Ada Palmer's THE WILL TO BATTLE (Narrated by T. Ryder Smith)

 Ada Palmer did some interesting things as her weird and highly imaginative third volume of the Terra Ignota series, The Will to Battle, kicked off that I both admire and find frustrating as hell, which is my reaction to this series overall anyway, so let's just talk about that right away before I get around to the rest of the book.

As the story begins, most of her 25th Century society is in shambles. A 200+ year conspiracy of minutely targeted assassinations to keep the peace has been unmasked at the expense of exposing the complicity of three of the seven Hives (for more about these and the way this society as a function works as a whole, look at my posts on the earlier volumes, Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders) in that plot. 

Furthermore, a grander plot to make one young man, the unbelievably strange J.E.D.D. Mason, the heir to the leadership of all seven Hives, has also been unmasked, exposing, yes, the complicity of all seven Hive leaders and numerous other high officials as compromised in some fairly icky ways. Plus, a very public attempt on the life of J.E.D.D. Mason that was actually successful also forced the "miracle child" Bridger out of hiding to bring J.E.D.D. Mason back to life (!) and pretty much shatter the ever-precarious commitment to secularity in this society; if a child like Bridger and a young man like J.E.D.D. Mason can exist, that's a Babel Fish caliber argument that there really is a God of some kind and that that God has been paying attention and chosen to intervene.

This is a hell of a read for the early days of Russia's attack on Ukraine, by the way. 

But so, everybody is in crisis, starting with the Congress of the Universal Free Alliance (the seven Hives), this society's ultimate deliberative/legislative body, whereat a whole lot of drastic measures have been put up for debate, up to and including dissolving the Hive that hosted and hid the assasination conspiracy. In order to force everybody to slow down and think things through, the head of the Masonic Hive, Cornel Mason, who bears the title of Masonic Emperor (and is also the adoptive father of J.E.D.D. Mason), takes the drastic step of joining the session and demanding the floor for a filibuster, in which we finally get to learn what "Black Law" and "Gray Law" and "White Law" mean both as modifiers for "Hiveless" (people who have chosen not to become members of any of the seven Hives) and as codifications of this society's laws in and of themselves, and reads out long-winded but carefully thought-out passages from the universal charter that governs all of Earth. For two long novels previously, hundreds and hundreds of pages and/or hours and hours of audio, we've encountered those terms -- Madame D'Arouet always wears her Black Law Hiveless sash over her elaborate 18th Century cosplay, for instance, and we've frequently heard other characters and officials as being Gray Laws or White Laws, but had to stumble along on context and our traditional (Western) associations for the associated colors. But now we finally learn what it all really means: Black Laws agree to be governed only by a bare minimum of the codified laws of the UFA, those that have universally been agreed to be undebateable over generations (like don't kill people, don't destroy nature, don't torture animals, don't interfere with emergency workers, don't break contracts, etc*); the Gray Law Hiveless and White Law Hiveless have agreed to be governed by further expansions of these laws, but we don't get to find out the details of these as Mason's filibuster is finally concluded when other delegates break in to announce that they have complied with his wishes and come up with a reasonable agenda for the session.

So on the one hand I really, really like how Palmer made the infodump of these laws an organic part of the plot instead of sticking them in as an appendix or just forcing us to cruise on context, but I'm also really, really annoyed that we had to wait until this third volume for this to come up. But there are other frustrations yet to consider and, yeah, bigger than usual spoilers in my very spoilery blog for TLTL and SS.

A big concern as a handful of characters desperately try to hold everything together is with whom a new-old character is going to side, and it's not really Mycroft; nor is it Bridger the Miracle Child, except that it kind of is, because the heartbreaking climax to SS saw Bridger giving up his self and his body to become a much more limited but still amazing character who both is and isn't Achilles, and yes, I mean the Greek hero whose Rage touched off the Iliad (which one of Mycroft's murder victims was re-writing as a space opera with giant robots duking it out between the planets). The resulting new-old character, who not only carries the Greek hero's memories and personality (very much as imagined by Homer but also somewhat the actual man the mythical figure is supposed to have been based on) but also those of the kind of battle-hardened World War II-ish officer represented by the little green army men toys kids apparently still play with into the 25th century, and the re-imagined Achilles of the space opera rewrite of the Iliad. It's weird and complicated and I kind of wish more attention had been given to what existence must really be like for such a being, but what's important here is that he is the only human-ish being alive who actually knows how to do this whole War thing. So everybody wants him on their side, especially since he and Mycroft kind of come as a package deal, except for the whole problem that Mycroft is simultaneously both a) Everybody in the whole world's slave as a Servicer but also b) Very much a part of J.E.D.D. Mason's sworn staff, so, big thumb on the scale there. This storyline alone is enough drama and angst to fill a whole book but this is Terra Ignota so...

But first, I have to express one great big disappointment that is really more my problem than the book's but it greatly diminishes my enjoyment of this series in much the way the revelation that Niccolo/Claes in Dorothy Dunnet's House of Niccolo has at least one frankly supernatural ability in that he can totally douse for water and precious metals, which annoyed me so much that I still havent read past The Unicorn Hunt even though I 100% love that series and want to know how it ends. And yeah, five years is a long time to hold a grudge but there are so many other good books out there, you guys!

Anyway, J.E.D.D. Mason is a god.** Maybe Bridger was, too, only he didn't get to grow up and his transformation into Achilles divested him of his extraordinary powers, so we'll never find out, but J.E.D.D. Mason is totally a god, invited by what he calls The God of This Universe to visit here and have a Conversation after he's experienced existence here for a while. I really, really could have done without this, and if it wasn't for the fact that this novel ended on not so much a cliffhanger as a possibly misperceived tragedy every bit as devastating as the Bridgermorphosis that ended SS I might have just stopped but all the stuff that happened at the end there was just stunning and I had to find out what happens next, for all that really not a whole lot happened in this one; it's just that what little did happen was huge and had tremendous consequences that has put all of humanity and (as Mycroft points out) all of its history of sacrfice and achievement at stake, because what was it all for if humanity finally decides to end it all in a family spat after hundreds of years of peace?

But so, there's the prolonged parliamentary debate I mentioned above, and then a visit to the Blacklaw stronghold of Hobbestown which, again, is so interesting I would absolutely love to read a whole novel set there for all that it's basically Galt's Gulch with cooler technology, and along the way J.E.D.D. Mason not only reveals to everybody that yep, he's a god, but also declares war on everybody else and demands the unconditional surrender to him personally of all seven hives, but nobody seems to care too much about that because there's already going to be a war, until the guy that originally shot J.E.D.D. Mason dead decides he's going to make everybody care and a temporary planetary truce is declared so the Olympic Games can be held in Antarctica (!) and the Utopians rile the waters some more by whisking away everybody on earth with the knowledge and capability to build "Harbingers" (this world's term for any kind of weapon, nuclear, biological, cybernetic, whatever, that can end the world) so that nobody has the advantage that they pose and everything goes even more to hell than the reader has already been expecting and I'm IN.

Plus, except when he is voicing the two characters that are going to be annoying to listen to anyway, Madam D'Arouet and Thisbe, T. Ryder Smith has grown on me. I've still gone ahead and just squeezed my budget to get the ebook of the fourth volume, though, since my library still hasn't acquired it in any edition yet and I want to finish this series with it all still fresh in my head because otherwise I'll probably never bother.***

But, I am so not down with the god thing, you guys. Snarl. Anyway, onward to Perhaps the Stars.

*I found a great site that has transcribed the whole of the law code read off by Emperor Mason here. It's been a great resource for writing this post since one of the other annoyances of audio books is how difficult it is to go back and check on important passages like this.

**His only godlike power, though, is inspiring ridiculous, even slavish loyalty in those close to him, and being really, really annoying. He was raised by Madame D'Arouet, after all, who decided on top of everything else to basiclaly make him learn seven or eight languages at once, so he grew up speaking his own idiosyncratic pidgeon of all of them that only a handful of people can understand and needs Mycroft, who also happens to speak all of those languages from a systematic self-education he undertook as part of his Big Murder Plot as a young man, to translate for him. So I don't know if it's just meant to be J.E.D.D. Mason really being an annoying character or if he just seems more so because Mycroft has chosen to write his chronicles in the style of the 18th century, but J.E.D.D. Mason's monologues (which is the only way he speaks, generally; he declaims) sound something like this:

[My universe] differs greatly from this one… My universe does not have time, space, limit, ignorance, discovery, exploration, hope, solitude, or death… Your own Creator, the Maker of this universe, is My Peer. He made this flesh so that I might visit His universe and here perceive His works. It is a dialogue between Us. During My visit I have experienced some forms of human suffering, so I sympathize with what you endure for Our dialectic, but I know no other way for Us to communicate.

But so, anyway, I'm still not sure if he is "actually" a god or if he's just convinced everybody that he is a god, but they're functionally the same thing so, yuck. 

**Though I'm still going to finish House of Niccolo someday soon. Just, again, there's not going to be anymore new Dorothy Dunnett, so I'm rationing her out like I do Philip K. Dick.