Woile reviewed Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer
Review of 'Seven surrenders' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Fantastic book! Such an amazing creation form Ada Palmer. Makes me wanna live in this Utopia.
Hardcover, 365 pages
English language
Published Nov. 27, 2017 by Tor Books.
From 2017 John W. Campbell Award winner, Ada Palmer, the second book of Terra Ignota, a political science fiction epic of extraordinary audacity
In a future of near-instantaneous global travel, of abundant provision for the needs of all, a future in which no one living can remember an actual war…a long era of stability threatens to come to an abrupt end.
For known only to a few, the leaders of the great Hives, nations without fixed locations, have long conspired to keep the world stable, at the cost of just a little blood. A few secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction can ever dominate, and the balance holds. And yet the balance is beginning to give way.
Mycroft Canner, convict, sentenced to wander the globe in service to all, knows more about this conspiracy than he can ever admit. Carlyle Foster, counselor, sensayer, has secrets as well, and …
From 2017 John W. Campbell Award winner, Ada Palmer, the second book of Terra Ignota, a political science fiction epic of extraordinary audacity
In a future of near-instantaneous global travel, of abundant provision for the needs of all, a future in which no one living can remember an actual war…a long era of stability threatens to come to an abrupt end.
For known only to a few, the leaders of the great Hives, nations without fixed locations, have long conspired to keep the world stable, at the cost of just a little blood. A few secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction can ever dominate, and the balance holds. And yet the balance is beginning to give way.
Mycroft Canner, convict, sentenced to wander the globe in service to all, knows more about this conspiracy than he can ever admit. Carlyle Foster, counselor, sensayer, has secrets as well, and they burden Carlyle beyond description. And both Mycroft and Carlyle are privy to the greatest secret of all: Bridger, the child who can bring inanimate objects to life.
Shot through with astonishing invention, Ada Palmer's Seven Surrenders is the next movement in one of the great science fiction epics of our time.
Fantastic book! Such an amazing creation form Ada Palmer. Makes me wanna live in this Utopia.
TLTL was interesting in that it sort of explores the concept that "God" (or at the very least something capable of creating miracles) suddenly walks amongst us in a future, theoretically tamed world, where people are all part of various houses and affiliations that work together to keep the world operating on an even keel. THIS book, however, takes the most boring and irrelevant bits of that (IMHO) and runs for an entire freaking novel with them. It was supremely frustrating to come off of reading TLTL and have all the fascinating ideas and such that I had floating around in my head dumped into the ice water of a 350+ page exploration of how the entire system could be turned on its head by one woman playing sexual politics. Very disappointing!
Would you destroy the world to create a better one? This book was great, with all of it's twists and turns, even though the wonderful world-building of the Utopia in the first book gets undone, and by the end of it, my sincere hope is that the third book will actually build something better.
Ambitious pair of novels, only a few loose elements, wild mystery chase through a glorious dense sea of 18C enlightenment ideals and underbelly and the classics, roman and sci-fi, in a consistently future-oriented questioning of belief and human/social capacity. This one will probably grow on me for a while.
I don't like these books, but I find them interesting and unusual enough to want to finish them anyway. Here's a compromise rating, I guess.
If Too Like The Lightning frustrated you, steel yourself and read this anyway. The payoff on your investment will be huge. TLTL was often a slog, but this is not that - complex, yes, but also moves at an amazing pace, with the most satisfying ending of a second book in a trilogy(?) that I can remember. Well worth the read.
(I do recommend rereading TLTL before reading this - there are a lot of details in the first book that get tied in to the second book, so having it fresh in your head will enrich the reading experience.)