From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality
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 labelling all public writing and speech. …
From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality
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 labelling 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 competion 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 destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...
This is a gorgeous setting, with a vast cast of characters, extremely ambitious. I enjoyed it but I was often confused. I want to reread, though, and then tackle the other books in the series. I had the good fortune to be on a couple of panels with the author--moderating one panel on utopias--at Kansas City's Worldcon in 2016, when the book was being launched. As an academic and writer, she is so much smarter and sharper than I've ever been.
La tétralogie est agréable à lire dans l'ensemble mais j'attendais vraiment un twist jusqu'à la fin. Twist qui n'est jamais venu. Il manquerait presque un 5ème tome pour expliquer vraiment les choses (et pour partir dans l'espace ENFIN !) parce que la discussion entre Dieux ne me satisfait pas du tout.
Edit : Han ! Je viens de voir sur Bélial qu'il y a un 5ième tome ! D'où l'impression d'une oeuvre inachevée... 😅
Review of 'Too like the lightning' on 'LibraryThing'
2 stars
Starts out packed with interesting ideas, gradually devolves into the author's Enlightment fantasy (super Eurocentric with a tokenistic Japanese presence) and by the end veers completely off the rails into a Renaissance-francophile sexual fantasy. I'm not sure why I read to the end.
18th century writing style is a good match for the plot. It's 25th century, there are seven different quasi-states, but they are ruled by disgusting lustful self-righteous hypocritical pricks akin to medieval absolute monarchs, which all happen to be members of their joint secret club.
The narrator is one well-connected person, employed by all the rulers, and even more abhorrent than them, and it's not just because of what's uncovered about narrator's past in the middle of the book; narrator, as a character, was revolting from the first pages. The book covers their quest to uncover certain mysteries in attempt to prevent a war caused by rulers' unimaginable unsuitability for their respective ruling positions. On that quest narrator interacts with some other characters, all of the elite; common people's lives are of no concern there.
Still, one can catch some glimpses of the actual society; and that's the society that …
18th century writing style is a good match for the plot. It's 25th century, there are seven different quasi-states, but they are ruled by disgusting lustful self-righteous hypocritical pricks akin to medieval absolute monarchs, which all happen to be members of their joint secret club.
The narrator is one well-connected person, employed by all the rulers, and even more abhorrent than them, and it's not just because of what's uncovered about narrator's past in the middle of the book; narrator, as a character, was revolting from the first pages. The book covers their quest to uncover certain mysteries in attempt to prevent a war caused by rulers' unimaginable unsuitability for their respective ruling positions. On that quest narrator interacts with some other characters, all of the elite; common people's lives are of no concern there.
Still, one can catch some glimpses of the actual society; and that's the society that botched it all. Gender issues are swept under the rug, so there are no more gender issues. Same goes for religious issues. It is suggested that democracy and egalitarianism evolved much further during these 4 centuries, but there is rampant cronyism and nepotism on the top, and there is a huge divide between elites and common folks.
Some reviews seem to believe this future is utopia, and praise the book for it alone. Some reviewers seem to like the book for how moral its characters are. I find it odd because it is horrifyingly realistic dystopia, and because all of the main and supporting characters, except for one 13-year old kid and maybe one or two more (which might well be because we don't know them well enough yet), are extremely repugnant. And that's why it rightfully earns its 4.5 stars, as a dystopia.
I read this book, then took a few weeks away to finish reading the rest of the Hugo nominees in the shorter fiction categories, then came back to read this again. While I enjoyed the book the first time, I was quite overwhelmed trying to learn the world and who all the players were. On this second reading I was able to concentrate more on the story and a lot of details I missed the first time through. I raised my review to 5 stars after this second read for several reasons, but primarily because I was staring in awe at the massive and vivid world that Palmer has created.
The difficulty in discussing a very original book is that that the vocabulary to describe it is missing. I spent a lot of the time I was reading this trying to figure out who to compare it to. In my updates, you'll see a couple of stabs at it, but I'm going with:
[a:Iain M. Banks|5807106|Iain M. Banks|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1352410520p2/5807106.jpg] and [a:Gene Wolfe|23069|Gene Wolfe|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1207670073p2/23069.jpg] and Maybe [a:Jo Walton|107170|Jo Walton|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1353809579p2/107170.jpg] write the Foundation Trilogy. But with pinch of [b:The Vampire Lestat|43814|The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)|Anne Rice|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1347515742s/43814.jpg|3241580].
This doesn't really give you a solid idea what it's like, but it's about as clear as I can get.
This book was not, quite, as they say on the internet, a wild ride from start to finish, but I never managed to know what to expect from it. It kept on becoming something else as I read it.
I also do not know if …
The difficulty in discussing a very original book is that that the vocabulary to describe it is missing. I spent a lot of the time I was reading this trying to figure out who to compare it to. In my updates, you'll see a couple of stabs at it, but I'm going with:
[a:Iain M. Banks|5807106|Iain M. Banks|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1352410520p2/5807106.jpg] and [a:Gene Wolfe|23069|Gene Wolfe|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1207670073p2/23069.jpg] and Maybe [a:Jo Walton|107170|Jo Walton|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1353809579p2/107170.jpg] write the Foundation Trilogy. But with pinch of [b:The Vampire Lestat|43814|The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)|Anne Rice|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1347515742s/43814.jpg|3241580].
This doesn't really give you a solid idea what it's like, but it's about as clear as I can get.
This book was not, quite, as they say on the internet, a wild ride from start to finish, but I never managed to know what to expect from it. It kept on becoming something else as I read it.
I also do not know if I enjoyed it, which is a very strange thing not to know about a book you have read. For one thing, this book's interest in Voltaire outstripped mine right out of the gate, as did its interest in the approximately thirty-eight other enlightenment thinkers who were regularly made reference to. The book also, I think, is quite uninterested in giving you characters to like; almost all the characters eventually reveal themselves to have ugly flaws.
There is a twist at the half-way point that I feel might be quite upsetting to some people, and I think the book is committed to it, rather than doing it for shock-value, so I am trying to preserve the surprise, but [triggers: rape/torture] a character you have been empathizing with turns out to have been responsible for some horrific atrocities, which are referred to fairly offhandedly.
The thing I came closest to enjoying was the world-building, but even that was a wild ride. I began thinking I was exploring a utopia, quickly became mired in petty and comprehensive politics, and then plunged into the realization that no one in this world is suited to raise children.
Then the story ends as the first half of a duology, leaving me confused and disoriented. Okay!
Recommended if Iain M. Banks or Gene Wolfe are your idea of a good time, or if you've ever said to yourself, "I would like this SF more if it were 20% enlightenment philosophers by weight."
