Woile reviewed The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer
Review of 'The Will to Battle' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Good but it feels a bit like Star Wars Episode I, too much politics. Still gonna read the next one! Gotta finish this awesome series.
Hardcover, 352 pages
English language
Published Jan. 21, 2019 by Tor Books, Macmillan.
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.
Good but it feels a bit like Star Wars Episode I, too much politics. Still gonna read the next one! Gotta finish this awesome series.
TBD, wow.
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.