Too Like the Lightning
by Ada Palmer
2016
Too Like the Lightning is the first book of a planned duology that later expanded into a quartet. There are a few series I've restarted this year, where I read the first book some time ago, and liked it, but never went further. I'd felt burned by the sequel to Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, I think, and had decided to only enjoy first books as stand-alones for awhile. Anyway, several of the series I'm reading right now are ones where I'm rereading the first book, and then continuing on ahead. So it's possible that I'll eventually get in a similar mood again, and come back and decide to finish Ada Palmer's series, perhaps because curiosity someday gets the better of me, but I really didn't enjoy this first book, so I kind of doubt it.
Too Like the Lightning is set in the 25th century, in the 2450s, as far from our time as we are from the Early Modern era, and there are a few conceits at work here. First is that we're being told the story of a moment of revolutionary change, when the system of world governance that is already so different from our own is about to collapse and be replaced by whatever follows it. It is written as a document for that further future, explaining how their world came to be. The second conceit is that the narrator, the extremely chatty and not terribly reliable Mycroft, is intentionally writing in an archaic style, as though this book were the product on one of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire.
One way that manifests is that Mycroft often includes asides of his imagined future audience members scolding him for the way he chooses to tell the story. Things like 'but Mycroft, thou'st were not present for this exchange, how can'st thou quote it so precisely.' This is a matter of personal preference, but I fucking hate that sort of thing; I really can't stand when columnists and bloggers do it, and I find it equally annoying here.
Another manifestation is that Mycroft refers to everyone as 'he' and 'she,' as Enlightenment authors might (and as Palmer and her actual readers are accustomed to), but which most of Mycroft's 25th century peers would find akin to referring to everyone by a slur. In almost all spoken dialogue, everyone refers to everyone else as 'they,' and it's unclear to me if people actually have gendered identities that they never speak about, or if Mycroft is taking additional liberties by assigning genders and not only by announcing them. He seems to expect his future readers to recognize these pronouns and to assume they correspond to specific anatomical features, so for every, I don't know, tenth character or so, he explains why he's calling someone by one pronoun when you the reader might expect another. I found this annoying too. It's an impressive effort at making the familiar strange, but I would genuinely hate for someone describing me to point out which of my features might tempt them to call me a man, but then insist that I'll count as a woman in their narrative because I work in a library.
I will credit Palmer that she clearly put a lot of thought into her worldbuilding, and that she's willing to throw us into the deep end and trust us to eventually take it all in, even as we're trying to keep up with the plot. Palmer's world is maybe a bit like what the Earth of A Half-Built Garden might become after enough time. Both Palmer and Emrys are grappling with imagining how people might adjust to omnipresent internet, to changes in gender and other norms of politeness, to the transformation of the nation-state system into some other kind of political power.
In Palmer's world, religion is effectively banned, with three or more people allowed to discuss belief only if a 'sensayer' is present. Households have been replaced by 'bashes', which are larger and mostly voluntary rather than hereditary, as though the most common living arrangement was something like a commune or a sorority house. Nations still exist, but their importance is nearly erased by omnipresent public transit in the form of flying cars that can get you anywhere on Earth in, at most, a couple hours. People identify with their ethnicity about as much as they do with their jobs (limited to 20 hours a week, except for workaholic 'vokers') and their many and varied hobbies. The seven world governments are called Hives, and you can only join one after you become an adult. You can also choose to remain Hiveless, and if you do, choose what level of obedience and protection you're willing to offer the law. Blacklaw Hiveless are basically anarchists who are allowed even to murder each other, though it would still be illegal for one to kill a Hive member, and I think a Hive citizen would still be breaking their own laws, which they voluntarily consented to be governed by, if they killed a Blacklaw.
Mycroft, our narrator, is a Servicer, a prisoner who is a kind of public slave. Servicers aren't incarcerated, but they also aren't allowed to have money or own property, and spend all day doing public service proects in exchange for their meals. Palmer apparently got this idea from an Enlightenment-era thought experiment. We don't find out what Mycroft's crime was until halfway through the book, we barely even get any hints, but once we learn, he talks about it frequently and matter-of-factly, which I think is emblematic of the way Palmer uses Mycroft to dole out key information. The book is a mystery, and it doesn't get solved in this volume, so maybe in book 2? But by the end I'm half prepared to think that Mycroft did it, and simply won't let on until some other character proves it. It's one thing for a narrator not to spoil the ending of their own story, quite another for them to withhold things they and the other characters all knew before the story even started. Based on Mycroft's obsession with gender and sexuality, I initially thought he might've committed some sort of sexual crime, perhaps voyeurism. When we eventually find out, it's so much worse than I expected. One character who learns the truth reacts like Mycroft is Jack the Ripper, and certainly, we discover only after this point in the book, he is equivalently infamous, and not someone you'd expect to be trusted to be a Servicer. The way this sort of information is withheld makes understanding the worldbuilding harder, because Mycroft will keep something secret from us for hundreds of pages only for it to later turn out to be common knowledge. (Although the fact that THIS Mycroft is THE Mycroft Canner is a secret. The public assumes that that criminal was executed, so people who meet him just think he has the same, previously relatively common, first name.)
As I said, the story here, which purports to show how one world order collapses and is replaced with a new one, is also a mystery. Every year, the world's most important newspapers publish their Seven-Ten lists of the most important people on the planet. The first seven are usually the Hive leaders, and the next three are other influential citizens. A few days before the lists are published, someone steals the list from the pan-Asian Mitsubishi Hive's paper, and sneaks it into the a Humanist bash, specifically, the bash of the extended, chosen family who operate the flying car network. It's not initially clear why anyone would do this, except that the investigation into who and why threatens to make all kinds of secrets public.
Among the secrets are the exact nature of the relationships among the world's ruling elite. Power is highly concentrated, and many of the Hives' leaders have public relationships - the Humanist President's sister is married to the Mitsubishi Chairman, for example. The Mitubishi Chair's many adopted children each have jobs close to the other leaders. JEDD Mason, the adopted son of the Masonic Emperor, has a high-level job in every Hive, and like Paul Atreides, is revered as some kind of chosen one by each, which looks a lot like forbidden religion. As with Mycroft's crimes, once you eventually learn the truth about all this, it's a lot more uncomfortable than you probably expected. Also, Mycroft is some sort of confidant to each leader, which is already unusual for a Servicer and would be a global scandal if the public found out.
Mycroft has one more secret that's threatened too, although this one we learn on the first page. In a secret room on the estate of the bash that operates the flying cars, with the help of one bash-member but without the knowledge of the others, Mycroft is raising an orphaned boy whom he found on the estate as a toddler. The boy, Bridger, has the supernatural power to turn any representation of a thing into the real thing, like turning a drawing of food into real edible food, or bringing his plastic army men to life. Bridger is a sweet kid, who seems to understand the risk of turning into the kid from that one episode of Twilight Zone who sends people to the cornfield, and tries to use his miraculous powers responsibly. Mycroft claims that by the end of the story, we'll see that it's Bridger, even more than the intimately entangled Hive leaders, who will be responsible for transforming the world. Although that doesn't happen until book 2 or later, so I guess I may never find out how or why everything changes.
One way that manifests is that Mycroft often includes asides of his imagined future audience members scolding him for the way he chooses to tell the story. Things like 'but Mycroft, thou'st were not present for this exchange, how can'st thou quote it so precisely.' This is a matter of personal preference, but I fucking hate that sort of thing; I really can't stand when columnists and bloggers do it, and I find it equally annoying here.
Another manifestation is that Mycroft refers to everyone as 'he' and 'she,' as Enlightenment authors might (and as Palmer and her actual readers are accustomed to), but which most of Mycroft's 25th century peers would find akin to referring to everyone by a slur. In almost all spoken dialogue, everyone refers to everyone else as 'they,' and it's unclear to me if people actually have gendered identities that they never speak about, or if Mycroft is taking additional liberties by assigning genders and not only by announcing them. He seems to expect his future readers to recognize these pronouns and to assume they correspond to specific anatomical features, so for every, I don't know, tenth character or so, he explains why he's calling someone by one pronoun when you the reader might expect another. I found this annoying too. It's an impressive effort at making the familiar strange, but I would genuinely hate for someone describing me to point out which of my features might tempt them to call me a man, but then insist that I'll count as a woman in their narrative because I work in a library.
I will credit Palmer that she clearly put a lot of thought into her worldbuilding, and that she's willing to throw us into the deep end and trust us to eventually take it all in, even as we're trying to keep up with the plot. Palmer's world is maybe a bit like what the Earth of A Half-Built Garden might become after enough time. Both Palmer and Emrys are grappling with imagining how people might adjust to omnipresent internet, to changes in gender and other norms of politeness, to the transformation of the nation-state system into some other kind of political power.
In Palmer's world, religion is effectively banned, with three or more people allowed to discuss belief only if a 'sensayer' is present. Households have been replaced by 'bashes', which are larger and mostly voluntary rather than hereditary, as though the most common living arrangement was something like a commune or a sorority house. Nations still exist, but their importance is nearly erased by omnipresent public transit in the form of flying cars that can get you anywhere on Earth in, at most, a couple hours. People identify with their ethnicity about as much as they do with their jobs (limited to 20 hours a week, except for workaholic 'vokers') and their many and varied hobbies. The seven world governments are called Hives, and you can only join one after you become an adult. You can also choose to remain Hiveless, and if you do, choose what level of obedience and protection you're willing to offer the law. Blacklaw Hiveless are basically anarchists who are allowed even to murder each other, though it would still be illegal for one to kill a Hive member, and I think a Hive citizen would still be breaking their own laws, which they voluntarily consented to be governed by, if they killed a Blacklaw.
Mycroft, our narrator, is a Servicer, a prisoner who is a kind of public slave. Servicers aren't incarcerated, but they also aren't allowed to have money or own property, and spend all day doing public service proects in exchange for their meals. Palmer apparently got this idea from an Enlightenment-era thought experiment. We don't find out what Mycroft's crime was until halfway through the book, we barely even get any hints, but once we learn, he talks about it frequently and matter-of-factly, which I think is emblematic of the way Palmer uses Mycroft to dole out key information. The book is a mystery, and it doesn't get solved in this volume, so maybe in book 2? But by the end I'm half prepared to think that Mycroft did it, and simply won't let on until some other character proves it. It's one thing for a narrator not to spoil the ending of their own story, quite another for them to withhold things they and the other characters all knew before the story even started. Based on Mycroft's obsession with gender and sexuality, I initially thought he might've committed some sort of sexual crime, perhaps voyeurism. When we eventually find out, it's so much worse than I expected. One character who learns the truth reacts like Mycroft is Jack the Ripper, and certainly, we discover only after this point in the book, he is equivalently infamous, and not someone you'd expect to be trusted to be a Servicer. The way this sort of information is withheld makes understanding the worldbuilding harder, because Mycroft will keep something secret from us for hundreds of pages only for it to later turn out to be common knowledge. (Although the fact that THIS Mycroft is THE Mycroft Canner is a secret. The public assumes that that criminal was executed, so people who meet him just think he has the same, previously relatively common, first name.)
As I said, the story here, which purports to show how one world order collapses and is replaced with a new one, is also a mystery. Every year, the world's most important newspapers publish their Seven-Ten lists of the most important people on the planet. The first seven are usually the Hive leaders, and the next three are other influential citizens. A few days before the lists are published, someone steals the list from the pan-Asian Mitsubishi Hive's paper, and sneaks it into the a Humanist bash, specifically, the bash of the extended, chosen family who operate the flying car network. It's not initially clear why anyone would do this, except that the investigation into who and why threatens to make all kinds of secrets public.
Among the secrets are the exact nature of the relationships among the world's ruling elite. Power is highly concentrated, and many of the Hives' leaders have public relationships - the Humanist President's sister is married to the Mitsubishi Chairman, for example. The Mitubishi Chair's many adopted children each have jobs close to the other leaders. JEDD Mason, the adopted son of the Masonic Emperor, has a high-level job in every Hive, and like Paul Atreides, is revered as some kind of chosen one by each, which looks a lot like forbidden religion. As with Mycroft's crimes, once you eventually learn the truth about all this, it's a lot more uncomfortable than you probably expected. Also, Mycroft is some sort of confidant to each leader, which is already unusual for a Servicer and would be a global scandal if the public found out.
Mycroft has one more secret that's threatened too, although this one we learn on the first page. In a secret room on the estate of the bash that operates the flying cars, with the help of one bash-member but without the knowledge of the others, Mycroft is raising an orphaned boy whom he found on the estate as a toddler. The boy, Bridger, has the supernatural power to turn any representation of a thing into the real thing, like turning a drawing of food into real edible food, or bringing his plastic army men to life. Bridger is a sweet kid, who seems to understand the risk of turning into the kid from that one episode of Twilight Zone who sends people to the cornfield, and tries to use his miraculous powers responsibly. Mycroft claims that by the end of the story, we'll see that it's Bridger, even more than the intimately entangled Hive leaders, who will be responsible for transforming the world. Although that doesn't happen until book 2 or later, so I guess I may never find out how or why everything changes.
No comments:
Post a Comment