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May. 10th, 2020 06:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretToo Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
I finally finished this. After reading the first hundred or so pages when it first came out, I got distracted or something and it sat on my TBR pile for a while. And it's so dense that when I wanted to pick it up again, I had to start at the beginning, there was too much I didn't remember. It turns out that loooong Shabbos days when you can't have any human contact are good for reading long dense books like this one.
It's an incredible piece of writing. There's so much breadth to the worldbuilding and the puzzle of figuring out the ways in which the world has changed and why is fun to work through.
Too Like the Lightning imagines a world several hundred years into the future where the nation-state has dissolved and been replaced with a more fluid sense of communal organization that reminded me of Malka Older's Infomocracy. The difference is that whereas the governments in Older's book are extrapolations from modern community institutions, Palmer imagines that the world has largely chosen to look backward, to stateless variants on the models of government postulated in the 18th century Enlightenment.
For Palmer, whose day job is as a history professor, the game of revealing this mixture of old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, is the lifeforce of the book. And I am geeky enough about Enlightenment philosophy to find this fun, to enjoy thinking through the mashups of Rousseau and Sade, to admire how Palmer plays with the concept of Panopticon, etc...
But it was also unsatisfying in a whole bunch of ways. Its plot is structured too much like philosophical novels like More's Utopia or Gulliver's Travels, where the narrative moves from place to place, each representing ideas, and in the process the plot loses its way. There is a mystery novel plot animating Too Like the Lightning, but the book keeps losing the thread of it. The last four chapters or so are full of shocking revelations that feel both too surprising and not surprising enough. Our first introduction to The Anonymous, three chapters from the end, after a bunch of casual references to them throughout the book that imply their importance but don't really communicate it, is the revelation that they're having an adulterous affair with a political rival. I really didn't know what to make of it. Okay, I thought, I have no frame of reference for whether I should be surprised by this. I'm four hundred pages into this book, I really feel like Palmer should have established some sense of who I should thought The Anonymous was for this revelation to shake. And that's just about the least of the dozen or so 'surprises' from the final chapters.
To too great a degree, the book leans on the gimmick of Mycroft's unreliable narration. Palmer's worldbuilding is too dense to support it, as full of allusions that don't pay off later as allusions that do. If I spot worldbuilding defects or unanswered questions, are they things that Mycroft, and by extension Palmer, are holding back, or are they errant details that I should be ignoring as part of the general suspension of disbelief any SF reader has to employ when reading about a new world? This is very much not helped by this only being half the story. I have ordered Seven Surrenders now to continue my reading, but until I get to it, there's a lot of things about the book I just read that just don't add up, and for all I know, Seven Surrenders may not make them add up any better.
The focus on the upper echelon of society is also a problem. It feels deliberate, Palmer knows too much about history to pay this little attention to representing how ordinary members of society experience the world of Too Like The Lightning, but just because it's deliberate doesn't make it more satisfying. Nameless gangs of servicers, nameless mobs, that's all we see. Stacked against the immense time lavished on the details of life in Ganymede's palace, for example, we feel very keenly how distorted a view of the world we are receiving, but there isn't enough in the subtext to undistort.
I finally finished this. After reading the first hundred or so pages when it first came out, I got distracted or something and it sat on my TBR pile for a while. And it's so dense that when I wanted to pick it up again, I had to start at the beginning, there was too much I didn't remember. It turns out that loooong Shabbos days when you can't have any human contact are good for reading long dense books like this one.
It's an incredible piece of writing. There's so much breadth to the worldbuilding and the puzzle of figuring out the ways in which the world has changed and why is fun to work through.
Too Like the Lightning imagines a world several hundred years into the future where the nation-state has dissolved and been replaced with a more fluid sense of communal organization that reminded me of Malka Older's Infomocracy. The difference is that whereas the governments in Older's book are extrapolations from modern community institutions, Palmer imagines that the world has largely chosen to look backward, to stateless variants on the models of government postulated in the 18th century Enlightenment.
For Palmer, whose day job is as a history professor, the game of revealing this mixture of old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, is the lifeforce of the book. And I am geeky enough about Enlightenment philosophy to find this fun, to enjoy thinking through the mashups of Rousseau and Sade, to admire how Palmer plays with the concept of Panopticon, etc...
But it was also unsatisfying in a whole bunch of ways. Its plot is structured too much like philosophical novels like More's Utopia or Gulliver's Travels, where the narrative moves from place to place, each representing ideas, and in the process the plot loses its way. There is a mystery novel plot animating Too Like the Lightning, but the book keeps losing the thread of it. The last four chapters or so are full of shocking revelations that feel both too surprising and not surprising enough. Our first introduction to The Anonymous, three chapters from the end, after a bunch of casual references to them throughout the book that imply their importance but don't really communicate it, is the revelation that they're having an adulterous affair with a political rival. I really didn't know what to make of it. Okay, I thought, I have no frame of reference for whether I should be surprised by this. I'm four hundred pages into this book, I really feel like Palmer should have established some sense of who I should thought The Anonymous was for this revelation to shake. And that's just about the least of the dozen or so 'surprises' from the final chapters.
To too great a degree, the book leans on the gimmick of Mycroft's unreliable narration. Palmer's worldbuilding is too dense to support it, as full of allusions that don't pay off later as allusions that do. If I spot worldbuilding defects or unanswered questions, are they things that Mycroft, and by extension Palmer, are holding back, or are they errant details that I should be ignoring as part of the general suspension of disbelief any SF reader has to employ when reading about a new world? This is very much not helped by this only being half the story. I have ordered Seven Surrenders now to continue my reading, but until I get to it, there's a lot of things about the book I just read that just don't add up, and for all I know, Seven Surrenders may not make them add up any better.
The focus on the upper echelon of society is also a problem. It feels deliberate, Palmer knows too much about history to pay this little attention to representing how ordinary members of society experience the world of Too Like The Lightning, but just because it's deliberate doesn't make it more satisfying. Nameless gangs of servicers, nameless mobs, that's all we see. Stacked against the immense time lavished on the details of life in Ganymede's palace, for example, we feel very keenly how distorted a view of the world we are receiving, but there isn't enough in the subtext to undistort.
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Date: 2020-05-10 02:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-05-10 03:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-05-11 06:33 pm (UTC)