The Will to Battle is the third book of John W. Campbell Award winner Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, a political science fiction epic of extraordinary audacity.
The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end.
Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location.
The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world’s stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held.
The Hives’ façade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past. But as the great secret becomes more and more widely known, that façade is slipping away. …
The Will to Battle is the third book of John W. Campbell Award winner Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, a political science fiction epic of extraordinary audacity.
The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end.
Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location.
The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world’s stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held.
The Hives’ façade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past. But as the great secret becomes more and more widely known, that façade is slipping away.
Just days earlier, the world was a pinnacle of human civilization. Now everyone—Hives and hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and the downtrodden, warriors and saints—scrambles to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war.
I think I really summed it up when I explained: "it reads like assigned reading for an undergrad philosophy course. The really cool one, with the professor everyone adores, but still."
Palmer has always been clearly been using her work as a vehicle for important cultural conversations, but that was paired with awe-inspiring world-building in Too Like the Lightning and a careful deconstruction of all of the holes in her world in Seven Surrenders. In The Will to Battle, nearly 300 or 350 pages are devoted entirely to dialogue, about half of which is between the narrator and either (a) the reader, (b) Hobbes or (c) other dead people as imagined by the narrator. It's important work about what it means to be a civilization, how to balance improving this world versus dreaming of bigger ones and what we as citizens in a global society owe each other. I think …
I think I really summed it up when I explained: "it reads like assigned reading for an undergrad philosophy course. The really cool one, with the professor everyone adores, but still."
Palmer has always been clearly been using her work as a vehicle for important cultural conversations, but that was paired with awe-inspiring world-building in Too Like the Lightning and a careful deconstruction of all of the holes in her world in Seven Surrenders. In The Will to Battle, nearly 300 or 350 pages are devoted entirely to dialogue, about half of which is between the narrator and either (a) the reader, (b) Hobbes or (c) other dead people as imagined by the narrator. It's important work about what it means to be a civilization, how to balance improving this world versus dreaming of bigger ones and what we as citizens in a global society owe each other. I think it may also be doing work holding up either end of the quartet in which it's placed (time will tell), but it's not really functional as a stand-alone novel.
Reading this series is harder work than most sci-fi. The narrative voice (not the audiobook narration) is very strong in ways that I didn't necessarily like. However, that and other choices make sense and work together to make something worthy of contemplation. That's what good thinking sci-fi does. There's a reason these books have won awards.
BUT, you kind of have to commit to put in the work for that all to come together and make sense. It's an effort that I'll admit I have sometimes struggled with. After each book, I have contemplated whether I need to see how it ties together enough to work at the next.
For this last book, it took me FAR longer than normal to get through. I listen to most of the books I mark as read and I kept finding reasons to listen to podcasts rather than dig back into this. I …
Reading this series is harder work than most sci-fi. The narrative voice (not the audiobook narration) is very strong in ways that I didn't necessarily like. However, that and other choices make sense and work together to make something worthy of contemplation. That's what good thinking sci-fi does. There's a reason these books have won awards.
BUT, you kind of have to commit to put in the work for that all to come together and make sense. It's an effort that I'll admit I have sometimes struggled with. After each book, I have contemplated whether I need to see how it ties together enough to work at the next.
For this last book, it took me FAR longer than normal to get through. I listen to most of the books I mark as read and I kept finding reasons to listen to podcasts rather than dig back into this. I know that sounds negative, but it isn't. These are good books that a lot of people are going to abandon or actively dislike.
The thing is, I've worked hard to be clear in my head about the fact that "good" and "I liked it" aren't the same thing. This series is good. And, over time, I may decide I liked it as well, but it's enough that it's good.
The series is still going strong. Book 3 out of 4, so it can neither be an amazing plunge into a whole new world, nor a finish with amazing twists.
Are you baffled, reader?
Reader: “Insult me not, Mycroft.”
It has plenty of politics and philosophy of course. Some of the exposition is surprisingly boring. I mean relatively. The first two books and Mycroft's style of narration have prepared me for nothing less than a constant stream of poetry and revelation and unexpected perspectives. Then here we get a few transcripts of senate sessions or court proceedings that are none of that.
But soon enough the amazing writing returns. Just check out these examples:
I saw Ganymede too give me a last glance, cold and dismissive, and so infinitely less disdainful than my station deserved that I could not mistake it for anything but heartfelt thanks.
Now fear reared dragon-fierce …
The series is still going strong. Book 3 out of 4, so it can neither be an amazing plunge into a whole new world, nor a finish with amazing twists.
Are you baffled, reader?
Reader: “Insult me not, Mycroft.”
It has plenty of politics and philosophy of course. Some of the exposition is surprisingly boring. I mean relatively. The first two books and Mycroft's style of narration have prepared me for nothing less than a constant stream of poetry and revelation and unexpected perspectives. Then here we get a few transcripts of senate sessions or court proceedings that are none of that.
But soon enough the amazing writing returns. Just check out these examples:
I saw Ganymede too give me a last glance, cold and dismissive, and so infinitely less disdainful than my station deserved that I could not mistake it for anything but heartfelt thanks.
Now fear reared dragon-fierce inside me, pain, cold, numbness as my blood’s departure reduced muscle to meat.
The Great Scroll’s Addressee forms all His words with care, as if the rest of us think ourselves typists, armed with delete keys, while He alone remembers that we carve our speech in the unhealing stone called Time.
It's just a joy to read and savor so many sentences. The prose alone makes this 5 stars for me. Everything else is just sugar on the top.
The first two books had their share of interesting references to the process of authoring. Can we trust our narrator? Can we trust the person ("9A") who edited the text? The Will to Battle takes this even further. This is a diary of events after the first books, which make one book in the novel's world. These events include writing that book. My head is spinning.
The theological arc is also making good progress. War, and pretty much everything, is now viewed as a conversation between our universe's God and His Guest, Jehovah.
The cast of characters is so great that just getting a short update of what everyone is up to these days easily fills a book. It is insane to wish for more characters. But it is also a bit strange not to meet a single new person in a whole book. We also never learn much about the population. I suppose this gives the story an abstract quality, where each person is a walking-talking philosophy. If someone has no distinct philosophy, they appear to have no right to appear in this story.
The plot in The Will to Battle is all about preparing for a very unpredictable finale. I am very excited for book 4!