Review: Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
| Series: |
Terra Ignota #1 |
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
May 2016 |
| ISBN: |
1-4668-5874-5 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
432 |
Too Like the Lightning is a science fantasy (?) novel and the first
of a four-book series. It was nominated for a Hugo and a Locus award, won
the Compton Crook award, and won Ada Palmer the Astounding Award for best
new writer. It was Palmer's first novel.
Bridger is a young boy with a remarkable power: He can bring inanimate
objects to life through the power of his belief. He is being hidden by the
Saneer-Weeksbooth bash', a family (?) business (?) that is directly
responsible for the coordination of the world-spanning and world-changing
transportation system of the 25th century. Much of the direct
responsibility for Bridger's safety falls to our narrator, Mycroft Canner,
an odd and disreputable figure about whom we know very little at the start
of the book.
As this book opens, two things are happening simultaneously. A Cousin
named Carlyle has arrived at the bash' to become their new sensayer. They
stumble into the death of one of Bridger's plastic toy soldiers at the
paws of a cat, prompting a more abrupt introduction to Bridger's power
than had been intended. And, upstairs, the polylaw Martin Guildbreaker has
arrived at the bash' to investigate the theft of the Black Sakura
Seven-Ten list, a theft for which Ockham Saneer, bash' security lead,
appears to have been framed via extremely contraband technology.
Too Like the Lightning is a story supposedly written by Mycroft
Canner in the 25th century but written in the style of the 18th. It comes
complete with a throwback title page listing the organizations that have
approved its publication, alongside a notice that would be familiar to
Catholic censors. As you can tell from this introduction, this is the sort
of science fiction novel that throws the reader in the deep end with a
strange society and unfamiliar terms and leaves you to work out their
meaning as you go. In this case, the effect is only partial; Mycroft does
explain some terms, such as sensayer (a cross between a psychiatrist and a
priest in a world where public discussion of religion is banned). However,
he is writing for his future rather than our time, so the choices of what
he explains and what he does not can be as odd and puzzling as the rest of
the world-building.
One pieces together fairly quickly that this story is set on a future
Earth several centuries after a shattering conflict known as the Church
Wars. Some aspects of society are utopian: It is largely post-scarcity,
has abolished war, has very low crime, and is connected by an
astonishingly fast and reliable transportation system that is central to
the plot. Most aspects, though, are ambiguous, mixed, or just deeply
weird. Geography-based political polities have been mostly abolished.
Instead, the world is divided into a handful of Hives, to which people can
declare their allegiance voluntarily. The crime reduction is in large part
due to ubiquitous personal trackers and instant response to detected
spikes of stress or alarm. Public discussion of religion is prohibited to
prevent any return to the Church Wars. Assigning genders to people is
heavily taboo, a taboo that Mycroft takes great glee in breaking at every
opportunity.
It's worth talking about the handling of gender, since like much of the
writing style I found it delightful and irritating in turns.
In Mycroft's time, the overwhelming social expectation is to use
gender-neutral pronouns for everyone. Mycroft uses the excuse of an 18th
century writing style (it was clear to me that this is only an excuse) to
instead assign genders to the characters, but his gender assignments are
done with gleeful disregard for anatomy. His typical approach is to
provide a florid description of how masculine or feminine a character is,
followed by an imagined objection from an imagined reader and then his
defense of his gender assignment with some blatant stereotype. Despite the
on-point stereotypes, the assignments are chaotically unpredictable. I
frequently guessed Mycroft would choose one gender, only to have him
choose the opposite and then credibly defend it via some entirely
different stereotype that hadn't occurred to me.
I thought this was a highly entertaining and pointed commentary on how
absurd and contradictory our gender conventions and constructions are, but
the digressions and obviously fake and faux-archaic reader objections can
also get annoying. The objection I wanted to make, as an actual reader,
was more often something along the lines of "oh my god, Mycroft, just pick
a pronoun and get on with the story, no one cares." Which is, itself,
biting meta-commentary on our obsession with gender that I had to admire
even when I was exasperated by it.
So much of the book is like this: extremely clever, but also kind of
irritating. Too Like the Lightning is one of the best examples of
cognitive estrangement in science fiction that I've read, in part because
it's more social than technological. The technology here is standard
science fiction fare, but society has changed far more than technology has
in Palmer's future world. All (I think?) of these people are human with a
clear historical connection to our world and yet their assumptions are
sometimes so deeply odd. Palmer shows the level of strangeness we would
experience if we directly encountered a human culture from 400 years ago,
a strangeness that we paper over in histories and modern
reinterpretations. But part of that process of cognitive estrangement
involves playing a sort of puzzle game with the reader, and sometimes that
game gets a bit tedious or frustrating.
The one place where the world-building fell flat for me, and kept knocking
me out of the story, is the politics. Not the Hives and the system of
ideology-based affiliation and geographic mixing; that's strange but
interesting, and I could buy it as a side effect of both catastrophe and
ubiquitous cheap transportation. Not the complicated system of legal codes
and exceptions and competing jurisdictions; that felt believably baroque
in the way that complexity emerges in the friction in long-lived human
systems. My problem was with the scale, or rather the lack of scale.
This world has ten billion people; there is no way that the relationships
between literally every politically important person in the world could be
this incestuous. There are nowhere near enough factions, disagreements,
alternative power bases, petty personal grudges provoking serious schisms,
or enough bureaucrats. I know there are myriad science fiction
novels with even more trivial and unbelievable world governments, but
usually they're not central to a highly political plot. Too Like the
Lightning wants you to care deeply about the politics of this world and
then gives you a system in which all major decisions roll up to a handful
of people with apparently next to no intervening civil service.
Also, why is there so little redundancy? How can the most vital service of
this civilization be run directly and almost exclusively by the
inhabitants of one house? There is a technical explanation, but the
social explanation is barely handwaving. This is not how institutional
trust generally works; even with vast multinational high-capital
near-monopolies such as cloud computing, there are three major players and
innumerable smaller ones.
Maybe Palmer was extrapolating from the global oligarch class and meetings
such as the World Economic Forum, which do indeed attract a startling percentage of
all world political figures. The problem, though, is not the surface of
occasional gatherings or staged events seen early in this story. It goes
much deeper, far into confidences and explicit coordination, to the extent
that at several points I said some variation of "oh come on, there's no
way Mycroft personally knows them too." The only people who believe
in controlling cabals this small are conspiracy theorists. This is simply
not how humans work when this much power is at stake.
Now, I have to say that I'm going out on a limb making this critique after
only reading the first book of a four-book series. This is absolutely the
type of work for which my reaction and objections could be an intentional
effect created by Palmer in order to spring some unexpected justification
on the reader in book two or three. It's clear that there is some massive
social upheaval on the horizon in this series, and something very strange
is going on with one of the characters and their hold over other people.
Perhaps the reader disbelief is setting up that upheaval. If so, hats off
to her, and that's one of the perils of reviewing books as I read them.
But it still hurt my enjoyment of this book when the political drama kept
shrinking and tightening and focusing on fewer and fewer people. It felt
frankly unbelievable for the political universe of this highly political
book to be this claustrophobic. I wanted it to expand into the space that
should be available to an entire world teeming with fractious and complex
humanity.
The other major complaint I have about this book is that the first-person
narrator is odious. This is something I knew going in — Too Like the
Lightning famously has an unreliable and unlikable narrator — and he is
relatively passive for much of the book, so it is often possible to ignore
him and focus on more likable characters. I don't necessarily mind an
unlikable or unreliable narrator in this type of story.
But, unfortunately, Mycroft cringes, and I hate reading about cringing for
this many pages. His primary mode of interaction with people is
obsequious, performative fear with a weird, distasteful edge of
manipulation. Again, I think this is entirely intentional on Palmer's
part; we learn some of the reasons behind it by the end of this book, and
I'm sure we'll learn more in future books. But, nonetheless, the overall
effect is a bit like reading a book narrated by
Gríma
Wormtongue. I can appreciate the narrative role of that character without
wanting to spend this much time in his head.
I have very mixed feelings about this book. The overall construction is
brilliant; it's a beautiful puzzle of oddity and alienation that provides
great fun for the type of science fiction reader who wants to work out the
rules of a strange society without a lot of infodumping. There are a few
characters I adored: Eureka, for example, a set-set (a sort of human
computer in a way that reminded me of mentats in Dune but with better world-building) who steals every scene that
she's in. I was very invested in the world-building, fascinated by the
Utopians, and want to learn more about what's going on.
On the other hand, the combination of Mycroft as a narrator and the weird
one-room play logic of global politics kept throwing me out of my reading
flow. It took me about a month to finish this book. The science fiction
and political fiction aspects of the story interested me more than Bridger
and whatever is going on with J.E.D.D. Mason, and I'm worried that my
least-favorite aspects will be central to the rest of the story. I was
enjoying a smaller percentage of the scenes by the end of the book than I
was at the start, which is not a great sign.
And yet, the ending absolutely worked on me. I don't want to stop here! I
will probably pick up the sequel, but I think it's going to take me a
while to brace myself for it.
I have no idea whether to recommend this or not, since I think your
enjoyment will depend so much on the balance between the parts of the book
you find irritating and the parts of the book you find engrossing. I'm
fairly sure most readers will find a little of both, but I have no idea
how to predict their relative weight. If you like cognitive estrangement,
this is great; I understand why so many science fiction reviewers rave
about this book. If you need to like the first-person protagonist, uh,
good luck. Maybe you'll have more tolerance for cringing than I do.
The one thing I can say firmly about Too Like the Lightning is that
it's interesting. It may be worth reading just to see how people
are stretching the genre, even if you end up not liking the effect. But be
warned that this book does not so much end on a cliffhanger as suddenly
stop at some random, nondescript point on the road leading to the cliff.
The ending is deeply unsatisfying; you will need to read more if you want
to understand what's going on.
Followed by Seven Surrenders.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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