Too Like the Lightning (2 of 2)

by Ada Palmer

Audiobook

English language

Published by GraphicAudio.

ISBN:: 978-1-68508-494-3

(3 reviews)

From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality. Adapted and produced by GraphicAudio with a full cast of actors, immersive sound effects and cinematic music!

Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built …

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.

And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destabilize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...

13 editions

[email protected] reviewed Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota -- Book 1)

Too Like the Lightning

2 stars

This is a temporary DNF, and one of my big disappointments of the year. I read to approx. p220, giving up during an extended (and frankly inane) overstuffed dialog sequence.

I like the author. Palmer is intelligent, and passionate about her chosen subjects. I share a stack of the same interests, particularly censorship (she has a couple of great lectures on YouTube about the subject, explaining what censorship regimes really do, how they work, how universally slipshod they are, etc.)

I also like the book's key ideas. My social milieu DOES matter more to me than the country on my birth certificate, and that SHOULD count for something. But I couldn't grok her writing style. It's baroque. Too wordy, too 'mannered'. The framing device she employs is original (a history of events, about which extraneous details are included, like editorial decisions and commentary on people) but I can't help but …

This is a temporary DNF, and one of my big disappointments of the year. I read to approx. p220, giving up during an extended (and frankly inane) overstuffed dialog sequence.

The extensive cast doesn't help things either. Then add in alternate names for certain characters, used in the same paragraph. Then add unconvential punctuation. The book has an obsession with names and titles.

I might pick up the book and the series again later on and discover a favorite. But I know it didn't hold me on the maiden read. A pity.

Will Sargent reviewed Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota -- Book 1)

Review of 'Too Like the Lightning' on 'Storygraph'

1 star

I can’t get past the second person grammar and the stilted Edwardian diction. Aborted.

kaput_reflex reviewed Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota -- Book 1)

Review of 'Too Like the Lightning' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Unique and thoughtful, I enjoyed it a lot.

Reading this book was an amazing an unexpected experience. The reading itself was a pleasure, the writing style unique but reminiscent of so many influences. As a fan of science fiction, I was excited not only for the technological future described, but for the future of ideas that is proposed, all with a multitude of characters which you actually get to know and love or hate or fear. Even if this is only the first half of the story, there is a sense of completeness. Looking forward to complete the cycle.

Subjects

Utopias
Prisoners
Twenty-fifth century
Fiction
Third millennium
Fiction, science fiction, general