The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota)

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 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.

This is a magnificent series! It has glorious prose, spectacular world-building, amazing intrigue and ... It's so good that I feel bad for not liking it. But fact is just don't. Yes, it's glorious and intricate and imaginative, to me this book was still a slog.
I'm not even sure what kept me going. Pure stubbornness and five-nines record of finishing books? (Not actually true, it's two nines and a smidgen.) A hope that it would eventually be worth it?
It definitely wasn't a desire to know what would happen to the characters from the first two books. They never seemed real to me, and I never cared for them. When they popped back into the story in this book, for shorter or longer, I never thought "Ah, I was wondering what happened to them." and at the end of the book I'm not thinking "I wonder what will happen in the next." Perhaps with one exception, but they barely appear in the book.
Only one thing, I think, could get me to read the next one, and that's a faint hope some or, highly unlikely, all of the mystery will be exposed.

If you really enjoyed the first two books, I wouldn't be surprised if you enjoy this one as well, but if you never truly related to the characters, found those to go on for too long about ... well, everything, and/or got annoyed with the sheer ornateness of it all, you should get out now.

When I'm giving it an "OK" instead of "didn't like it", it's based on it feeling less of a slog for the last 25% of the book, but there's a non-zero chance that this, at least in part, was induced by the end being in sight.

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.”

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.