Read Too Like the Lightning, part of the Terra Ignota series, by Ada Palmer. I generally try to be a lot nicer about books written by living authors, on the off chance that they read what I'm saying. For example, I tried not to be very mean about the Baru Cormorant series, which I thought was pretty bad but had some strong points I could highlight, but I was perfectly willing to go in on Madame Bovary. All I can say is, I tried. You see, Too Like the Lightning is straight up terrible, and it is basically impossible to find anything nice to say about it at all.
Too Like the Lightning is an unbelievably stupid book. Now, I don't require total scientific fidelity from my science fiction, not unless the author signals I should. But I do think authors should be at least broadly aware of what laws they are breaking to get what they want, and Palmer very clearly isn't. Basically everyone has the predictive/prescient powers of Dune characters through mathematical oracles, despite this being provably impossible. Everyone travels in cheap supersonic private jets that probably also have VTOL capability, which are powered by Fucking Magic presumably, the author sure as hell doesn't seem to care. This wouldn't be as annoying if the book didn't spend so much time musing on the deep sociological effects of the FM-powered aircars, while entirely forgetting that evidently both Fucking Magic and oracles apparently exist and should probably affect society in some way also. There's also more minor points. At one point, the first of the aircars is analogized to the Nina and Pinta and Apollo XI, all of which were notable exploration vessels, not technical breakthroughs. The appropriate comparisons would be to something like the Kitty Hawk Flyer or Stephenson's Rocket or some of the Trevithick machines. Sure, it's a minor error, but for a novel this pretentious, all errors are serious. There is no appreciable narrative reason for this error either. If the book were edited, perhaps someone would have noticed.
The ideological and historiographical (more on this later) background is also just kind of dumb. The book is trying to make some tedious liberal points and also say that we need to have very serious discussions about like sexism and racism or whatever. What the content of these discussions is supposed to be is extremely unclear, and as far as I can tell simply the existence of them will basically fix things on its own because discussion is magic and leads to Truth and such, except, of course, when the narrative needs for it not to. Also destroying a book is kind of like killing a person, and other trite garbage. Anyway, where the book actually ends up is in my opinion quite far from the apparent intent, but unfortunately not in a very interesting way. Suffice to say, if I wanted to read kinda racist gender-normative rapey fiction with clockwork twists scattered around, where all the characters are secretly serial killers (notably Mycroft and the Saneer-Weeksbooths) because that makes them edgier or something I guess, I suspect I could still do a whole lot better than Too Like the Lightning, for example by reading self-insert Wattpad romance novels about pop stars, or werewolf erotica, or self-insert Wattpad erotica about werewolf pop stars. The incest is boring as hell and cowardly, too. It's a book that's trying to shock you, but the author doesn't know how to actually do that because, again, just not very good at writing at all. It doesn't help that the pacing is so horrible that none of the shocking twists actually land, especially since absolutely nothing keeps actually happening. Sure, Too Like the Lightning is the way it is for a reason, but so is the werewolf erotica, and helping other people jack off is a far more noble pursuit than jacking yourself off.
If the book is so stupid, why do a lot of fairly intelligent people seem to like it so much? Well, a lot of those people are Rationalists it seems (or close enough to it), and Rationalists have insanely bad taste in fiction for some reason. Actually Rationalists have insanely bad taste generally speaking but it's especially marked in fiction. And it's obvious why Rationalists would like the book, it treats intelligence as a comic book superpower the way they do, there's group homes and libertarianism and all sorts of other stuff they like. But there's a more fundamental feature that I think a certain kind of nerd loves about Too Like the Lightning. It's the omnipresent didactic tone, just like with Baru Cormorant, though here it's somehow even more obtrusive. Some people evidently like it when the author has a character read an encyclopedia entry for a paragraph or two for no particular reason, or pointedly make and then exhaustively explain a reference. I suspect it's because if they knew the reference, they feel like very clever students who read ahead, and if they didn't know the reference they feel like they are learning. I think it might be a form of high school nostalgia, the nerd version of student athletes unable to move on. Which is normal I suppose, I still think about doing amateur theater after all, but it does seem kind of embarrassing. To me, at least, the didactic tone always feels insulting regardless of if I knew the reference or not.
This insistence on transforming most of the characters into condescending lecture or encyclopedia entry delivery mechanisms understandably has serious consequences for the readability of the novel itself. It is impossible to believe that any of the supposed 10 billion people in the Hives that we barely ever see any actual traces of are actually persons in the eyes of the author or the narrative. Nor are most of the several dozen very important characters we do meet, to be fair. There is a single character, Eureka, who reaches the dizzying heights of "is an actual character" and she barely shows up. Thisbe is the only other one under consideration, but, eh, nah. Everyone else is functionally just a rhetorical device, because outside of the exposition most of the novel is poorly stylized as philosophical dialogue in Enlightenment style.
According to the Author's Note, Palmer sincerely wants to be participating in the Great Conversation. Now, this is a lost cause from the start. You cannot engage in a conversation by just parroting the words of others, and if you don't have any ideas of your own (and it is quite reasonable not to, there are so many people and so few ideas to be had), then a bare minimum would be the ability to rephrase or synthesize them. Now, maybe Palmer can do this, in lectures to students. Or maybe not, I have known instructors like that too (especially in history, lately). All I know is that Too Like the Lightning is no thoughts, all cliches. But if there were original ideas, the framing device would interfere anyway. You fundamentally cannot participate in a conversation while maintaining plausible deniability for everything by hiding behind your fictional characters, as Palmer does with Mycroft. Whenever I object to, well, more or less any feature of the novel, its fans can always say that actually I just haven't been paying enough attention to the unreliability of the narrator. This objection tends to be either false or irrelevant, but it's a pain in the ass to prove, and the only reason it is possible in the first place is that the author is actively refusing to stake out a position to be held to.
For what it's worth, I don't think it's out of cowardice. Palmer seems to have noticed that the tradition of the conte philosophique and the genres that take off of it includes a lot of different styles and narrative devices, and has ultimately decided to use most of them, invariably quite poorly. I've read conte philosophique, and it does not read like conte philosophique, sorry, the writing is all so painfully 21st century. Ironically, the one major device for philosophical stories I can think of that was not used, the travelogue, is the one I think is clearly most appropriate to the sort of worldbuilding-based speculative fiction Palmer is engaging in here, both from a practical and a historical perspective. The eclectic stylistic muddle makes the novel much longer without giving it any additional depth, the styles do not complement each other, and also the author very obviously does not have the skill required to pull any of it off. Authors, unless exceptionally competent, should pick at most one gimmick per work. Might not have helped here, but it's good practice either way.
One of the techniques that gets talked about with regards to the book is the unreliable narrator, probably because the device is referenced in the book right at the start. In fact, contrary to what people insist, it is not really present in the sense I would understand it, of a narrator styled as deliberately deceiving the audience in order to promote his own agenda. Since the narrator of Too Like the Lightning, like basically every other character in the novel, evidently only actually has an agenda or motive as an informed attribute, there is no way for the reader to reason their way to the implied meta-narrative of what "actually happened", because I'm pretty sure that meta-narrative doesn't actually exist. As far as I can tell, the only actual function of the extremely tedious and obtrusive in-universe narrator is to justify telling the exposition in a particular twist-preserving order, which, again, is not what the unreliable narrator is.
The novel really does consist almost exclusively of dry narration and loredumps. Nothing ever happens in this miserable 460 page slog. I really mean this, nothing actually happens and nobody really does anything except flit around irrelevantly at supersonic speeds. A bunch of characters talk to each other, or talk at each other, or read the encyclopedia at each other. But it turns out none of that actually matters, because enough of the characters are basically omniscient (except for all the stuff they can't know otherwise the story falls apart, even though there's no conceivable way they wouldn't know) that there is no appreciable difference between characters talking at each other and thinking at each other, which they also spend way too much time doing. None of the dialogue serves to develop the characters, because, as discussed earlier, there aren't any. None of the dialogue serves to establish the plot or stakes, because the plot gets retconned every other chapter with yet another tedious twist so there's no real point in following the intrigue, which I'm pretty sure consists mostly of plot holes by the end anyway. Worst of all, a consistent pattern in these retcons is that it becomes clearer and clearer that an alarming number of the conversations in this book are actually functionally just a guy talking to himself.
It kind of makes sense that the novel is more or less entirely people talking to each other (well that and poorly done metatextual horseshit) because it turns out the novel endirses a fundamental theory of historical change consisting entirely of people talking to each other, specifically, a variation on Great Man Theory that says change happens because the most important members of the very real and existing natural aristocracy get into a room together in order to figure out what's going to happen next by finding the smartest bestest boy from among them all and all just doing what he says, and then maybe some other stuff that doesn't matter happens after who cares, all of the actual persons have made their decisions. History of ideas people are basically all wacky, but this seems extreme even for them, so I sure hope Palmer isn't actually teaching anything like this. In addition to being based on a variant of it, Too Like the Lightning references and then explains its own reference to Great Man Theory, and naturally has its own Great Man in the narrative itself, the guy talking to himself from the last paragraph, and boy is he unbearable.
The guy in question, Y.U.D.D. MASON, is genuinely in the running for the most insufferable character ever written. I wouldn't mind him being written like a particularly annoying teenager with delusions of grandeur who has evidently somehow read both far too much and far too little philosophy so much if the novel did not take every single opportunity to make it absolutely unquestionable that this horrid little git is in fact an unparalleled superhuman intellect omniscient oracle capable of outright mind control through speech alone. And no, that's not a unreliable narrator thing. My understanding is that somehow this gets much worse over the course of the rest of the books, which I will not read because frankly 460 pages was an unreasonable test of my patience and commitment to reviewing everything I read and finishing everything I review. Apparently at the end he starts a civil war and becomes God-Emperor of Humanity or whatever, who even cares.
Look, a persistent obsession with Mars, nonsensical car-based revolutionizing of transportation, references to De Sade, excessive confidence in mathematical oracles, these are not the preoccupations of a serious thinker, these are the preoccupations of Elon Musk. Musk really is a convenient example of the sort of Great Man that actually exists by contrast to the ones you get in fiction and in Carlyle. Richest man on the planet, widely acknowledged power behind the throne of the most powerful state out there, owner of what was once (you know, before he bought it) regarded as the online public square, AI magnate, rocketman, surely here we have the Great Man of our time? Except, wait, we know him. We know him from his irrepressible habit of Posting, his now decades of pathetic self-promotion, his desperate need to turn himself into a living meme to get the attention he never got from his father, and which he in turn will not give to his two dozen kids. He is a massive loser whose aesthetic interests consist of the most accessible symbols of coolness and futurism that he can find, up to and including the glyph 'X' and memes that got old over a decade ago. What does it say about Too Like the Lightning that half of its aesthetic language is not only shared with this fucking loser, but is even projected out to the 26th century? Nothing good, that's for sure.
It is my opinion that novels should be edited. Unfortunately publishers do not seem to agree. Editing could never have made this book good, but it might at least have informed the publishers of the scale of mistake they were in the course of making. This novel was a lost cause the moment it was accepted for publication, which happened by a mechanism I am still quite unable to explain. The Author's Note does contain a very helpful list of the extraordinarily many collaborators allegedly responsible, of whom I would pick out for particular discredit the editorial decision-makers and the peers who apparently encouraged the creation of the work. That this book was written was a mistake, that it was published was a travesty, that it got sequels is an absurdity. The existence of Too Like the Lightning is an enormous embarrassment to the entire genre of Science Fiction, whose reputation was frankly already quite bad for very good reasons. Anyway, I'm never going to read Worm that's for damn sure.
This novel made me afraid to write my own intended stories, for fear that they will end up like this. Ordinarily, this is where I mention what kinds of person might enjoy the novel, recommend it to someone even if I did not like it myself. Frankly, I think I have provided enough information for people to figure out whether or not they would like it, but I have to confess that I do not think anyone should read this book, including the ones who would enjoy it. It's not for moral reasons or anything, I just think the book is that bad.
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