Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota

Ada Palmer

May 2016 · Terra Ignota Book 1 · Sold by Tor Books

About this ebook

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 competition 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...

Terra Ignota
1. Too Like the Lightning
2. Seven Surrenders
3. The Will to Battle

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ratings and reviews

First off, this is a tough book to read but the effort is well worth it. The style is intentionally anachronistic almost bordering on indecipherable, BUT, I must reiterate that the book is intentionally written this way. We are roughly the same amount of time between the Enlightenment and the future presented in the novel, and the vague uneasiness the reader experiences at literary tropes we've loooong since grown past (Dear Reader...) serves to (not so gently) remind the reader that the culture and themes may not be immediately recognizable without a little bit of effort and imagination. In my opinion this is the mind space all great speculative fiction puts the reader in and this novel certainly challenges a lot of concepts that we take for granted in modern sci-fi in ways that are simultaneously anachronistic and unmistakably futuristic. Knowing this was the first in a series of novel did allow some leniency in certain areas, but the sequels deliver on everything that is missing.

i have complicated feelings about recomending this series. it is bold in the extreme. i misses a lot but i have not been able to shake its ideas from my head since i first began reading it years ago. i recomend this only if you want to be challenged too.

Withholding my judgement until the next book but so far it's amazing if also a bit disturbing with the occasional flashes of horrific crimes' grisly details. I love the languaging and focus on enlightenment ideas.

About the author

ADA PALMER is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a capella music, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. Her personal site is at adapalmer.com, and she writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com.

The third book of her Terra Ignota series, The Will to Battle, will be released December 2017.