Palmer’s series suggests [that] science fiction should not be viewed as just another literary genre, but as the genre where Enlightenment—the hopes for radical human self-improvement, the dream that we might collectively control our own fate as a species, the determination to transcend our own limitations — takes refuge in an anti-Utopian age that seems determined to deflate any such ambitions...

Its ambitions and achievements far surpass... the limited imagination of fictions that confine themselves to representing everyday life. More than philosophy or political theory, science fiction is the genre through which our age joins the Great Conversation.

Regarding “Terra Ignota”, a series of novels by Ada Palmer:

The series is a lot of things. It is the most sustained fictional portrait of Archipelago and polystates, one of the few utopias I would maybe like to live in. Palmer starts in an Enlightenment utopia (post-war, post-nationalism, post-scarcity, post-gender, post-theocracy, post-fideism, post-meat, post-capital-punishment, post-nuclear-family, general justice via universal voluntary surveillance) and then shows what the tensions will do to any system that has to handle humans as we are.

The worldview diversity is probably the greatest thing about it. I’ve read twenty-author anthologies with less variance in values than this. Speaker’s Corner and SSC comments have nothing on Palmer. You think I’m being bien-pensant right now, praising diversity - but there are fascists in it! Sex-murder teens! The Worst Fan In The World! Rapist priestesses! All

About half of readers find the prose unbearably clotted and affected. (If you’ve read books from more than two hundred years ago you’ll have some immunity.) I loved the many didactic discursions - e.g. de Sade’s Christian name being a plot point, the untranslated Latin - but I think most readers will not love them. You’ll have to be fine with long fourth-wall violations, long passages in speculative macaronic Latin 9, hallucinated C17th philosophers reacting to 25th Century scenes by expositing their extrapolated view of the 25th Century, allusions that yell ‘REMEMBER ME??’ in your face (‘Hobbestown’, the anarchist commune). I found the narrator’s madness engaging but it does divert every chapter a bit.

(Meme: “in the grim darkness of the C25th, mankind has divided into its elemental archetypes: jock, fash, hufflepuff, freud, stemlord, landlord, libertarian, person with a country of origin instead of a personality, and ‘meh’”. 7)

The books depict superpowers, even if we ignore the 2 or 3 purportedly supernatural beings. The Mardis, the Censors, and the set-sets have ridiculous amounts of predictive power using Weird Data Science, predicting the timing of world events 20 or 30 years out. The Brillists have this power, plus mind reading, and bizarro mind control, and arbitrary hacking power. These are so much more powerful than the tame AIs and giant mechas of the Utopians. But the plot is unchanged by them until the last book, at which point they are easily subverted for confusing reasons.

“Worldbuilding” is often a red flag. It predicts an author who cares more about their lore than their characters or plot, who is going to fail to make you care that the legal system or the conlang or the magic system is consistent. Palmer is the queen of worldbuilding, and yet she gets over it: her characters somehow nevertheless rule the series. It is quite obvious that large amounts of her notes did not make it into the 2000 pages of this series.

I could see you, across the sky, the crowded sea, a thousand black and winged shapes for every tardy, well-meant [dove]. But humans began digging a canal across the Gulf of Corinth more than three thousand years ago and finished it in 1893. It’s worth trying things again. Apollo Guardian of Strangers knows that it’s worth trying things again. Especially for [peace].

Book 1: Too Like the Lightning

I choked a little at the constant coincidences, and at the enslaved protagonist meeting literally every elite in the world in the space of two days. (“Providence” innit.)

Book 2: Seven Surrenders

The sunny, war-free Hive system gets subverted multiple times. The Cousin democracy is fake. The Masons get exposed. But every Hive is governed at the whim of Madame and her captive orgy. Missed the first time: The Madame conspiracy are as bad as you’d expect, silently squeezing the pluralism and democracy out of the world

Perry has been a midlevel member of this establishment for six years now. No one could advance so far in politics without some help from here.

Book 3: The Will to Battle

Many riches. There are constantly five or so subplots on the go, and when one ends it spawns two others. Best are its careful sketches of deep divides: Tradition vs progress, act vs rule, order vs freedom, safety vs optimum return.

Some of the oppositions fall flat because I don’t have the requisite respect for the other side. For instance Damnatio memoriae - the official expurgation of someone from history - is presented as an ultimate horror (the pain and execution preceding it is overwhelmingly more important).

[the damned person is] neither slim nor mighty, stooped nor noble, just a shape... Somewhere in a dusty archive a baptismal registry records some Hildebrand, and, when that dry page molders... I can't look, I can't! Behind the shades, the broad gray plain, that sea of shapeless gloom extending on and on... all forgotten souls, minds empty of memory, smeared one into another... to this absolute dissolution Caesar damns his enemies... Not me! I will never let you take me! I will carve my memory into history, by work, by force, by guile, in swathes of blood and ashes if I must!

I can admire Palmer’s rendition of the old bad legacy code (it has driven quite a lot of history) but I give no part of a real morality. The dead are past caring.

Elsewhere, the Aura (metaphysical identity) of art is used to devalue perfect replicas of the nuked Coliseum and Forum (which seems like magical thinking to me):

All false. Our race cannot afford such losses again... On the Acropolis the tears we shed are still tears of connection: where I stand Socrates stood. In the [replica] Roman Forum, by the [replica] Coliseum or the [replica] Patheon, they are regret tears. Replicas cannot touch. That is what we all want, to touch what someone touched, a special someone... whose story reached forward through history...

Speak for yourself; a perfect simulacrum is enough, though it screams depth to say otherwise. (I’m not actually salty: I love the breadth of ideologies on show here. No doubt someone else will grumble about how thin and unconvincing the utilitarian views presented here are. By writing so many good characters in disagreement, Palmer has passed about 10 Intellectual Turing Tests. )

• On the other hand, I feel the horror of true deontology quite keenly:
  

Dominic would happily watch the world burn if he could defile the blasphemer's corpse amid the coals.

• Much as I like Jedd Mason, his rise to the top of every state - the expressionless, motionless, Spectrumy king of the world - is implausible, even given his mother’s scheming; it only makes sense with Intervention. Which is fine, because Palmer is committed to that, but it would still have been nice to have a natural path.

Book 4: Perhaps the Stars

Of the war between Myopia and Utopia.

Hold on until page 125. That wait would be fatal in a first book, but everyone who makes it here, to book four, has proven hardier.

Not a lot of war in this war novel before then. Instead, a Hufflepuff hum - faint in previous books, risen in this one. I don’t mean to be mean: the philosophical principle that nice things are important, philosophically rich is one of mine. But 9A, the narrator, is too much the overgrown child. They say “snugglier”. They emphasise snacking. Someone cries in every chapter I think. Like Odysseus. They also rave against free speech (though Palmer is a historian of censorship and should not be identified with 9A).

Neotene domesticity is all very well for Becky Chambers, but it doesn’t gel with the other gigantic aesthetic banners of this work (the Enlightenment consummated and their language appropriated; a society transformed, deluding itself to be peaceful; the ideological roots of conflict, the inexorability of war’s logic, thus this realistic war between lovers and friends). It is simultaneously too twee and too pretentious 2.

The achievement of this book - besides the truly baroque prose, the truly insane narration - is that it nearly succeeds in making every faction reasonable. Uncertainty justifies terrible things, the most terrible: distrust, surveillance, subterfuge, war. 1. I can’t remember this being done so well. Maybe in Hugo or Dumas.

I am a big fan, but, so I dislike a lot about this book. I find the central conflict arbitrary, and the central psychological claim wrong. Actually maybe I just dislike the Ninth Anonymous, puppy Odysseus.

The main gripe

The Gordian / Utopian split - the heart of the whole series - is not at all crisp.

What is the real war about? “Earth vs Space”. “In vs Out”. “Unity vs fragmentation”. Variety vs far greater variety. Life extension vs space exploration.

Here’s a solution: Just let the ones who want to stay stay!

People often pose life extension and space exploration as opposites, but they just aren’t, and so they are an unsuitable pair to base thousands of pages of conflict upon. I can’t take Faust seriously when he arbitrarily prefers current people to all of the thousands of worlds’ worth of people that space exploration would bring. He misses the great daily loss of entire galaxies, lost forever. He says he wants ems, which could pack the earth denser with minds. Well consider the greater packing of galaxies full of ems! The only way it makes sense is if they’re selfish, scrabbling to keep themselves alive. His war, his terrorism, is thus rooted in repeated errors, and the books are rooted in his war. I cannot love this.

Also nearly all the main characters are Utopian fellow travellers, take one side, which belies Palmer’s normal preternatural sympathy for all. (Am I supposed to like Im-Jin?)

What would I have as the war’s great theme? The one from the last book is fantastic and underemphasised here: faith in a benevolent dictator vs pragmatic, aggressive scepticism. The second? Past-regarders and future-regarders. Long reflection vs Builders. Noble lie vs radical honesty. Bioconservatism vs transhumanism (represented already, a little). Theory vs praxis. Academia vs autodidacts. Stamp collecting vs engineering. All better than the chosen “inwards vs out”.

So I only have deep invalidating problems with the main narrator, the God, the main antagonist, and the whole point of the main conflict (half of all events in book 2, 3, and 4). That I still esteem these books should tell you something. Palmer gets it:

I hope the ideas, the fragile and imperfect Hives of 2454, and the battered but changing-for-the-better Hives of 2456, will help you rise with strength tomorrow morning as you lift your oar, or pack, or first aid kit, whatever task at hand, they’re all the oar so long as you still carry in your breast the ancient spark, contagious, shared from breast to breast, that has died out a thousand times, but never yet in every breast at once. We will.

I am so glad. There is nothing like it in C21st literature. I am only able to attack its philosophy (philosophies) because it’s so clearly and sympathetically drawn, because so intellectually ambitious. I am certain there are readers out there who view Utopia as trivially wrong (though it’s hard to imagine anyone loving terrorist Gordian. They’re from Ingolstad!)

Characters routinely do the reasonable thing, including positive-sum trades with their mortal enemies, including instrumental harm for enormous stakes. It is one of the few works which sees the full stakes so clearly, which sees the world-historical significance of nerds, science fiction, and technical tat, both beneath and beyond the average novelist.

Over-the-top, wrong, and great.

Against Mycroft and the fans

So the surface text is deeply flawed. But it’s by a Renaissance scholar, who knows all about the misattribution of deeds in favour of elites, the deep pre-emptive self-censorship, and the sheer confabulations. So we save it by noting that Mycroft and 9A are more than half unreliable. The unreliable narrator is ignorable in most novels, changes some stuff around the edges to make themselves look good. Here the narrators instead misreport: the nature of reality, key figures, and the main plot.

Excessive coincidence. Mycroft admits to lying sometimes, but many other events are too coincidental. (Mycroft just happens upon his archnemesis Tully Mardi while he’s out and about on normal business?) He’s probably a more active conspirator than he lets on.

Mary Sue elites. Some of the ludicrously high competence of the main characters is explicitly just assigning them credit for things which were done by someone who was Damnatio’d. The elites are responsible for most events here, and this isn’t at all plausible.

Inconsistencies. See this headfuck.

The series thus simulates the experience of reading first-person Renaissance sources - while Palmer really likes her characters and makes them exceptional on purpose, (some of) the patent flaws in the text are a way to hint at their vast frame control, image management, self-deceit, and deceit.

Thus: yes, JEDD kind of sucks, 9A kind of sucks, the climactic theme kind of sucks, and the audience are allowed to notice that, despite the text 8. Also yes, Gordian are probably deeply in control of the narrative and twist destiny and hobble their Utopian nemeses - and this is why they mostly escape the consequences. Madame was probably much less vicious and self-serving than we see.

This doesn’t mean that the flaws are justified and doesn’t fully redeem the last book. But it gives hope for those of us who would still like to like Palmer’s world and who flee from the applause lights and crap Crowning Awesome trope stuff.

TODO

• Naturalist reading which explains away Bridger and JEDD.
• Deep reading which gets through the censorship and Whig history and deification. The book without Mycroft’s filters, essentially. This is how you make the Peacefall and Gordian make sense.

See also

• Robnost trying to understand why the bad bits are there
• dril