Too Like The Lightning

So first off, Ada Palmer was at Bryn Mawr in '99-01 and involved with Double Star, so while I don't think I ever met her, she can't be more than a step removed. Hi, if you're the mutual friend and you happen to read my lj. :)

Secondly: Too Like The Lightning is the first of four, and if you want to read it without knowing anything more about it at all, my recommendation is that you wait to do so until at least one more book in the series is out, maybe more than one. There's a large, complex cast of characters here, and no reason to think we're not still going to need to remember them all in future books - in fact I felt like the main work of TLTL was to painstakingly set up the board, piece by piece, for something that will play out in later books? Like it may actually make more sense to think of this as the first quarter of a very long single novel, just reaching plot breakout in the final chapters of this quarter.

From which you might guess that the heart of my reaction to this book is "well, it depends where it goes!" Maybe I've been watching Palmer meticulously setting up dominoes (which is not unpleasant, seeing the tricks and patterns) and then there's going to be one breathless orgiastic finish when they finally run. Or maybe it'll be more like putting together a puzzle without a lid, and there'll be all the little satisfactions of putting bits together, and then the big quiet satisfaction at the end of seeing that it all fits. I am, in general, both a sucker for this sort of thing and wary of it; my favorite books end up being the ones that are rewarding the whole way through, instead of saving up their zing for some ultimate payoff that might or might not actually pay off. I've been burned by television, by things like the X-Files or Lost, that pretended to look like a puzzle but turned out to be a heap of individually manufactured separate pieces some of which could be joined up but were never conceived as a coherent whole. Or, a more fair comparison, the Rothfuss Kingkiller books, which might in the end turn out to be a brilliant meta-work about storytelling or might turn out to be a tedious shaggy-dog story, we just don't know yet. At least Palmer is vastly less tedious than Rothfuss.

I also suspect that there's a whole layer going on that's a conversation with someone not in the room, which is frustrating when it's going over my head, but probably much more interesting if it's not. Possibly I need to have read Candide.

I think this review is sounding more negative than I mean it to be? It just feels so hard to know what to make of it. I want to compare it to Simmons' Hyperion series (four books, similar themes so far about politics, religion, transportation as a mode of social control), but Hyperion has a lot more sfnal razzle-dazzle (the farcasters, the cruciforms, the Time Tombs, etc). But maybe it's more of a Snow Crash or Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom project, about futuristic ways to organize society, although the latter had some razzle-dazzle too, and the former is *wildly* action-packed, so not a good comparison at all. I don't know! Stranger in a Strange Land, which is name-checked explicitly at one point, and might be being referenced in a whole bunch of other ways more subtly - I've read that, at least, unlike Candide, so that part of the conversation I am catching. Or possibly making up. (ETA: Dune, of course. Mentats and messiahs? Shadow/not so shadow organizations steering history? Duh, me.)

One more thing behind a spoiler cut for significant spoilers. ( Read more... )

...I reread that and what I think it means is aryky read this one, ideally without reading that very spoilery paragraph. :)