Meanwhile, an inexplicable theft and perhaps a murder mystery threaten to destabilize the world order.Ī good deal of this book is exposition and philosophical discussion between Mycroft and the reader. Against the backdrop of this human society that’s alien to us, Mycroft explains how he and a few allies are trying to prevent Bridger’s premature discovery. And it’s rude to gender someone in polite conversation-everyone is referred to with gender neutral pronouns. Nation-states are a thing of the past, mostly-instead, people join “hives,” what we might call a collective or club or association, and form bash’es, which are like extended families. In this future world, by the way, religion is outlawed. For example, he’s breathed life into some toy soldiers. Mycroft is also helping a child named Bridger, who has the mysterious ability to reify any image or give life to inanimate objects.
He’s on call by pretty much all the Powers That Be. Most of the world thinks him executed actually, he lives out his days as a Servicer-a kind of lifetime sentence of community service. The narrator is Mycroft Canner, an infamous convicted murderer. In this case, Palmer grounds her story in the duelling philosophies of the Enlightenment-humanists vs rationalists, individualists vs collectivists-while simultaneously springboarding us into a vision of a future for humanity that is probably utopic, if you’re willing to be flexible about how you define “freedom.” Honestly, I don’t know how much I liked this book, but I know for certain I’ve never read anything like it. That is, Ada Palmer’s writing here reminds me a lot of Dan Simmons’ writing: science fiction heavily saturated with literary and philosophical references. I'm not sure if it's a positive or negative that I read Too Like the Lightning so soon after reading Ilium.
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