Let's get the problems I had with Perhaps the Stars out of the way first. It's a year, almost to the day, since I finished Book III of Terra Ignota, The Will to Battle; in that time, I've been to sleep around 365 times, been to work, seen films, ballet performances and live music, and read other books. Quite a few of them. So when I started on Perhaps the Stars, I quickly found that there was a lot I couldn't remember from the previous books. Some of the characters' names looked familiar; plenty more didn't. And there were details of the political stances of different Hives which escaped me. What I ought to have done at that point was close the book, pick up The Will to Battle, and re-read the last couple of chapters. But by the time I realised that, I was perhaps a quarter of the way in and I didn't really want to break off once I'd got even a little traction with the narrative. So I carried on, treating this as an historical novel where i knew the broad outlines of the history but was coming across the characters anew. We have also changed narrator for the opening of Perhaps the Stars, so this helps, too. But I also struggled on a practical level. Ada Palmer has written a highly detailed philosophical novel with complex ideas which she had taken a lot of time over committing to the page. But this does tend to mean that the chapters are long and paragraph breaks indicating pauses in the narrative are few and far between. When circumstance forces you to read in 20-30 minute chunks most of the time, this is not helpful. In short, the philosophical speculation almost completely bypassed me. So I had to park my appreciation of that side of the book (or rather my lack of it) and concentrate on what I usually read science fiction for - the world building and speculation about how we might make life and worlds better. At least with this series, if one aspect remains a mystery, there is always something else to get to grips with. In The Will to Battle, the system of Hives that transcend national boundaries and which people select allegiance to once they have attained their majority collapses into warfare over a set of rivalries and political schisms. This book opens with an account of the outbreak and initial stages of that war, and how a small group of neutrals attempt to mitigate the worst excesses of military strife and the disruption of ordinary life. Though with real war raging in the Ukraine at the time of writing (early 2023), this all seems a bit idealistic. Eventually, after a series of quite wide-screen events (including the destruction of a space elevator), a powerful figure, J.E.D.D. Mason, achieves supremacy through intrigue and imposes a peace. The imposition of peace is followed by an accounting in which all are held to answer for their actions, including J,E.D.D. Mason themself. I understand that Ada Palmer intended the whole series of Terra Ignota to be a work that poses philosophical and theological questions. As I said above, this is not something which I was able to fully appreciate, partly because of the interval between reading the last book and this, but also because those philosophies and (in particular) the view of the nature of God are not things I share with the author. Throughout, however, I have been interested in the politics and (in part) the economics of Ada Palmer's world. And in that respect, this book has many revelations. For one thing: the Utopian Hive was known to be working on spaceflight and building new worlds, but nothing in the previous three novels suggested that this would be at all central to the narrative. Well, that isn't the case here. Utopia isn't just planning space exploration, it has access to four space elevators, a permanent base on the Moon, is commencing the terraforming of Mars and has ambitions to travel to Titan. I did do a slight double-take as all that emerged; other double-takes followed. The flying car network turns out to be powered by antimatter, though I felt that this might just be because antimatter is less hand-wavy than, well, handwavium. Perhaps my biggest one was when I discovered that there are uplifted apes in Palmer's future, revealed in a (literally) walk-on appearance by "an orang-utan chieftain and their translator". It's wholly consistent with the milieu that Palmer describes, and yet there was no hint of this elsewhere. Gender fluidity is also a key feature of the milieu, and there are some moments when I thought "Oh - I was wrong about them, then." The reshaping of societies and economies was, for me, a big feature of the earlier books. I recently encountered some discussion of current conspiracy and right-wing thinking which centres around the concept of the "sovereign citizen", a superior individual whose mental brilliance and business ability makes them superior, not only to the rest of us, but to all the petty laws and restrictions that democratic legislatures shackle them with. In Palmer's future society, we see one possible end effect: the trans-national Hives are all run by "sovereign citizens" who make the laws around them; a series of basic laws apply generally, but these are restricted to quite broad principles, and the whole series is based around what happens when some Hives decide that even those laws are too restrictive. True, some Hives elect leaders, though the details of the franchise are glossed over. Palmer's take on this is quite utopian; looking at our world leaders today, with so many different shades of authoritarianism rearing their heads, I wonder if we could ever get there from here. But the action of this book does end with the world in a different place than we started at. And this rather looks like the author considering her starting point, and proposing ways to make it better. Yet even with all the action, there's a feeling that so much of it happens off-stage, with characters describing events or watching them via video or satellite feeds. For all the action that happens, we are rarely there with it. Also, be aware that the author's passion for Classical mythology is given full rein here. When we were talking about political manoeuvring in the previous books, this was acceptable: but when we are talking about warfare in the 25th Century, to continually describe it in terms of conflict and with reference to heroes of a good three thousand years previously certainly began to stretch my credulity. The wars of the Twentieth Century saw slaughter and barbarity on a scale previously unknown, yet Palmer's characters keep branding others as "most accursed ever" for some transgression or other that by our standards might be considered mild. Just when this was pushing my bogglement to extremes, someone referenced the World War I poet Wilfrid Owen as an example of the sort of tragic casualty of war, killed between the time that combatants have decided to cease conflict on a near, upcoming date and that date itself. This review might be thought of as unduly critical. Not so. It's just that for many reasons, I was unable to get the most out of this book. That is not to say that the book itself is deficient, just that it takes a lot of attention and commitment on the part of the reader. I have now scheduled this book - indeed, the whole series - for a re-read when I have more time to devote to a concentrated bout of reading. I suspect that Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota will become in future years a classic of the genre, to be attempted by readers who believe they have matured sufficiently to tackle its scope, themes and speculations. The series is a challenge, and Perhaps the Stars no less a part of that challenge.
(read less)Let's get the problems I had with Perhaps the Stars out of the way first. It's a year, almost to the day, since I finished Book III of Terra Ignota, The Will to Battle; in that time, I've been to sleep around 365 times, been to work, seen films, ballet performances and live music, and read other books. Quite a few of them. So when I started on Perhaps the Stars, I quickly found that there
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