kid, Bridger, never quite makes sense until the end where we have a weird mishmash of "Sci-fi gods are just super-advanced beings" and "No, they're actually divine."
Too Like the Lightning resembles several other futuristic transhumanist novels I've read that are so jam-packed with Big Ideas that I got lost trying to follow the story. When eventually a Big Thing is about to happen, the book ends, to be continued in book two. I doubt I will read it.
My complete list of book reviews.