Alex Pheby's WATERBLACK (And the rest of CITIES OF THE WEFT)

Hey Kate, tell us about the weirdest trilogy you've found since Brian Catling's Vorrh series, why don't you. Pretty please? Is it Jeffrey Ford's Well Built City trilogy? What about Tade Thompson's Wormwood books? Or Vladimir Sorokin's Ice trilogy (wrong, I haven't read that yet. But stay tuned!)? Well, close, but no: it's Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft, and yes, Mordew, Malarkoi and Waterblack (also the names of the cities in the series title) are weird as hell.

And yeah, just like happened with Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog/Ludluda diptych, I didn't post on here when I read the first two books last year, in glorious audio book form as narrated by the idiosyncratically excellent Kobna Holdbrook-Smith*, but again, not because I didn't love them. I just don't post about everything I read anymore because I don't have the stamina I used to and typing still really hurts. Anyway, once again, I saw the final book on Netgalley and didn't want to wait, so now I'm honor-bound once again to share my thoughts about it. Which I have to talk a little about the earlier books to do at all well. So.

A warning to start: Alex Pheby is not here to meet your expectations. He's not writing any kind of fantasy that your average Big Publishing House marketing team would have any idea what to do with (so let's hear it for the brave and tasteful souls at Galley Beggar Press!). He's not giving a master class on world building, not here to give fan service to people who have come to care a lot for the kid who seemed to be the series protagonist in the first book, Mordew, nor to lovers of his urchin pals who take over most of the action in the second, Malarkoi, nor even for the incredible magical dogs who steal the show in both of those books.

We start Waterblack full of questions about what's next for Nathan Treeves, Prissy, Gam, Anaximander and Sirius (well, we kind of feel like we know what happened to the Goddog but Pheby has taught us to maybe not take certain endings very seriously). Nathan's mother, Clarissa, seems to have achieved her ultimate end already and has nowhere to go but down; is that what we're going to watch here? Nathan's enemy, Sebastian, the Master of Mordew, is still kind of kicking around though he was pretty disappointed at the end of Malarkoi, what about him? What about Portia, the Mistress of Malarkoi, "goddess of gods," who gave little Prissy quite a gift last novel? 

Cue pitiless laughter from our author, who doesn't give a fig for our expectations, but who knows that he's got us hooked anyway because the kind of people who enjoyed the first two volumes of his Cities of the Weft trilogy want to know where the hell he's going with all of this weirdness way more than we're invested in any particular character. Although, them, too, somewhat. I mean, there's still an untold number of "Nathan flukes" loose and wreaking havoc in the topologically distorted ruins of Mordew, after all, and Clarissa, who's been powering all of her mighty spells in the single most ruthless manner I've ever seen a not-quite villain employ in a novel of any kind, ever, still has... something going on and hey, does she care about her son, like, at all? And speaking of offspring, there's still a puppy of the Goddog's running around somewhere.

There are some very weird and intriguing and mind-blowing plot threads that have yet to be properly woven into this here narrative textile, is what I'm saying.

However...

Waterblack starts off by posing an extended philosophical argument as to how a whole bunch of stuff we've just been taking for granted as "true" within the universe of the Cities of the Weft... is ontologically impossible. This undermines almost everything we've come to understand about the hundreds of pages and dozens of hours we've devoted to exploring his creation.

And then he launches into a deep exploration of the background of a minor antagonist who had maybe two scenes in Malarkoi and wasn't even mentioned in Mordew.

But, because Pheby is a hell of a gifted storyteller, we're immediately interested in this girl, Sharli and her defective firebird companion, Tinnimam, anyway. Even before it's hinted that her back story may allow us to learn, at long last, what the hell the Women's Vanguard of the Eighth Atheistic Crusade is all about. I mean, this isn't Philip Pullman, here; as the jacket copy on Mordew discloses before we've even read a page of this series, God has already been dead a long time, here. But there are definite echoes of Pullman's work in the Cities of the Weft; there's even a Subtle Knife, though the person who gets it puts it to very different use than sweet young Will does in the book named for it 

But wait, Pheby isn't done trying to talk you out of loving his trilogy. He still has many logical arguments to make as to why everything he's shared with us through hours of narration/hundreds of pages is really kind of bullshit, and he makes these arguments in exhausting detail (there's more than one reason why people refer to these books as the most Platonist since Susanna Clarke's Piranesi). And, as he starts warning us about halfway through the book, a lot of our pressing narrative questions will not be answered in the text of Waterblack proper; we'll have to wait for the appendices, which, Lord of the Rings-like, take up a good chunk of this last novel.

 

But that's really the only thing these books have in common with Tolkien, I assure you. 

What this ultimately comes to is the most fascinating yet frustrating read I've encountered in a long, long time. Waterblack does my favorite thing a series' final volume can do, which is make me want to go back and re-read the whole trilogy because it has fundamentally changed what the earlier books even mean. This is a particular achievement in this case, since I just re-read Mordew and Malarkoi last month in preparation for this! 

But so, despite Pheby's best and most perverse efforts to the contrary, I still love this series. I still love its characters, especially the magical dogs (and especially especially the new magical puppy introduced in Waterblack. I absolutely want a sequel devoted to the further adventures of Anaximines. I am also absolutely sure I'm never going to get one. But that's ok, I have this.); I still love its strange cities and its stranger creatures (especially the very cerebral and civilized Person-Headed Snakes). And I love most of all how it made me question pretty much everything I'd read before, both in and out of the fantasy genre. You might, too. Give the first book a try!

*Who commits pretty much every sin I hate most in an audio book narrator but makes it all work. Even his artificially high and breathy female character voices somehow work. But that doesn't mean I'll accept this from anybody else, you hear?

Herve Le Tellier's THE ANOMALY (Tr. by Adriana Hunter, Narr. by Dominic Hoffman)

A phrase that repeats often as Herve Le Tellier's The Anomaly gets going is "Maybe this is happiness," usually describing something banal and material, or at least basic, implying that if this is what happiness is, it's been oversold, at least to the cast of characters whose mini-biographies form the first part of the novel. Among these are a novelist who wrote a book called The Anomaly and committed suicide (this is not much of a spoiler; it happens early in the book and it's one of the pivotal issues that touches off the many philosophical conundra that pepper Le Tellier's The Anomaly as the fictionalized author of The Anomaly achieves a posthumous level of fame and respect he never enjoyed in life and if you're thinking of Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, you're supposed to; the book gets an explicit name check in the account of the dead author's success.)

But the fictionalized writer of that other The Anomaly is far from being the most important character in this The Anomaly. After all, as far as we get to know, his The Anomaly is not, in fact, the text we are reading here. That would be almost too Borgesian, no?

Anyway, there are lots of other characters more interesting and more important to the story than this author. Like a professor of statistics and probability who, in his undergraduate days at M.I.T. cooked up something called "Protocol 42" as a set of guidelines to follow when something truly unexplainable, unpredictable or unprecedented happens -- when there is an anomaly that can't be handled by any normal means. He chose 42 for its name because Douglas Adams, of course -- a signal that he and his friends who cooked it up together never in a million years expected it ever to be taken seriously, let alone actually employed by the U.S. Government, even after U.S. Gov made them all sign contracts requiring that they be permanently available to be called on at any time, no questions asked, if it was ever deemed necessary to activate Protocol 42. Which, of course, is what The Anomaly, as in the Le Tellier novel, is actually about.

In March of 2021, an Air France plane traveled through some very adverse weather but fought through to JFK International Airport, sporting considerable hail damage but otherwise all right, and its several hundred passengers disembarked and went on with their lives.

Then, in June of that same year, the exact same plane, with the exact same crew and passenger manifest and serial numbers, the exact same everything, emerged from a similar storm and sent a Mayday message to JFK because the damage was a bit more severe this time around, only to be diverted to a New Jersey military base under fighter escort because all this had already happened three months before and this was too weird to allow the plane to come to JFK and disembark, etc. Yes, this all feels very familiar. We've seen the TV show, etc. But this is a French novel, you guys, and it's the Frenchest thing I've read since I finally got tired of Michel Houellebecq's shit (and yes, this includes the terrific Vernon Subutex trilogy I enjoyed last year), so, buckle up, there's going to be a whole lot of philosophical speculation going on. Starting with a lot of attention being paid to how this manifestation of a duplicate, a perfect copy in every way, of the plane and all of its contents, including a few hundred passengers, is an almost incontrovertible argument in favor of the Simulation Theory, which, in brief, states that our entire phenomenological cosmos is actually a computer simulation, none of us are real, we're all just programs running in a vast godlike computer system called Deep Thought, wait no, not that, but all the other stuff? Yes.

But again, the novelist isn't the interesting passenger. Not when there's an honest-to-Ludlum international assassin who had been traveling from Paris to NYC on his latest assignment (but left behind a wife and children and charming double life in Paris -- double lives are a theme here, my friends)! Except, we don't get to see him much, just enough to see how he handles coming home to Paris and finding another version of himself living the aforementioned charming life with wife and children and reacting the way a guy like him might react, since he alone of all the passengers is the only one who didn't get the memo about what was going on because he escaped from US Gov too soon to get in on the briefing and counseling sessions. D'oh!

There's also a Nigerian rap star who, between March and June, wrote a song that went batshit viral on the internet and catapulted him to fame on the level of being invited to collaborate with Sir Elton John on a song, because our Nigerian, stage named Slimboy, is actually gay in a country that still considers homosexuality a serious crime, see, double life again! How he -- the he's, the Slimboys -- handles the sudden dopplegangery is one of my favorite bits of The Anomaly along with...

And also there is the issue that suddenly hundreds of people who have been going about their ordinary lives in this world suddenly have perfect doppelgangers, exactly like them in every detail except they are three months younger and have no knowledge or memory of the three months that have elapsed since the original plane landed. Among the passengers on this plane were the novelist who wrote the in-book novel The Anomaly and then committed suicide; suddenly the novelist is alive again and ready to resume his life just as if it were still March 2021, except, of course, he doesn't even have the germ of the idea for The Anomaly yet so whatever experiences led to the writing of the novel and the author's suicide are quite beyond his ken.

Slight digression time. This book was written and translated and published at a very specific moment in 21st century history, and the President of the United States is very much a character in The Anomaly, only it's pretty obvious from tons of context clues and the POTUS' general behavior and way of speaking that Le Tellier assumed the United States would be dumb enough to re-elect our most embarrassing POTUS and sketches us a pretty merciless portrait of that man without ever naming him. It's sort of darkly fun to imagine that guy handling a philosophical crisis like this story poses, almost as much fun as it is to watch Le Tellier's merciless skewering of American pop culture in the person of Stephen Colbert and The Late Show, an episode of which is depicted in minute detail when Colbert et al land an interview with a pair of doppelgangers who are very attractive young women willing to go along with the producers to create some Fucking Great Television with, uh, unfortunate results.

OK, back to the others. Like the aging French architect who finds himself with a second chance at saving his relationship with his much younger girlfriend, or rather, in learning from his March self how the March self ruined said relationship with the girlfriend's March self and making a plan not to make the same mistake. And the girlfriend herself, who is a single mom with a young son who suddenly has, not just two mommies, but two absolutely identical mommies except one of them doesn't remember anything since she took a trip with her boyfriend in March.

What I'm saying is, Le Tellier took a rather tired trope -- airline experiences mysterious event and passengers lives are weird forever -- and turned it into a specific way to examine a lot of different solutions to the problem of What If Suddenly There Were Two Of Me on both a personal and a worldwide scale. Being a French novelist not unlike Houellebecq, Le Tellier does not think the rest of society, especially not American society, will handle the advent of a few hundred duplicated human beings well, let alone the news that potentially one of the less hopeful ontological interpretations of our existence is proven pretty much true, and I wish I could say I thought he took this too far but unfortunately, as events just this last week or so have proven all over again, I think Le Tellier was right on the money about how badly a lot of us would behave.

All of this is conveyed beautifully by the smooth voice and precise diction (as in consonants so crisp they sound almost British) I last enjoyed in the gigantic audio edition of Chuck Wendig's Wanderers (co-narrated with fellow audio narrating superstar Xe Sands), who performs the difficult feat of giving each character their own voice and flavor without pushing through into voice acting, meaning he also gives female characters the right hint of femininity without falling into caricature that I so appreciate.

As for translator Adriana Hunter, I have nothing to say about her work, which in my book is a compliment in that it's pretty great when a translator does so well that they seem to disappear into the translated work, where often I notice a translator for a weird word choice that sends me down rabbit holes to find out if the weird phrasing originated with the author or the translator. No, here there were only philosophical rabbit holes, and that was enough.

Maybe this is happiness. 

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.

Ada Palmer's TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING: A NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2454 -- with an excursis on recasting audio narrators in a series

Ada Palmer writes and plots like Dorothy Dunnett, imagines future politics like Malka Older, and plays mind games with her readers like Gene Wolfe. Holy shit, I think I'm in love.

 Too Like the Lightning serves up all of these qualities on a Roccoco silver platter and expects you to know exactly which piece of tableware to use for each bite of the meal. Don't be gauche.

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.