Ada Palmer's SEVEN SURRENDERS (Narr by T. Ryder Smith)

 Blogger's note: as this is the second volume of a quartet, my post is likely going to make no sense if you haven't at least read my post about the first, Too Like the Lightning. But you do you.

The thing about four-volume series/quartets is they have not one but two books that are in danger of developing middle chapter problems -- usually. I'm happy to share that I don't think that Seven Surrenders, the second in Ada Palmer's historico-futurist speculative fiction Terra Ignota series, encounters many of those problems, though I might still grumble about the switching of audio book narrators a bit more.

It does, however, create some new problems for itself before it rushes us pell-mell into the war footing that has been looming over Palmer's 25th century Golden Age since we first met its criminal unreliable narrator historian, Mycroft Canner, and the biggest one is tied up with Mycroft's very unreliability; even as Mycroft himself gets a partial rehabilitation/retcon as breathtaking as Jaime Lannister's, the most intriguing ambiguity with which he teased us in TLTL is blown up for us pretty quickly. It was fun to wonder how seriously to take Mycroft's claims about the wondrous powers possessed by the child he's helping to raise, Bridger, and how seriously to take Mycroft's claims about the overwhelming righteousness and near-divinity of J.E.D.D. Mason, but Seven Surrenders settles both of those questions unequivocably for us. Sigh.

So right away, there goes a lot of the Gene Wolfean fun of this read for me. Luckily, there's still plenty of Dorothy Dunnet fun to be had; everybody we've met (with the possible exceptions of Bridger and J.E.D.D. Mason) has had secret agendas all along, some of which we've known about and others that we've guessed, new villains take center stage, centuries-long conspiracies are elucidated and exposed -- and thank goodness for the final chapter of TLTL, in which one of several detective figures takes the time to clarify for himself, his superiors, and us readers that an even more cunning and terrible plot than the one we'd been following so avidly in TLTL has been exposed in the course of investigating the plot we were led to believe was the main one. Without this, I would have been thoroughly lost going into Seven Surrenders.

As matters continue unfolding, we get small helpings of background information on the crimes that caused our narrator to be the first man of his age for whom there was a public outcry to execute him and on the origins of the weird 18th century cosplay brothel which is patronized by almost all of the leaders of this world's seven "Hives" that have replaced the nation state and any other varieties of socio-political allegegiance. The story of this weirdass brothel also turns out to be the back story of how J.E.D.D. Mason became the heir-apparent to the entire Earth and also still looks poised to have some influence on the affairs of the Moon and Mars through secret dealings made before his birth with the only Hive not to have any visible interest in cosplaying/fucking in the past, the future-oriented Utopians, who are by far the coolest people in Palmer's strange Renaissance/Enlightenment-flavored future. I totally want a holographic coat that displays a real-time animated version of my personal idea of what the future will look like superimposed over whatever actual environment I find myself in! An animated Buffalo Commons would look dope AF on a duster, after all.

Unfortunately, in this story the Utopians are mostly important simply because they have been giving sanctuary to the only survivor of Mycroft's original crime spree, and that survivor is hell-bent on enacting the terrible plan we've learned Mycroft's crimes were meant to avert (I did not invoke Jaime Lannister in jest, friends), which is nothing less than sparking off a new world war, which would be the first war of any kind in over 300 years. Much is made about how weird this is going to be since there hasn't been a professional soldier class in all of that time, nor do any military veterans exist who have any experience of war (foreshadowing Seven Surrenders' devastating finale); much is also made of how the machinations of the 18th century cosplay brothel and a program of pinpointed and nearly untraceable assassinations have kept war from breaking out before the survivor, whose name is Tully, starts stirring up trouble.

BUT, Dunnettian in the extreme, it is not the brothel's machinations that expose the assassination plot, but rather the revenge schemes of a character barely mentioned in TLTL, who emerges as secretly someone's father and as a sunofabitch to rival the nasty pieces of work we were already gnashing our teeth at last novel like Domnic Seneschal, and who executed his plan with the cold perfection and professionalism of a Lymond or a Niccolo. Except, you know, we're not rooting for him. But then, who are we rooting for?

Again, the big problem here, for me at least, is that the world these characters inhabit is pretty sweet. Nobody goes hungry; medical and mental health care are public benefits; most people only work 20 hours a week unless they're really driven and passionate about their callings; there's a steady stream of technological progress; a handwavium-powered system of flying cars means that no two points on the globe are more than a two-hour journey apart from one another; huge strides towards gender equality have left most of the population convinced that gender really just doesn't even matter anymore; violence is only ever a matter of small scale brawls over we-don't-get-to-see-what but it isn't economic scarcity that's for sure; the artificial and capitalism-imposed institution of the nuclear family has been replaced by a model for cohabitation and child-rearing that focuses on the kind of found families the most fortunate of us 21st century types find and create in adulthood when we bond closely with a peer group (say, your college friends -- but then imagine that the norm is that you all stick together after graduation); and religion, by law, is a matter for the individual conscience and the individual conscience alone. Um, sign me up!

But of course, human nature. Though the seven Hives mostly cooperate, there are still power games fed largely by the mass media. Remember, all of this was set off in TLTL by the theft and leaking of an early draft of a list ranking the ten most influential people on the planet, which everybody uses as a proxy for which Hive is the best/most/important/should control the most resources! People like power, and nobody likes power more than Madame D'Arouet, proprietress of the 18th century cosplay brothel, who long ago realized that in discarding gender inequality/oppression and religious bigotry, this society had discarded two forms of power that she could easily use to her advantage -- all the more powerful because, supposedly, the ease of 25th century life has left ordinary humans defenseless against the power and allure of gender-focused sexuality and religion, so she has rather easily ensnared all of the Hive leaders in a complicated web of romantic/sexual entanglements with her and with one another, with the fruit of her efforts being the walking and talking perturbation of every known orbit that is J.E.D.D. Mason.

As Seven Surrenders concludes, the title becomes the key to the whole: some Hives have been conquered since long before Mycroft began his narrative; others are still fighting to stay autonomous; meanwhile everybody is struggling with the question of whether it is still possible -- or even desirable -- to avert the inevitable conflict that is about to engulf everybody who is still Earthbound (the original argument of the faction Tully represents having been that 300 years of artifically maintained peace have actually been detrimental to human development and the sooner a war is fought the better the chances that somebody, anybody, might survive it); still others are just cackling and watching everything burn, and hoping that in the general chaos their crimes might go unaddressed.

But in the midst of these plots and conquests there is still the matter of the little boy, Bridger, whose supposed supernatural powers are no longer so very secret and who has been raised by people  who have been very frank with him about their hopes -- more, their expectations -- that someday he and J.E.D.D Mason will save the world. But, wisely yet also tragically, Bridger has learned that it's not his wonderful powers that are what is directly needed, but what one thing they can resurrect from the distant past, that is really called for, at terrible cost. His closing scene with daddy-figure Mycroft is a crushing heartbreaker. And this, more than anything else, is what is pulling me forward to complete the series despite the issues I have with how it is coming to me, on audio.

Having listened now to one book narrated by Jefferson Mays and one by T. Ryder Smith, I regret more than ever that Mays was not able to continue this series. His smoother voice and precision much better suit the storytelling style that Palmer is employing -- an excellent 18th century pastiche that should feel comfortable and familiar to fans of Henry Fielding and Lawrence Sterne as well as of Voltaire and De Sade. Mays was especially deft in the frequent "breaking of the fourth wall" when Mycroft not only directly addresses the reader but puts arguments in the reader's mouth. And, as I mentioned in my post on TLTL, he developed distinct character voices that stopped short of full-on voice acting but suited the flow of the prose beautifully.

T. Ryder Smith, though. Sigh. I've already mentioned that he re-characterized many of these voices, which made starting Seven Surrenders a very jarring experience until I got used to it.* And he did it like a voice actor, rather than a narrator. Ryder is very good at accents and there are lots and lots of accents for him to show off with in this world, but his choices meant that every character who had, say, a French accent (and he gave one to several characters who didn't really have to have one) sounded exactly like every other character with a French accent, and to make matters worse, he gave two characters speech patterns that aped the intonation of the stereotypical French accent but with conventional word-attacks that left it really just sounding like every single sentence either of them spoke was being almost farcically coy and flirtatious. It borderline worked for the character of Sniper, an intersex celebrity and model for sex-dolls who basically does flirt with the entire world, but it was obnoxious as hell for Thisbe, one of Bridger's many informal parent-figures, who is a powerful and imposing figure with such an outsized influence on others that Mycroft calls her a witch -- definitely not the kind of person who has to flirt to get her point across.

But, as I observed last time, I am pretty much stuck with these, so I'm gritting my teeth and moving on with them because I really want to see where all of this is going. Onward, to war! Stay tuned!

*I had to listen to the first five or six chapters multiple times in order to do so, which was a drag.