SEVEN SURRENDERS – Ada Palmer (2017)

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Normally I read more than 15 other books between installments of a series, but as I was so hooked by Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer’s debut, I decided to read book 2 of Terra Ignota quickly.

Seven Surrenders is not a stand alone novel, and this review isn’t stand alone either. If you haven’t, please read my review of Lightning first – in which I try to explain why that book nearly flabbergasted me.

To cut to the chase: this review will be less raving. While I loved the bulk of Seven Surrenders, a few problems did arise, and taken as a whole – the two novels are one story playing out over a few days only – I can’t give it the full 5 stars. Some of that will be nitpicking. All things considered, it still is a strong 4.5 star read – not a mean feat by any measure.

It is only in Seven Surrenders Palmer shows her true hand: while there were hints of it in Too Like the Lightning, this part makes it fully clear this series is an over the top, theatrical series, heavily influenced by the pulp side of Japanese anime. Not that Palmer writes only for effect and show: she also wants to articulate serious thoughts. And even though she manages to do that, those thoughts also form the heel at which this kind of reader will aim his arrow.

More on that in a minute. Let me be loud and clear first: together, the first half of Terra Ignota – there are 4 books in total – is audacious, daring, dazzling, intricate, high octane, entertaining, dense, a bit pompous, at times soapy & melodramatic, original, fresh. A full on recommendation for anybody in for challenging science fiction. I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy the two remaining books, but as Palmer walks a tightrope, we’ll see. For those who were still on the fence after reading Too Like the Lightning, if that didn’t grab you, Seven Surrenders will not change your mind: don’t even bother, I’d say.

So, taking stock, Too Like the Lightning remains a favorite book. As a series though, based on my reading of Seven Surrenders, I doubt it will eventually match The Book of the New Sun or Anathem as an intellectual achievement of speculative wonder. That’s because there’s also something more fundamental to be said than nitpicking. The biggest problems I experienced have to do with some of the philosophy underlying the books. To explain that I will need to spoil certain parts – including spoilers for Lightning.

It might seem strange for a book I thoroughly enjoyed, but the rest of this review will generally be critical – as I said, check the first review for the laudatory part, all of it still stands, even with the caveats I’ll voice after the jump.

For those readers that turn to this blog for critical analysis, this is were I start my dissection of Terra Ignota. Obviously some of this criticism might change after I read book 3 & 4, but as I also draw a lot from interviews, I’m pretty confident the bulk of what I’ll say will also apply to the full series. And even if certain things will change significantly in the remainder of the series, I hope in that case my analysis will remain interesting to map how certain themes progress throughout the series.

I want to warn you: I’ve written 8600 words. You may not want to read it all, so I’ve provided sections with a heading. Amongst other things, I will discuss the series’ metaphysics – tied with Mycroft’s status as a narrator, its seemingly essentialist outlook, the embedded case study of utilitarian ethics, the nature of J.E.D.D., the question whether this utopia could devolve into war, a gender issue and the books’ politics, intrigues and world building.

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SCIENCE FANTASY & MYCROFT AS A WITNESS; Or, METAPHYSICS & EPISTEMICS in the First Half of Terra Ignota

Palmer has written a remarkable story: while Bridger’s magical abilities are spelled out on the dust jacket, Too Like the Lightning somehow still manages to come across as a realist book because of the detailed world building and the general prevalence of science & technology. The book’s tone is overall rationalist, and so I expected a rational explanation for the fact that Bridger was able to transform toys into living things. It is only throughout the first book that it slowly started to dawn on me that the series could very well be a science fantasy at heart.

To be clear: I liked this aspect. It offers an fascinating duality to the reading experience, and Palmer provides a kind of slow reveal to something that was actually revealed from the very onset. It’s very well done.

But there’s also something problematic about it, at least, when judged with Palmer’s authorial intentions in mind. Palmer has written a book in which she really wants to communicate certain things – “add my voice to the Great Conversation”, or, at the very least, ask questions. That in itself is no problem, lots of authors want to, heck, me on this blog too.

There’s two methods to communicate ideas via stories: in a subdued manner, almost as a side effect, or explicitly. Palmer goes for the second option, and makes her questions a significant part of the books, with characters ruminating about philosophical and moral issues out loud. That isn’t a problem either. What’s problematic is whether Palmer has anything interesting to say. The answer to that question will be diverse – depending on the topic, as you’ll see down the line.

For now, we were talking metaphysics. And Palmer also talks about metaphysics in a lengthy 2017 interview with Jonathan Thornton on Fantasy-Faction.

I wanted to use a world that had all the strengths the genre has gained from Asimov and Heinlein but asked Voltaire’s questions about is there Providence? What can you tell about the nature of the maker of the universe from the universe itself? And the political questions of the Enlightenment, can religion and the government coexist? Because those questions have not been asked of a sophisticated science fiction world before.  [my bold]

Now we get to the crux of my beef. If you want to derive something about the nature of the maker of the universe, you cannot do so if you start from a story that has fantastical, magical aspects to it. It logically short circuits. As far as we know, magic does not exist in our reality – except for the miracle of creation itself. If you want to reason about our own universe, you can’t draw valid conclusions from one that is made-up, includes magic and as such differs fundamentally from our own.

Not that I think thought experiments are never instructive. But in this case all Palmer achieves is speculation about a speculative world. One can ask what the existence of Bridger says about Providence – but it only says something about the fictional Providence of the Terra Ignota series, not about our own human reality.

It makes for a mere metaphysical exercise. It is an exercise that ultimately does not interest me, even if I am very much interested in the metaphysical nature of our own reality. So far, on this matter, Palmer’s books are a sideshow only, an intellectual distraction. There’s nothing to learn from them about the metaphysics of our universe because they are not about our own physical reality.

As far as I can see, there is no possibility of transfer from her story to our own world. The book doesn’t work as a metaphysical metaphor nor as a symbol, because our world and the book’s world have different foundations: learning by analogy or negative analogy doesn’t work here. I’m not saying Palmer’s thought experiment doesn’t have any metaphysical value whatsoever, but because of these very different foundations anything that could be derived from these books isn’t fundamental.

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At the heart of this discussion lies another question: the epistemological nature of the text. Lots of reviews talk about Mycroft Canner being an unreliable narrator. Maybe Bridger’s miracles are not real?

Palmer masterfully obfuscates the nature of the books. There are a few formal aspects to this: the disclaimers at the very beginning, showing the text went to all kinds of (fictional) offices; hints of others (9A) that redacted Mycroft’s basic testimony; and a few parts that aren’t written by Mycroft himself. Also by means of the narrative structure itself Palmer adds confusion: Mycroft only discloses information slowly, which hints at the possibility he doesn’t show everything and holds important things back. All this makes for a great puzzle.

So if we truly want to grasp the story’s metaphysics, we have to know: how unreliable is Mycroft? Palmer has something to say about that in that same interview on Fantasy-Faction:

So Mycroft is in a way an unreliable narrator, but you’re always conscious that he’s doing his best, and that everything he’s doing he’s doing because he genuinely can’t think of a better way to get this information across to the reader. So I would say in many ways rather than an unreliable narrator he’s an imperfect narrator, or a semi-successful narrator, who bares to you all of the ways in which he’s struggling to communicate something so complicated and also for him so emotionally vexed. (…) Mycroft is a narrator whose biases are incredibly transparent, which paradoxically is less manipulative than a narrator whose biases are veiled, like a narrator who tells you someone is a bad person in such a way that you believe someone is a bad person.

Palmer has also indicated that Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun was an inspiration on the matter – and also with that book there is a giant misconception among readers that Severian, its narrator, lies. (If you want to read more on that, I’ve written a 5500 word analysis of TBotNS.)

The conclusion here is that Mycroft isn’t an unreliable narrator in the strict sense. He is unreliable about the gender he assigns characters, but he’s upfront about that. And while he doesn’t disclose all information immediately, he doesn’t seem to lie, and so we can assume Bridger’s miracles are real.

On top of that, there are other signs that Bridger is real. The most important being what Sniper says in the chapter he wrote: “The Bridger parts are true. There’s proof. Unlike Mycroft, I won’t let you get away with pretending it’s madness.” Add to that the fact that others that have read or even redacted the text – 9A and the offices of the Hives – haven’t added any disclaimer or warning that Bridger’s miracles were fake or of a non-magical nature.

Obviously new information that alters our perception of Bridger could turn up in book 3 & 4. But if that happens, it would have to be information that alters our entire understanding of the fictional text as it is presented so far. It would have to mean that the chapter Sniper wrote is a fabrication – or at the very least that Sniper lied as well, that 9A might be a fabrication too, that Mycroft fundamentally lies about entire scenes, etc. And more crucially: it would would go against what Palmer herself has said in the quote above – unless it turns out Mycroft was delusional or duped himself.

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ESSENTIALIST ETHICS; Or, MORAL PHILOSOPHY & FREE WILL in the First Half of Terra Ignota

One of the mysteries surrounding Mycroft is why he did what he did – all those murders. Different answers are given, and Mycroft possibly has blind spots about his own motives, he might be insane, but I won’t go into all that here. It is of note that one of his questions surrounding the crimes – a question about the Nature of Man – is repeated by other characters too, most notably in this passage voiced by Sniper:

Philosophers had long speculated about Savage Man, whether the conscience is innate or implanted by society, and whether the human mind is actually capable of willing evil for the sake of evil – even the most heinous killers still tend to imagine some goal (revenge, profit, personal pleasure, some mad command). It’s an important question, fundamentally really – can we choose actions that purely make the world worse without any perverse perceived benefit? – but we couldn’t discover whether the true Human Beast could exist back when the Beast was like a craftsman in an age of mass production, negligible beside the infinitely greater evils: Democide and War.

Is this really an important question? Fundamental? I dare say no. While research about the exact relations between nature and nurture are still ongoing, phrasing it like that obfuscates a number of other questions. Before you start debating the possibility of moral choice, a much more basic question is whether free will exists? All else is secondary.

I don’t see the urgency of Sniper’s question either, or rather, it forgoes reality’s complexity to try and come up with blanket answers about “Man” or “Human”. Palmer’s characters have the tendency to speak about “humanity” and “Man” as if there are certain essentials that are true for all of us. I think that is misguided. True: we all breath oxygen, but aside a very small number of other basic biological features, that’s about it.

Being human is being on a spectrum. Sure – there are people who are capable of cruelty. Such people tend to be psychologically damaged by trauma, or received inadequate nurture. Others were born neurodiverse – take psychopaths for instance. What does the existence of all these different kind of people say about “Man”? Even if such evildoers would still exist in a future utopia free of violence and cruelty? That brains are fragile? No shit, Sherlock.

While it is partly a matter of taste, this particular philosophical strand of the book simply doesn’t interest me, because I don’t see a moral mystery at all, nor do I think Palmer adds something interesting to the debates.

It is not only taste: Palmer is an historian, and it seems to me she is a bit stuck in the 18th century as far as reasoning about these matters goes. I’d rather read The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory by Buchanan and Powell again, or Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and The Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene, or Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny by Tomasello – 21st century non-fiction instead of 18th century thinkers that were flying blind to genetics, evolution, hormones and basic neurology. I don’t want to dismiss 18th century philosophers out of hand, but they are generally more interesting for the questions they ask than the answers they provide. To observe behavior is one thing, to explain its bio-sociological workings in detail another.

While Palmer’s world building is top-notch and detailed – more on that later – it seems as if there hardly has been any progress in ethics and philosophy between 2017 and 2454. And while the future Brillists supposedly do have much more advanced insight in psychology and the brain than we do today, that scientific knowledge doesn’t seem to have any impact whatsoever on the moral debates that are central to the books. It is an important weakness for a series that has an outspoken goal of adding to “the conversation”.

Moreover, philosophy aside: why would any sane and happy person choose evil in the first place? And why should you be proud if you don’t? If one thinks to be proud is a valid feeling on the matter, does that mean they think free will exists?

There before the cameras Mycroft preached that, in these days of peace when we choose our Hive and values for ourselves, human individuals finally have the change to be the worst thing in the world, and the right the be proud of our choice if we are not.  [Sniper]

I’m not debating De Sade & Diderot didn’t pose interesting questions about morality in the 18th century. But these questions were interesting because of their historical context. Nietzsche followed their ilk, and I think it is safe to say this day and age moral philosophers have moved beyond Nietzsche as well – I again refer you to those three non-fiction titles I listed a few paragraphs above.

Granted, big parts of the general public have more crude and traditional conceptions about right and wrong, and maybe those kind of readers might be inspired by what Palmer has on offer.

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Back to free will – the much more fundamental question.

Mycroft acknowledges he lacks free will, for instance in this passage:

When Hope left she took Doubt with her, leaving only resolution, and a quiet curiosity about the larger nature of the universe. I mused, those seven nights, abstractly about what forces had conspired to put me in such a place, and make me such a person that I would choose this. I almost thought the dread word ‘Providence.’ (…) How dare the world make me do what I had done (…).  [my bold]

And while he admits the larger world determines his actions, he struggles with what determines that larger world. And so ‘Providence’ features heavily in his thoughts – and seemingly Palmer’s too, if you recall that first fragment from the interview I quoted. Mycroft seems to have the need to project personality or volition on the order of the world.

There is a Will behind this universe, reader, that I know. There are miracles, and a Divinity behind those miracles, Who has a plan, but have you ever, reader, heard me claim that that Plan is benevolent.

On the other hand, consider the following fragment, in which Mycroft also acknowledges there might not be a teleological reason for existence – no Providence with a will.

“(…) I let myself fall into the delusion that Providence might be simple. It isn’t simple. It isn’t kind. It isn’t working toward some happy end where we’re all saved, and every bad thing that happens turns out to be for the best in ways we can’t yet see. It isn’t cruel either, though it often seems so. (…) It’s not trying to destroy humanity, or torture us, or leave us in the dark alone. It’s something else. There is a guiding Principle, not Good, not Evil, not Justice, not even Progress, something else that we can’t understand or name yet, one of these God-sized concepts that even Jehova can’t describe in all His languages. Providence planned this war. (…)”

I do think things are simple, or at least, that the complexity isn’t situated where Mycroft (Palmer?) puts it. I do think we understand this “guiding Principle” fairly well – and they surely would understand it even better in the 25th century. It is cause-result, the basic principle of evolution and physical reality. Granted, we don’t fully understand certain aspects of our material world, and certain domains in the quantum realm seem to operate in a more complex manner, but on the macro scale of things – the scale Mycroft is talking about – we live in a deterministic world driven by countless cause-result reactions. It really is that simple.

What is not simple is the mystery of creation/existence itself. How and why did our universe came into existence? What is its metaphysical nature? These questions possibly have a religious answer, and the debates about deism in Seven Surrenders do have their place, but they only get you so far morally – that is, not far at all.

And here we come full circle in this section: morally the questions whether there is a God, and, if there indeed is one, what kind of God it is, are hardly are relevant, because it is loud and clear that – practically, as far as our behavior goes – we do live in a material, deterministic environment, and, even more importantly, any moral law that needs a religious justification isn’t satisfying rationally, as there are lots of people alive that don’t believe, or doubt the existence of God or gods.

The conclusion is the same: for my taste, and from what I have read on these matters, Palmer doesn’t add that much to this particular part of the conversation, on the contrary, she seems to be stuck in a conversation from the 18th century past.

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THE TROLLEY PROBLEM; Or, RATIONAL CALCULUS & J.E.D.D. in the First Half of Terra Ignota

We are not done with ethics yet. For those unfamiliar with the trolley problem, it boils down to this: there are 5 people tied to a railway track. You can’t get to them in time, and a train is hurtling towards them. You are close to a lever however, and if you pull it, the train is diverted to a different track, to which only 1 person is tied. What do you do?

The central crimes of Too Like the Lightning and its political fallout in Seven Surrenders revolve around a variant of the problem. Questions like these are interesting, but they are old. Long before Phillipa Foot devised of the trolley problem in a paper in 1967, the British fed counterintelligence to Germany so that the Germans adjusted the aim of their V-1 rockets, placing southern suburban London in danger, and not the more populous center. Apparently 10,000 lives were saved as a result.

Given the scale of what they need to govern, it is what politicians are asked to do the entire time – COVID showed that again. One of the essences of policy making precisely is utilitarian calculus.

As such, from a philosophical point of view, I don’t think Palmer offers anything new, and I don’t even think the debate is that interesting in terms of black and white morals: what is more interesting is how these things work in our minds. Books by Joshua Green, David Edmonds and Thomas Cathcart offer such insight, and deal with the current research on the matter, lifting the matter from its fumbling philosophical origins into the illuminating light of science.

All this is not fundamental criticism: Palmer does provide an entertaining mystery, and again, people not versed in the trolley field will have a blast making up their own moral minds on the matter.

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There is actually a second version of the trolley problem in the book: the corruption of the CFB, the political system that governs the Cousins Hive. It is similar to the trolley problem in that one chooses a lesser evil over a bigger one: that’s why the Anonymous rigged the system with good intentions, and clearly good consequences too.

But it is a bit of a convoluted version of a moral problem, and it defies suspension of disbelief. Why? Essentially, the Cousins’ feedback system works well, but it has a few minor design flaws – it reacts too quickly at times. Some of the characters are very dramatic about the exposed corruption, but instead of abolishing the entire system, tweaking it would be better, all the more as the necessary tweaks have already been tried and tested by the exposed corruptors. It’s unbelievable a character in the position of Bryar Kosala would not be more pragmatic about it. I would even say that in the real world such design flaws probably would have been avoided from the onset, as it would be one of the first things to be tackled by its designers: how do we deal with fads? But again: I need to remind myself from time to time that this is not a series whose primary aim is realism.

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Zooming out from the trolley problem, a bigger theme of the books is rationality as such.

I’ve been fairly critical so far, and you might be wondering: how come this guy still likes this? Well, one of the reasons is because the books are so rich that it’s not that big a deal if certain parts don’t click, there’s plenty of stuff that does. And specifically this next thing, this is were Palmer shines: she ties ideas from Diderot to how societies change to thinking & writing about utopia, and even to our own current political reality. Part of the conversation indeed.

I’ll first quote Palmer, again from the Fantasy-Faction interview:

Diderot in particular, you see in his writings like Jacques The Fatalist and Rameau’s Nephew was aware of the fact that what they were really doing was destroying the society they lived in and they didn’t know what the attributes of the next society that developed would be. It wouldn’t share their values, it would be a society they themselves wouldn’t be comfortable in. But it would be more rational, and Diderot then had faith that a rational world would be better, even if it would not be a place comfortable for him.

It’s funny to say he has faith when he’s one of the most famous atheists in all of human history, but he had faith in reason, in that sense. Faith that it would bring about a world worth bringing about, and worth destroying his own world for. That is a very sophisticated relationship to have with progress. I think we often see, many of the tensions we’re having right now around liberalism and progress have to do with people enthusiastically supporting progress, thinking yes, I and my family and everyone will be better off, and then it advances a bit, and they’re like, wait a minute, this is changing things more than I expected. I am no longer comfortable in the new order that’s being created by this and now I feel like this is wrong. And they don’t recognise this is the nature of progress, and instead try to turn it into a progress has gone wrong because of something, we direct blame somewhere.

This fragment goes to the core of the book, and the reason it is – without doubt – a worthy addition to the utopian and speculative canon, and even, on a larger scale, to political literature as such. Palmer again:

I think that was one of the questions I wanted to get at, is those figures in the Enlightenment like Diderot had a healthier if less optimistic relationship with progress than a lot of us do, in that they recognised progress is the act of destroying our world to make a better one. And the book asks many times this question, would you destroy this world to save a better one, or conversely would you destroy a better world to save this one, not meaning, you know, there are all multiple universes and inside another one there’s a better world than this. But if the future world will come about, that will be better than this one because of progress, will you destroy that to protect the world you already have and are comfortable in. And that’s a very important tension we don’t talk about very much but underlies almost all I think of our current, certainly political and social upheavals.

And again, Ada Palmer:

And so I think when anyone looks at the real future, it’s one third dystopia, one third utopia and one third depressingly familiar. And I wanted to write a book that was like that.

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Maybe I should say a few words about J.E.D.D. MASON here too, as his character ties into rationality and Diderot as well. For starters, his mother, Madame D’Arouet, has this to say about him:

“(…) The Enlightenment tried to remake society in Reason’s image: rational laws, rational religion; but the ones who really thought it through realized morality itself was just as artificial as the aristocracies and theocracies they were sweeping away. Diderot theorized that a new Enlightened Man could be raised with Reason in place of conscience, a cold calculator who would find nothing good or bad beyond what his own analysis decided. They had no way to achieve one back then, but I did it. I raised an Alien.”

(Notice how Palmer speaks through her characters, almost as if Madame quotes from Palmer’s interviews.)

Here is Palmer herself in a 2017 interview with Chris Urie in Clarkesworld, on Madame, J.E.D.D., Diderot and de Sade:

Madame de Pompadour is the obvious corollary, the incredibly powerful mistress of Louis XV. That’s how Madame sees herself, but for me it is more directly based on some of the fictitious stories of devious and powerful women told in the course of Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, and also in de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom.

Diderot and de Sade were interested in the artificiality of social mores, how patterns of power, and seduction, and marriage, and relations are largely arbitrary rules invented by human society, and how it’s easier to manipulate those rules if you start thinking of them as arbitrary and not real.

But unlike de Sade, Diderot believed that it’s very hard to do that because society works so hard to ingrain belief in social mores in us, and that even people who can distance themselves from and manipulate social mores in some circumstances often remain viscerally locked in to other social mores. And Madame’s plans for her son are modeled partly on the version of the Roman Empress Livia (Augustus’ wife) as depicted in Robert Graves’ I Claudius.

The nature of J.E.D.D. is one of the other mysteries of the book – just like Bridger’s, which I discussed in the section about metaphysics. But I don’t think the metaphysical nature of Bridger and J.E.D.D. is the same. Bridger seems a fantasy miracle, but J.E.D.D. seems to be the result of determined Nurture, a project of Madame.

J.E.D.D. supposedly became who his is, because he was exposed to seven languages, intellectual contradictions, tons of philosophers, etc. from a very early age on. On top of that, he was exposed to lots of sex and power.

“Those people our world respects most, emperors and kings, Jehova saw fucking like animals since before He knew the difference between beast and man. No child could absorb social values after that. I birthed a Being Who believes in nothing He did not conceive Himself. I hadn’t realized Enlightened Man would turn out to be a God.”  [Madame]

Obviously, this is over-the-top and absurd theatrics. Back in the days, children were exposed to their parents having sex too. Being raised in a brothel with high profile customers will undoubtedly influence your moral compass, but to say such a child “could absorb no social values” because of that is baloney, let alone it would turn a child into a solipsist.

It’s obvious that Madame is crazy, and Palmer is a master storyteller because she generally manages to uphold the impression that her characters are more or less normal. Most of the time I bought everything they said, and it is the tension between serious realism/rationality and insane theatrics that makes these novels so unique – not unlike The Book of the New Sun, now that I think of it, as Severian is also much more crazy than readers notice at first.

Anyhow, a more prosaic reading of J.E.D.D. would be that he is indeed emotionally damaged by his particular upbringing. I’m not even talking about the brothel here, but by being treated as a science & political project by all his chaperons from the different Hives. He obviously is extremely intelligent, and thinks himself to be special and unique, a God in his own mind – not unlike some other gifted people. People are bad judges about their own status, and fanboys like Mycroft aren’t objective too, so, in the end, so far, at the end of book 2, J.E.D.D. seems to have no supernatural powers. It is of note that Bridger calls Mycroft’s theology about J.E.D.D. crazy.

Could it simply be that J.E.D.D. is somewhere on the autism spectrum? Consider what Andō Mitsubishi says:

“I don’t believe TAi-kun is capable of that kind of ethical compromise. (…) We aren’t discussing a normal . . . person here. (…) Tai-kun is psychologically unique, without the precedent even in the annals of Brill’s Institute. You cannot predict their actions or reactions, not if you don’t know them. Words, ethics, the decisions where we every day see gray and compromise are to Tai-kun as rigid and precise as mathematics.”

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CASUS BELLI; Or, WHY WAR? HUMAN ESSENTIALISM & POLITICS in the First Half of Terra Ignota

Marion Deeds refers to this next problem in her review of Seven Surrenders on Fantasy Literature as well. Supposing the war will start full on in the second half of Terra Ignota, why would it start in the first place? It is not fully clear, as the world of Terra Ignota does seem to be a utopia – even if it has problems with suppressed gender and religion, and a level of competition between the Hives.

I’m no historian nor a political scientist, but to me it seems most wars have economic realities underlying them. To Palmer’s defense, the books do offer some explanation of why a war would start. The main reason Palmer offers is a particular ratio of membership, landownership and GDP between the Hives, but it is not really explained why that particular ratio would be so problematic in a world where there is no poverty, everybody is fairly affluent and has “unprecedented political self-determination”. Some additional factors are named too: the landgrab, Nurturism: “those were potential fuel.” Also Apollo and the Mardi bash did some preparatory ground work, but again, all this is shady, and it is unclear how it would work in a real world.

The effect evolution and change have on society – discussed in the previous section – also plays a possible role. In the words of Cornel MASON:

“Every life has the potential to be a good one, for the first time in history. And everyone is secretly afraid that it’s fragile, that if we try to make it better, change something, if the Hive proportions shift too much, if science raises the life expectancy too fast, or Brill’s Institute finally figures out how to upload our brains into computers, or make us all into impossible geniuses, it will fall apart.”

As for the spark, there are the O.S. and the CFB scandals, and the exposed machinations in the brothel. Again, it is not really clear how all this would lead to war – especially as both O.S. and CFB had clear positive results. Mass rioting for a few days is plausible. But world war? It will be interesting to see how The Will to Battle and Perhaps the Stars will continue, and if they will provide more clarity on this front.

I do agree a kind of end-of-history thinking is probably naive, and it will take more than 4 centuries to truly eliminate the risk of war. Be that as it may, I think the book would have been deeper if the motivations had been made more clear, especially the (economic) motivations that would drive common, affluent, free and more or less happy people to support violence & worldwide war.

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So far for political realism: another important factor could be Bridger – maybe he was right, and him reading Apollo’s Iliad and his magical powers indeed made Terra Ignota’s society more bellicose. If that truly is the case, it’s a legitimate choice of the author, even an original, daring, creative one. And I don’t have a problem with it, but it would make the social underpinnings of the novels a bit less interesting, as it would sidestep reality.

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There’s another thing to be remarked in this particular context. Reading the book one often gets the impression that lots of characters think war is inevitable not because of something in society, but because of some inborn, unchangeable human nature – again, Man as a Beast, as hinted in the first section of this review. I don’t buy such essentialist thoughts, and it is unclear how Palmer herself thinks about it.

“They [Mardi bash] thought war was inevitable,” I answered, “locked in by human nature, that there will always be another war, now or two hundred years from now, sometime. (…)”

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Regardless of the cause for war, two of the question Palmer asks – how would war look like in a post-nation-state, borderless society, and what would the effect of 3 centuries of peace be on a subsequent war – are indeed interesting.

The two questions are tied to the political organization at the heart of the books: the Hive system and its details is probably the biggest, most original idea Palmer has to offer. A brilliant idea really. I would like to learn more about its genealogy – maybe there are authors who have thought something similar, or devised precursors to such a system? If you know of any, don’t hesitate to comment.

Palmer talks about the benefits of the system in that same interview:

The other is the enormous degree of trust they have in their governments. Because this is a world where a citizen who’s dissatisfied with their government can leave within 24 hours, and be a citizen of a different nation. And so in a sense it’s a buyer’s market rather than a seller’s market of citizenship. Because if your government does something you disagree with, you leave in an instant and have a different government. The governments are held to a high degree of accountability to their people. And if their people don’t like what they’re doing, boom! Gone! Which makes people feel their government is working for them.

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ESSENTIALISM pt. 3; Or, GENDER & DISBELIEF in the First Half of Terra Ignota

As I already said in my review of Too Like the Lightning, I really like what Palmer does with how Mycroft uses pronouns. But Palmer does much more with gender. I also like her idea of examining what it would mean if we would suppress expressions of gender too soon – even though I think it is highly, highly unlikely such a thing would happen in the wake of religious wars a few centuries from now, so unlikely that I don’t buy that part of the books’ premise. But that’s not a big problem, as it provides for entertaining drama. I don’t buy giant sandworms either, and we all know we need to give speculative authors some slack from time to time.

In the review for the first book, I also mentioned I don’t buy neutered sex. I agree that there’s a big cultural component to what we find sexually attractive, but what would neutered sex mean? That we would be able to shape desire in such a way that the social norm becomes bisexual attraction? That because of a changed culture people would somehow stop caring about the gendered appearance of bodies? That reeks of the opposite of gay conversion therapy. Admittedly, Palmer is a bit vague on this matter, but it is the impression I got in both books.

I also want to talk about another point Palmer raises, and which reeks of gender essentialism. Philosopher Ethan Mills talks about this in his review of Seven Surrenders on his excellent blog Examined Worlds:

With only a mild spoiler, dear reader, I can say that some of the characters consider the wisdom of the outright ban on old-fashioned gender associations (along with bans on religion, of course). The idea is this: while gender certainly creates a lot of trouble for us, it does serve social and cognitive functions of organizing human experience. Gender gives us a way to make sense of “masculine” traits like aggression, competition, etc. and “feminine” traits like nurturing, cooperation, etc. This is a far more subtle point than it appears. The point is NOT gender essentialism. The characters aren’t saying that all men are essentially masculine and all women feminine. The point is that simply banning all gender associations that have developed over thousands of years without replacing them with something else leaves humans with impoverished resources for making sense of their experience.

I’m not sure what gender associations would be replaced with. Nobody in the book does, either. Maybe that’s the point. We have to think of something new.

I found this to be a pretty deep point, but I’m not sure what I think about it.

I do not agree with Mills, however, nor with Palmer if she has the same ideas about this as some of her characters. I do think this particular thing boils down to gender essentialism – not the kind that says that all women or all men are alike or share some common essentials, but the other way around: the idea that one could distill an essence from all women and one from all men.

Lets see how Palmer phrases is via Heloïse, the nun:

“(…) How many fewer people might have died if the Cousins had felt free to say overtly why they were really upset? That their motherly feelings judged it inhumane to do such things to children. Without that vocabulary, the real cause of the conflict couldn’t even be discussed! (…)”

I really don’t get what’s such a big deal. Isn’t the answer easy? Palmer, in the same scene, uses the phrase “all the voices of nurturing”. Isn’t that enough? Wouldn’t that be apt vocabulary? The words are right there: aggression, competition, nurturing, cooperation. Why the need to cluster them around gender? Just use them. And use them without disenfranchising aggressive females, cooperative males and competitive non-binairy people – all of which would still exist in Palmer’s future utopia.

This thought seems a bit misguided, it would just derail the future gender movement in the wrong direction, back to clustering people and feelings around average characteristics. It might be true that generally, on average, women are less aggressive then men. That knowledge wouldn’t be lost if we would start using neutered pronouns or start dressing without gender markers. I agree with Palmer that stopping the conversation about gender too soon would be harmful to society, just as I think repressing it would be harmful as well. But there’s a pretty large gap between repression of all things gender, and using more specific words like ‘nurturing’ instead of ‘feminine’.

A character goes as far as suggesting the Set-Set riots would have been much less severe if the Cousins would have had more apt vocabulary. That’s not believable, not in the real world, and not in the context of the fictive world Palmer created.

update August 2022: It has become fully clear to me Palmer herself surely is not a gender essentialist. Palmer wrote a really interesting guest post on Nine Bookish Lives in November 2021. The post is very thoughtful and nuanced, and well worth your time, clarifying a few issues in Terra Ignota some more. If there’s any critique to give here, it’s that some of the books’ themes need these extra sources via interviews, and in a way that’s a shame.

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COMPLEXITY; Or, WORLD BUILDING & INTRIGUE in the First Half of Terra Ignota

Lots of reviewers have talked about these books’ complexity. Let me start with Palmer on world building in that Fantasy-Faction interview:

Tons! Five years of world building, then six months of outlining the entire series, all four books, before I sat down to write chapter one of book one. And the world building consists not only of coming up with stuff but writing elaborate timelines. I have a huge timeline of the history of the world from now to 2454, and I have spreadsheets of people’s relationships and ages and names and dates, and I have terminology, and the distribution of different voting blocks and different political groups and the history of art collecting, and fashion and a giant map with notes on every city with a population of 10 million or more, and what the political history and ratio of Hives is in that city. There’s a giant customised google map with millions of pins all over it. Dozens and dozens of them. Lots and lots of planning to make the fabric all the way through. But again as I said, I want to be able to interrogate this the way a historian does. And if I come to it with a historian’s question and there isn’t an answer here then the world isn’t mature yet. Which is what makes the world feel so thick and real and like it goes all the way down.

Hats off, as simple as that. The amount of dedication to her project payed off. Aside from an economical side that’s a bit underdeveloped, and my remarks about the casus belli, this is one of the most detailed world building I have come across.

Not only the world building, also the plot has a similar complexity. Some reviewers even feel that it is too much: it does require a lot of energy to keep everything in mind. At times it felt like I lost grip on certain plotlines indeed, especially in this book, with revelation after revelation, conspiracy after conspiracy, unmasking after unmasking. But this is nitpicking, it’s not even criticism: I loved it – Seven Surrenders was a total blast in that respect, all that intrigue made for an outrageous experience.

It is incredible how Palmer manages to tie everything up coherently in the final chapters, again offering revelations to the very end, revelations that were surprising, creative, daring.

Having said that, I can understand reviewers like Liz Bourke who think that there’s just too much going, which makes it hard to pay attention to every strand, so that by the end of a particular strand it doesn’t feel the strand has paid off because experiencing it was diluted by all the other strands.

There’s truth in that observation, but I still prefer the way Palmer handled it: the wild ride needs it. The only ways to fix this would be to either add page time – and that would have clogged up the ride – or to cut certain strands, and that would have made it less wild. The problem comes with the territory.

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I want to end this part with another fragment from that Palmer interview – it really is a blessing to have an author so vocal about work that is as complex as it is. There were spoilers in the article before, but I want to repeat the warning. What follows might be the biggest spoiler in this entire review: a massive one for Too Like the Lightning, so if you haven’t read that book yet but plan to, do not read this.

The strange structure of the first two books, really, in as much as this is a whodunnit, the entire first book is learning what the ‘it’ is that someone has done. You don’t understand until the last page of book one exactly what has just happened. And so it’s a two part whodunnit in which the ‘whodun’ doesn’t begin until book two, because the entire first book is ‘it’. If you think of the structure of murder mysteries, usually that’s been gotten over with in the first chapter, and the rest is the ‘who’, but this is just the ‘it’, before you understand, because you can’t start to investigate who before you know, the full reach of ‘it’. The world is that interconnected, both our real world and this imagined future world. And so that is the way I found that I could bring people into this world and trace through knot after knot after knot so that everyone would see exactly how interrelated everything was. By the time you understand ‘it’ you also understand the entire political structure of this future.

I hadn’t thought about it that way before I read this, but the achievement at the end of Too Like the Lightning indeed is superb – I’ve never had an experience like it.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Lots of my remarks above deal with possible intellectual disagreements, but I want to stress that Palmer generally doesn’t seem to take firmly entrenched positions. From what I can gather, she mostly wants to throw up questions, and make the reader think about certain issues. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I have the impression Palmer sometimes avoids taking a clear stance, and maybe that’s a missed opportunity. Maybe The Will to Battle and Perhaps the Stars will offer more than questions.

At the same time, paradoxically, certain parts of Seven Surrenders reads as MESSAGE literature. It’s not always easy to parse how characters’ opinions differ from Palmer’s – especially as in certain interviews Palmer echoes things she has put in the mouths of her characters almost verbatim.

Long time readers of this blog know that my tastes veer more to less overtly preachy literature, and especially on gender I have the impression Palmer does want to make a few points.

If I need to summarize my thoughts so far, I’d say this: the first half of Terra Ignota is brilliant as a story, a construction, as a display of creativity. As a philosophical book I felt it a bit lacking at times, maybe even dated on certain issues. This might also be the result of Palmer choosing such an extreme, hyperbolic, baroque form of theater.

It’s really wonderful how Palmer balances the soapy pulp side of a story that’s pompous, at times even contrived, with something that is also serious and intellectually intricate – I’d nearly say it boarders on the incredible, it really is a tour de force.

This balancing act provides what is probably the books’ biggest challenge: readers should never forget that this isn’t meant to be a naturalist, realist account, even though it is ‘serious’. The text acknowledges its own absurdity, multiple times, and the perverted, mad humor of the books hasn’t been fully acknowledged in most reviews, including my own. When I learned Bridger nursed himself via his thumbs I nearly lost it, and it is a good example of a clever joke that’s at the same time a deadpan, serious element that perfectly fits the plot.

Palmer asks questions, generally about the human condition at large. It might not have been her focus, but it I think it is a missed opportunity there are so few recognizable real human emotions to be found in the book. This is not necessarily the result of choosing a theatrical form: I’ve been brought to tears by pompous theater multiple times throughout my life.

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One more question: is there a substrate of conservatism in these books? I am not talking about the Emperor that said “Too much change is dangerous. A happy world wanted progress to stop.” That is simply true. Besides, one can be progressive and still warn against too much change too quickly.

I ask the question because of the nature of both the Emperor and the King of Spain. They are uncorruptible, prime specimens of the human race – basically the only upright people in the entire cast. The Emperor is selected via a ruthless procedure that ensures his character, and the King seems to be that way because he was born Noble. Is this a form of Great Man elitism? We’ll see how things play out in the two final books.

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I’ll probably read 15 or more books before I’ll start The Will to Battle. My head is still full of this first half, and while I’ve written a lot here, it will take some time to process everything. To properly taste the next installment, I need a fully cleared palate, and that’ll take time.

What a remarkable, provocative series.

If you have thoughts of your own on something I’ve written, please do not hesitate to comment. I might have missed things, some of my interpretations might not hold. Debate is very welcome, but please, no spoilers for book 3 and 4 in the comments. 

If you like this kind of analysis, I’ve made a separate index of my lengthy in-depth reviews.

“I do not ask you to forgive them all, just to have reasons beyond rash grudges or affections when you choose to fight and kill for one side, or the other.”

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Consult the author index for my other reviews, or my favorite lists. Click here for an index of my non-fiction or art book review.