Too Like the Lightning

I reread this book for the SFFBookClub this month.

Personally, I deeply enjoyed this book and series, but I think it is not for everybody. I highly recommend folks read the first two chapters online here to get a taste of the voice: www.tor.com/2016/04/12/excerpts-ada-palmer-too-like-the-lightning-chapters-1-and-2/. Mycroft the narrator is self-deprecating, frequently addresses the reader, and is most definitely a very unreliable (and heavily edited) narrator. You can read it in the link above, but never ever have I ever seen a book do so much world-building via content warnings.

This book (and series) is trying to do so much, and regardless of whether you feel like it worked or not, it's hard not to be in awe of the ambition and the sheer density of ideas threaded together here. In the first chapter we've got flying cars, a secret magic kid who can turn toys into real life, mention of a Church War and sensayers (religious therapists) in the wake of it, Mycroft letting the reader know that he's misgendering everybody for ~reasons~, legal punishment alternatives in a Servicer system, questions about free will, and alternative family structures called bashes. This is before we get into 18th century philosophy, ethics, religion, and Greek myth. FOOF

This book is really catnip for me even on a reread; I find Mycroft to be extremely engaging as a narrator, and I appreciate so much how all of these details are spooled out at just the right pace to keep me intrigued but not overwhelmed. It felt like each chapter was carefully crafted to introduce a new location, bring in some world details and history, focus on a slightly different set of world leaders, and push the mystery investigation of the 7-10 list theft forward. It never felt like too much, and I constantly hungered to find out more about the world.

I talked about this after reading Infomocracy for SFFBookClub, but I really appreciated how much flying cars in this story drove so many social changes. If people can be flown across the globe in a few hours, then borders lose meaning. And if borders lose meaning, then what does that mean for governments that are based on geography. Clearly, the hive system is not meant to be posited as some ideal government solution, but for me at least there's something idealistic and positive about the idea of people being able to (more) freely choose their own laws and government in ways that aren't constrained by the power of geography.

I enjoyed the rest of the series as well, but I feel like the first two books are by far the strongest for me as a reader. The final two books are no longer an edited history and so Mycroft becomes even more of an unreliable narrator (if such a thing is possible) and the fourth book goes off on some epic :drum: diversions. I enjoyed the final two books a lot (and the ending lands SO well) but in some ways it wanders much more philosophically and is not as tight of a story as the first two books for me.

Unsurprisingly, I have a bunch of gender thoughts on this book too, which I'm going to put separately, because there's a lot of them: books.theunseen.city/user/picklish/status/87074

This book started out by making me very annoyed and frustrated.
The world is immediately immersive, complex and fascinating.
However, the author says the world recognizes no gender, everyone uses they/them pronouns and then the narrator inconsistently genders people with he or she. Is it a TERFybook which assumes you know someone's gender based on their genitals or secondary sex hormones and denies the existence of trans people, I wondered? It wasn't clear and the book was pretty interesting so I kept going, and I ultimately think the author was doing something interesting with gender, thought provoking, and affirming of trans people, but it took a while to get there.

I also found the beginning of the book very confusing. There are multiple characters named Mycroft, and I had a hard time keeping track at first.

I was not prepared for the level of graphic violence discussed. And that you come to sympathize with the perpetrators of said violence.

Overall, I think I liked this book, though I'm not sure. It made me uncomfortable a lot, but was interesting, and compelling.

This book has some truly spectacular world-building, all proceeding from perhaps the most fundamental element of science fiction: flying cars. How would society change if we had flying cars? The author sat down and built from there, and I think they did really intriguing work.

I've seen other reviewers complain about the stylistic choices that the author made. This has a very distinctive voice that attempts to evoke 18th-century styles, like constantly rapping on the fourth wall for side conversations. It didn't really bother me. In the straight prose, the author's really quite talented:

If you cannot imagine numbers have such power to move a man, imagine instead one of his historical counterparts: you are the tutor who has sensed something strange about this youth Caligula; you are the native who sees a second set of white sails on the horizon following the first; you are the hound who feels the tremors of the tsunami about to crash on Crete and erase the Minoan people, but you know no one will heed you, even if you bark.

You write a sentence like that, you could run it up pretty much any stylistic flagpole and I'll salute.

The author is quite enamored of [a:Alfred Bester|10992|Alfred Bester|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1418852724p2/10992.jpg] and his masterwork, [b:The Stars My Destination|333867|The Stars My Destination|Alfred Bester|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1433671750s/333867.jpg|1398442]. They get a shout-out both in a character's name and in the acknowledgements section. That's a perfectly good idol to have, and a perfectly good book to emulate, but my big complaint about Too Like the Lightning is that it emulates the worst part of The Stars My Destination: to wit, every character is a really important polymath/paragon, every story line is potentially world-shaking, and the characters are constantly zipping around the world (in their flying cars!) having epic struggles.

For example, our narrator, Mycroft Canner (the world's most notorious serial killer -- strike one) is hanging out with a magical child with mysterious powers (strike two). As punishment for the serial killing thing, which bothers exactly one character for two scenes, he is sentenced to travel the world "helping" people. The first household where he's performing the service is the six- or seven-person family business that completely manages the entire world's fleet of flying cars (strike three). One of the family members is a world-famous athlete, raconteur, and gunslinger who is used as a model for dolls (strike four), one is an Oscar-winning smellographer (strike five). He's called from there by the Imperial Censor (strike five) to compute some mathematical fallout from a plot element, because he's a world-class mathematical analyst (strike six). From there, we meet the leaders of every faction in the world, essentially voluntary nations (this is an awesome idea, very well-executed in the text), who are all on a first-name basis with our narrator (strike seven).

Now, this happens a lot in scifi, notably in The Stars... and many other rather famous works. And it's relatively easy to get past, because I was interested in the story and the world enough to put up with the narrator's knack for being in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment to get the next clue, maguffin, or character. And remember, I'm giving this thing three stars, so clearly it wasn't enough to throw me off.

Basically, I'd say give it three chapters. If the style doesn't turn you off and the collection of ubermensch characters don't alienate you, you might very well dig it. I'm looking forward to the sequel, not least of which because this book comes to an incredibly abrupt ending and resolves almost nothing.