Ada Palmer's PERHAPS THE STARS

Blogger's note: This post concerns the fourth novel of a quartet so it might not make a lot of sense if you haven't read my posts on the other three books. 

 We are the instruments that carve the path from cave walls to the stars.

And so I come to the very satisfying end of Terra Ignota, Ada Palmer's astonishing and astonishingly weird and unexpectedly timely quartet of 18th century-styled science fiction novels,  with Perhaps the Stars. Suddenly, Palmer has decided that there is no time to waste and turns the story arc into the incident-crammed War Story it's always threatened to become, with one huge change: [REDACTED] is understood to be dead with his place taken up by a character who has never gotten a name and who has barely appeared in the prior three novels unless one has been watching for them carefully, but is this really a new character? Or is it actually somebody else? Or possibly somebodies else? We sort of find out later, but can we trust what we're told? These kinds of puzzles are why I like these kinds of books, and why I consider Ada Palmer to be the literary love child of Dorothy Dunnett and Gene Wolfe.

There are lots of reasons why I now consider this the most satisfying series ender I've encountered in yoinks. And yes, that includes the one you're thinking of. It might, over time, come to be considered on a par with that one, but then again, it might end up ranking as better, for me.

The most exciting thing I have to say going into this post is that, at long last, we get to start learning about that most mysterious seventh hive, which has only gotten passing mention so far: the mostly-Moon-dwelling Utopian Hive, which has been busily engaged in a generations-long project to terraform Mars as so many "small u" utopian types long to do in so many other science fiction stories. Unlike any of those I've read (with the sort-of-exception of the Expanse novels), though, this terraforming project has always dwelt in the shadow of war, because on Earth another hive, a bizarre hybrid of the good old Mitsubishi corporation we know from our reality and the good old Greenpeace organization that we also know from our reality, has been steadily buying up every scrap of land on Earth for the entire life of this post Church-War 25th century civilization. Land, the Mitsubishi Hive believes, is the ultimate repository of wealth, and an individual's power within the Hive is directly related to how much land they own -- but what happens when suddenly there is a whole new planet's worth of land available that is not really within Mitsubishi's easy grasp? Won't its Earthly holdings lose value? And won't that be a swell casus belli? To, uh, go with all the other casus belli we've encountered in these books? 

This background is of paramount importance in the other three books in that it is inextricably intertwined with the lot in life of primary narrator Mycroft Canner, who alleges that he committed his crimes at least partly to avert a deliberately planned war his adopted family was committed to provoking -- on the grounds of war being better now, while Mars is still a project and not yet a reality, than later, when a war would be an interplanetary disaster that could actually annihilate the entire human race. Despite the importance of all of this, though, Utopia has been a cypher, until Perhaps the Stars, in which we finally get to hear U-Speak spoken, encounter its vast diversity of U-beasts (strange and fanciful hybrids of genetic engineering and cybernetics) and get to know at least one actual character from that Hive. And his awesome invisible black lion!

It's about time!

Meanwhile, War. Of course, we have since seen that nothing so drastic or exotic as a sudden glut of Martian land on the market in the distant future is needed to touch off conflict in this world that has only managed to stay peaceful through a secret program of precisely targeted assassinations over its hundreds of years of history. The prior three novels have explored the much more mundane causes that will actually bring war to this idyllic-seeming world. All it has really taken is one jilted lover (and never mind they'd been jilted for a weird kind of faithlessness) with access to the right information and the will to expose that the leaders of this world have feet of clay, and the appearance on the world scene of a would-be dictator who might wind up a benevolent one but who really wants to take that chance except for fools and people who have been conquered by the dictator's personal anti-charisma?

And speaking of J.E.D.D. Mason, thank goodness for the Utopian Hive, and one character, Huxley, in particular. Huxley has been guarding our new/old narrator invisibly throughout the chaos, and in a moment of bared souls explained that there is a very good reason why J.E.D.D. Mason's sobriquet in their culture is The Alien; as far as Huxley is concerned, he is one:

 I believe we had no reason to assume First Contact would come to us in a ship of steel across the darkness that we happened to have senses tune to see. Why not a ship of flesh? Why not across a darkness as unknown to us as Starlight to the creatures of the deep sea? I believe a Being boundaryless and unfamiliar with time, accustomed to an existence where everything within Its perception is directed by Its thoughts, would find it very hard to understand our physics and experience, hard to explain Itself to us. And I believe that, if the first humans to teach this being language were Madame's it might well learn from them the word God.

For much of the novel, though, J.E.D.D. Mason is really just a J.E.D.D. Mason-shaped hole in the narrative, because an early salvo in the war was a masterful dual attack on the planet-wide system of flying cars, conveniently centrally controlled in order to maintain a truly impressive safety record, and the global communications system. Suddenly every human on earth has to confront the reality of Distance* again, and everybody is stuck where they were when the initial attack took place. J.E.D.D. Mason was in the Masonic capital city of Alexandria; most everybody else we're still concerned with (and mercifully a whole lot of characters that I have disliked thoroughly in the prior three novels have kind of dropped out of this one) is in the Alliance headquarters city-complex of Romanova on the island of Sardinia, or has been trapped elsewhere by circumstance or design. But without the ability even to make the 25th century's equivalent of a phone call, J.E.D.D. Mason is stranded and all but mute (remember, he speaks all languages and none, and only Mycroft Canner can understand him well enough to interpret his speeches for everybody else).

Meanwhile, Mycroft's fellow J.E.D.D.-fanboi and one of the series' enduring villains, Dominic Seneschal, made on J.E.D.D.'s suggestion the interim head of Mitsubishi since the previous one is under arrest for the crimes of the targeted assassination program that blew up and was exposed earlier in the series, is stuck in Japan, but that's not going to keep him from his idol. Seemingly the whole of Mitsubishi's resources have been bent to the single goal of "rescuing" J.E.D.D. Mason from Alexandria -- whether J.E.D.D. wants that or not -- and suddenly Mitsubishi has a huge and powerful naval force and, for all that the Hive owns most of the land on earth, suddenly controls the seas as well, commandeering other ships, interning their crews in prison camps or forcing enemy personnel to adopt one of a handful of other, rather ingenious means of guaranteeing their cooperation**, and generally terrorizing everybody. And that's not all!

A fact of this world that I've not talked much about before looms as potentially as big an issue for it as the existence and will of J.E.D.D. Mason, and that's the existence of a new type of human, created rather than born, very different from the standard model, known for reasons that I'm not going to get into here as a "Set-Set." Set-Sets are raised from infancy to interface directly with the intricate and omnipresent technological web that runs the world; for instance, two members of the family-unit that controls the global flying car system are Set-Sets as that is the only way a human being could manage the levels of complexity required to do that. Anyway, Set-Sets' biological senses are stunted in favor of the adapted ability to accept a much greater range of inputs via their interfaces with technology; their bodies are attenuated and weak. They're not regarded as cyborgs, but functionally, they are cyborgs. And a faction within this society is as angry about their existence as 21st century fundamentalist types are about abortion; to them the whole practice of raising Set-Sets is an abomination that should be outlawed and severely punished. And as Perhaps the Stars gets going, this faction, called the Nurturists, has greatly expanded its definition of what counts as a Set-Set. All of the people who grew up in Madame D'Auroet's brother, for instance, have been branded "Gender Set-Sets"*** -- but these, at least two of whom have grown up to lead or co-lead Hives, are not being targeted for "rescue" as they are to be regarded as irredeemable. They're to be put down.

Under cover of War, this can be pretty easily accomplished, they come to realize. If they can just get someone into proximity with the targets.

The other element that has really made this final volume of the Terra Ignota quartet stand out for me above the prior four, though, is none of the above. What stands out is its willingness -- indeed,  insistence on -- dealing with a fundamental question at the heart of science fiction that usually seems, very carefully and deliberately, to be ignored: is it worth it? Is the dream of space and discovering and settling other worlds, which is, after all, an experience that won't be open to us all or even to very many of us, worth the commitment of effort and resources and time and agony it would take to achieve? And, just because our ancestors thought so, or at least acted like they thought so, does that definitely bind us and our descendants to continuing in that costly endeavor? Life on earth is already no picnic, even in this idyllic 25th century, even before materiél and intellect and energy and, eventually, personnel that could be devoted to trying to improve the lot of humans already born and growing old and suffering and getting ill and making art and dying and mourning the dead... is diverted towards a dream that none of the billions from whom they're diverted will get to enjoy? Is Space the ultimate Sunk Cost Fallacy for the human race, at least as it now exists?

This tension is enacted as a secret war within the War that J.E.D.D. Mason terms "the Trunk War", the analogy describing the choice between exploring and colonizing Space or using our resources to make Earth better now for everyone as two great branches on a decision tree, each battling to become that tree's trunk. Utopia, of course, represents Space, and seems to be leading humanity in its direction with everybody's blessing,  but we discover in this last novel that many of the anomalies Mycroft and the gang have been encountering are very much due to the machinations of those who want Paradise on Earth Now. A whole Hive's worth of somebodies has been throwing incredibly subtle but devastating spanners into the works since even before the War began. Intrigue!

Only - need this be a zero-sum game, everybody realizes late in the novel? Doesn't the existence of J.E.D.D. and the Miracle Child Bridger and a bunch of cool stuff Bridger did before turning into Achilles maybe give everybody a chance at both? Especially since these mcguffins have put things like biological immortality for everyone very much within our reach? Which, wouldn't colonizing the stars be a lot less painful if we could attempt it as immortals instead of, for instance, sentencing several as yet unborn generations to living out their entire lives as passengers/cargo on spaceships, never even to know planetary life for even a moment?

As all of these thorny issues get careful consideration and occasional actual battle scenes occur, Perhaps the Stars attempts one more semi-innovation in genre fiction: making the transfer of power from one generation to the next an equal concern to all the other story elements; Mycroft is not the only major chess piece to be swept off the board for considerable periods of in-narrative time, and several key resolutions to crises are developed and executed by promoted pawns, as is emphasized in a fantastic instance of near-gloating when a narrator realizes that series villainess Madame's quartet-long plot to rule the world by bringing back Patriarchy was defeated by a whole bunch of, uh, decidedly not Patriarchs. And more explicitly, while 25th century society had already greatly empowered young people through things like creating a class of legislators that can only be minors but by giving the 25 Minority Senators the power of veto over any decision made by the Romanova Alliance Senate if all 25 of those Minor Senators agree, as "Peacefall" in its many forms begins the work of remaking society, the Minor Senators, who were raised with absolute faith in the institutions of their society and the infrastructure that made it a near-paradise and then watched their elders almost destroy it, get final say in how the perpetrators of the war are to make amends for what they destroyed. And the category of "perpetrators" includes both faction leaders and actual combatants, with even J.E.D.D Mason (himself still a minor while this whole epic takes place) sharing in the (incredibly fair and wholesome) sentence the young people mete out. Among the many, many ideas for thinking our way, as a species, out of our myriad of existential threats and dilemmas here back in the 21st century that Ada Palmer has suggested in this quartet, this last one -- empowering the kids to have a real say in how things are run -- is the one that makes me the most wistful, because probably the least likely ever to get implemented. And so I end this series and this post on a sigh. And the sinking feeling that I'm probably going to have to read this quartet again sometime.

Bravo!

*Personified by Palmer-as-Mycroft as the Greek god Poseidon, whose realm was the oceans, since it is the oceans that are the hardest for humans to cross and also most of the biggest stretches of distance we encounter, at least until we start thinking between planets or stars -- and by the way, brush up on your Greek and especially your Homeric mythology before starting these books, if you can, because this is a device Palmer/Mycroft just LOVES, just as the 18th century author/philosophers she and her characters look to as Authorities on Everything loved to do.

**A whole intriguing and imaginative thread in this narrative is how various factions come up with ingenious technological and sociological ways to mitigate the inherent cruelty of warfare. Some of them seem like they could actually be real someday, even if we don't ever get a Miracle Child who can wish things into existence. 

***There are lots of different kinds of Set-Sets already, based largely on how they're raised to understand the world that their interfaces show them, so this isn't quite as big a stretch as it first seems.