The novel, the first of a quartet known as Terra Ignota, is set in a 25th century that seems impossibly utopian to us now (for all that it contains actual Utopians who have strictly defined what that term means with that capital "U"). The nation state is an obsolete bygone, as is organized religion after "The Church War" almost destroyed the world. Humanity is now organized into and sort-of-governed by seven different "Hives" who each has a different philosophy of how life is best lived; what freedoms are to be enjoyed to the full and what discouraged; and how people who have strayed from the righteous path are to be treated. There is a sort of pseudo-aristocracy composed of a few genuine aristorcrat/royals (the King of Spain is not only still a thing but is an almost universally beloved figure who has served as the Prime Minister of the European hive with distinction) and some genetically engineered specimens of such perfection and delicacy they are revered and honored with aristocratic titles just because they're so awesome; an almost complete lack of gendered language or clothing with an emphasis on biological sex as really the least important facet of personal identity; and religious discussions in groups larger than three people are against the law, to prevent the revival of old and the formation of new forms of organized religion. Everybody has freedom of conscience but is still entitled to spiritual counsel provided by experts in threading the needle through the secular and the spiritual without getting dogma or granfaloonery involved. I think I'd like it there.
But all is not quite what it seems. For one thing, the leaders of six of the seven Hives are much better acquainted and enjoy much closer relationships with one another than I'd feel comfortable with and they totally have a secret Eyes Wide Shut-ish hangout, ruled by a woman who considers herself so very much the spiritual if not actual descendant of the 18th Century Enlightenment as exemplified by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot and Voltaire that she styles herself Madame D'Arouet (Voltaire's actual surname) and requires everybody on her premises to engage in note-perfect 18th Century French cosplay down to the fiendish requirements of ettiquitte and, of course, Performance of Gender. Which everybody finds incredibly erotic compared to the egalitarian androgyny of the outside world. Which is to say, this book has a lot of scenes that prudes like me do not love, but they're in there in the manner of another of Madame's idols, the Marquis de Sade, who wrote brutal porn as a vehicle for communicating lofty ideals and posing weighty philosophical dilemmas. And, I mean, at least nobody is slicing beating hearts out of other people's bodies and shoving those hearts into their vaginas. So far. At least, not on screen, as it were.
Our guide through all of this is the age's greatest criminal, one Mycroft Canner, whose crimes were so infamous that he was the first person in this Golden Age to have a signicant proportion of humanity screeching to revive the death penalty for, but who is so talented that killing him would be a waste, the oligarchy has decided, so he is instead sentenced to become a "Servicer" -- basically, the entire world's slave, who may own nothing, wear only a very distinct uniform that marks them out as one, and is required to do all kinds of Task Rabbit/Gig economy type things for the benefit of society as a whole and for individual as needed/allowed. Which is mostly what he goes around doing, except the oligarchy occasionally needs his somewhat unique abilities -- among other things, he is the world's greatest statistician/data scientist -- so he winds up at the heart of an incredibly complex story of intrigue, strategic murder, sexual politics, political gamesmanship, and, most forbidden of all, sometimes, theology.
Perturbing his orbit the most are two young people, a young boy named Bridger and a young man named J.E.D.D. Mason*, both of whom exhibit extraordinary gifts that are basically supernatural. Mycroft believes that one day the two of them could radically transform and improve the world, but Bridger isn't ready yet to deal with the extraordinary personal magnetism and moral force of the powerfully ethical but overwhelming J.E.D.D., and so has spent most of his time and energy helping to raise the former and serve the latter, while also keeping the two of them from ever meeting or even knowing about one another's existence.
Meanwhile, there's a larger plot afoot, involving the theft of the latest edition a list of the ten most prominent/important people in the world, one of a handful of such lists that different influential newspapers publish periodically as a sort of shorthand indicator of the relative strengths of the seven Hives -- and it's having been planted in the trash can of a very important member of a very important family that just happens also to be unofficially fostering the miracle child, Bridger. When news of this leaks into the outside world, and then when news leaks that Mycroft is not only still alive but has been living and working among the Servicers this whole time, more kinds of hell break loose than a normal reader could be expected to keep track of (fortunately, I am not a normal reader. I read Dorothy Dunnett and Gene Wolfe. Do you?) as the greater geopolitical situation threatens Mycroft's health and safety, freedom of movement, privileged position with regard to all of the world's most important people, and his special secret mission of making sure that Bridger and J.E.D.D. Mason, the two baby superheroes, don't meet until they're on an equal footing.
There's not a lot of action and really not that much plot, but there are lots of intricate and puzzling scenes in which exchanges between characters have many levels of meaning, some of them hidden, some that won't make sense until you're many, many hours into the audio book later, and some of them.... kind of gross.
Look; many other writers on the internet with more skin in the game than I've got have called attention to some icky things that Palmer has done with gender and sexuality in this series. At first it all seems egalitarian and kind of lovely; everybody uses they/them pronouns and nobody seems to care much about how they present -- but our narrator, insisting that it matters, uses gendered language all over the place, always to some very intended effect (Mycroft is most certainly an unreliable narrator and has his own agendas in how this story is understood by this world's imagined posterity). Many of the characters we meet, most of whom are at or near the very top of this society's hierarchies, have decided that the equality of the current system of the world isn't actually worth giving up the power imbalances that come with gender roles, and exhibit a near-compulsion to rebel against this society's norms (we learn late in the novel how this contrariness has all been inculcated by one person who insists it's more civilized to emphasize gender and never mind that trans and non-binary people probably still exist in this world) and several insist on presenting unambiguously as one particular gender (whether or not it corresponds to the anatomical sex they were born with or chose later on) in a somewhat weaponized fashion. Furthering the ickiness of this is the universally accepted (at least by the characters who must deal with those who are flaunting one gender or another for Reasons) idea that emphasis on gender is irresistibly sexy, the sexiest thing possible, and so intoxicating and captivating that no one who goes, for instance, to Madame D'Arouet's sex club and engages in her required 18th Century cosplay can ever enjoy regular sex with someone dressed in 25th Century clothing again.
Then, too, there's the way Mycroft keeps switching pronouns to describe an important character in the series, Carlyle Foster, who is the closest thing this world has to a cleric, a Sensayer (one of the experts at threading the needle I mentioned above), and as member of a Hive called the Cousins, is by courtesy and tradition always referred to with feminine pronouns to honor the roles the Cousins play in society.** Most of the time, Mycroft holds to this tradition and calls Carlyle "she/her" but insists on dropping unsubtle hints that Carlyle is in fact anatomically male, and is to a certain degree important this way because it means Carlyle has the equipment to father children and continue his family's genetic legacies -- except Carlyle was, himself, a foundling and furthermore one whose geneaology and gentic information is under a kind of high tech gag order to protect the identity of his parents from even the closest of scrutinies. Carlyle is thus a mystery as well as a person in a position to mess up Mycroft's happy little world when he is assigned to be the Sensayer to the family that is fostering Bridger, and is thus likely to find out what is so special about the boy sooner rather than later -- which means that it is very much in Mycroft's interest to very carefully control how his readers perceive Carlyle, so while we've guessed that something is up with Carlyle's gender identity (which, remember, we're not supposed to care about as the readers of this history) we don't get the real answer until very late in the story, by which time Mycroft has called Carlyle "he" as often as "she" and I suppose I'm going to have to go back and listen to this again sometime to see if I can find a pattern in when Mycroft does this and why.
Speaking of listening to this, sigh. The narrator for Too Like the Lightning is the wonderful Jefferson Mays, who gave Mycroft in particular a very distinct voice that was unmistakably Mycroft's even when it didn't necessarily matter who was speaking, and gave voice to the dizzying array of other characters with equal attention and skill (and, yes, without resorting to falsetto or breathiness for female characters, hooray!). I perhaps didn't appreciate him even as much as he deserved because I assumed he'd be with me throughout the four volumes of Terra Ignota. Alas, though; he turned out not to be available when time came to produce the sequel, Seven Surrenders, which I'm already listening to as of this posting and for which, instead of waiting for Mays to be available, the powers that be just recast. And T. Ryder Smith is fine, equally as talented as Mays, but Smith has a very different voice and has come up with very different speech characterizations for the characters in the sequel, all of whom, at least so far, have carried over from Too Like the Lightning, which wouldn't bother me so much except for that author Ada Palmer, daughter of Dorothy Dunnett and Gene Wolfe that she is, eschews dialogue tags much more than is traditional in English language prose fiction, and so I have found myself utterly lost and having to replay entire chapters of dialogue-heavy scenes in which I no longer have any idea of who is who. This is frustrating as hell and makes me not want to continue with the series in audio form except that's all that my public library has and I am a poor semi-disabled retired old lady on a very modest fixed income, so if I want to continue with this series, and I do despite the gender/sexual ickiness because I have to see where all of this insanity is going, I'm stuck with the audio versions that my public library has, and just have to keep plugging away until my brain finally groks the new way everybody sounds now (and the particularly icky way a character, only mentioned in Too Like the Lightning but now very much a part of the action in Seven Surrenders, is voiced, which is almost farcically epicene -- which is even ickier once one realizes that now that that character has been revealed to be anatomically intersex, Mycroft, still narrating this second novel, refers to with the pronoun "it.").
I am very not happy about this.
However, as I said, I am super invested in this world and what's going to happen to it, and in where this story is going to take it, even though I don't like very many of the characters, all of whom (except the innocent baby supermen_, seem hell-bent on ruining this society in one way or another, very much.
To be continued.
*The Masons, and yes, exactly who you're thinking of right now, are one of the world's seven Hives, originally allegedly formed out of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons that everybody thinks secretly already ruled the world but really, guys, they don't, but largely amplified by folk belief and expectations into something that meets those expectations and moreso. They affect a modernized/futurized spoken Latin in all conversation, are the most hierarchical of the Hives to the point where their leader is referred to as the Emperor, and in as many ways as they can ape the conduct and the structure of the good old SQPR, except the Emperor is not styled First Name Caesar, but First Name Mason.
**Founded by a group of barely-connected individuals all over the world who had the travel bug but didn't have regular traveling companions, who agreed ahead of time to act as unofficial "cousins" to members of their little club who came to visit their home regions; something like David Foster Wallace's famous "Native Companion" in his famous essay "Ticket to the Fair." Eventually this group grew in number but never wanted to be much more organized than they already were, so as of the time of Too Like the Lightning the closest thing they have to a government is a bureau that manages efforts to address and comply with what comes into the Hive's Suggestion Box. Grown from this club and loose organization, the kinds of people who elect to join the Cousins hive are in helping professions -- social workers, organizers of charities, first responder types, teachers, etc.
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