(I’ve read 2 of the 4 books, the others TBR. I might update this once I’ve finished the whole series.)

(Notes to self on adjectives that come to mind: sprawling, baggy, gabby, grandiloquent, megalomaniac, obsessive, kitsch, humanistic, grand; books of ideas; script-like; like a film (what are the words I’m looking for?); opinionated (you do get the sense that Palmer is bossy, opinionated, knows her mind and her worth); endlessly interested; homage; hopeful and realistic, not cynical exactly…)

Sprawling, baggy, grand theatrical novels. Ada Palmer is a historian specialising in the Renaissance and intellectual history; this is a series calling out to Voltaire and de Sade and Rousseau. It’s both less grand/magisterial/totemic, and less serious and staid, than that might suggest, though — it’s also a series which is very into mecha anime and Gene Wolfe and the world-building tradition of science fiction. These are books that wear the author’s heart on their sleeve: you can feel her intellectual heroes and obsessions through the pages.

Terra Ignota is set on Earth, in the 25th century. It’s a place of general plenty and prosperity (and surprisingly not-that-distinct from our own world: more on this later). The key technology — not in a hard sci-fi sense but for the effects it has on culture and politics and plot — is flying cars. Inhabitants of this Earth can travel across the world in minutes, maybe an hour or so for the longest distances. This has transformed how they live. Flying cars enabled the obsolescence of geographically-bound nation-states, obsoleted by the Hives: systems of government/interest groups/vibe clusters that stretch across the globe. Citizens in Palmer’s world choose a Hive to belong to and agree to be bound by its laws, or choose to remain Hiveless and live under a “default law.” Geography remains an important part of the series, with different cultures and Hives clustering in different areas, but the general picture is one of cosmopolitanism (taken more seriously, taken to its extreme, perhaps?). Characters might live in Paris and fly to Buenos Aires and Togenkyo (a fictional city: I guess you can guess the location) and Cielo de Pajaros daily.

Discussions of religion between 3 or more people are banned, after seemingly brutal “Church Wars”. Instead, citizens have sensayers: somewhere between a philosophical tutor and a priest, schooled in all the main religious and spiritual traditions, who talk to parishioners one-on-one. The sensayers present theological arguments, thoughts from various schools, or provocative questions which help their parishioners make sense of things, or otherwise answer their pent-up need for religion.

Similarly, this world has tried in at least some small ways to abolish gender. Clothes are generally unisex, gendered pronouns are not used, and it seems like gendered archetypes or stereotypes are frowned upon and consciously removed. For example, things like child-rearing and empathy and being a supportive parent are not explicitly discussed as being feminine, or having a unifying theme of femininity. (I thought that some of the response to this was a little extreme, and that I’d seen this kind of thinking about gender and sex done more radically and interestingly by Le Guin and by Delany, just to name the few writers I’ve read, much earlier. Nonetheless, this is a fun feature of the books )

Palmer’s approach to this world comes explicitly from the 18th century, in a few ways. The narrator of the series, Mycroft Canner, explicitly talks about modelling his narration after 18th-century texts; the elites in the Terra Ignota society are also obsessed with the 18th century. Beyond this, the political structure of the system and the implicit theory of the novels is very 18th-century, I think. Despite these otherwise quite cosmopolitan and enlightened forms of government, the world is in fact dominated by a small handful of aristocrats, schooled in separate and surprising ways, many clinging to or advancing now-recherché theories of gender and sexuality, quoting classics to each other, speaking Latin, etc.

The implicit ideology of the books is one that is, if not sympathetic to the normative claims, very enamoured with the descriptive claims of these ideas. Ada Palmer is a writer who spends much of her book with a small handful of very strange and powerful individuals, often very exceptional in multiple dimensions. The implicit message of the book is a great man theory of history: that a handful of individuals can, and do, shape the course of the world. It’s a series that’s interested in what happens when these idealistic, collective forms of government come into tension with the individuals behind the scenes — not just whether we could ever have this kind of mass empowerment of people, in a world with much less need for work and much better information technology, and education, and so on — but also, how should we think about them coming into conflict, whether this is a desirable feature of the system, who we should we side with, and so on. Maybe more on this to come.

There are some concepts and ideas in the book that I expect I’ll find myself referring to often in the future. Some ones I especially like:

The Hives. In Palmer’s world, world government is made up of seven major Hives, each representing, broadly speaking, a different interest group. They’re a mixture of a government — when you choose a Hive, you choose the law to live under — and also, a choice of decision procedure/governing institution, a choice of vibe/atmosphere/general set of norms, and a choice of ideology. I think each Hive is well understood as making a claim about the right end of human activities, or at least the most valuable close intermediate end.

They’re also social/cultural groups, and we see this influence go in both ways: people’s social groups determine their Hive, but their Hive also (informally) determines who they interact with, who they see. I think Palmer has nicely and believably thought through the details of what well-lived Hives might look like.

The seven Hives, briefly:

There’s also the Hiveless, a sort of de facto government which represents those who don’t feel their interests align with any particular hive. Hiveless can choose laws of varying stringency, from the Whitelaws, which seem to have broadly liberal policies for people who just don’t like any of the hives, all the way to the Blacklaws, which are some strange hybrid of Russeau’s state of nature and an old-timey dueling society. For Blacklaws almost anything, including murder (of other Blacklaws!) is permitted.

Bash’es. In Palmer’s world, instead of being organised in traditional nuclear families, people live in bash’es: cross-generational groups of friends or colleagues or whatevers who live together and raise children together. This obviously isn’t a totally new idea, but I personally really enjoyed seeing this in fiction — seeing bash’es and ba’pas, groups of friends, raise children together. Many of the bash’es we see in the novel are also themed around an orientation to life, or an interest/pursuit. We spend a lot of time in one bash’ which runs the global transit system, and does other work besides; similarly, we hear of bash’es where people are all obsessed with their work, or training to be high-up politicians in the Mason Hive, or are all artists. I find it really touching to see how this was depicted, and it’s become a useful piece of cultural shorthand for me.

Vocateur. In general, Palmer is good at cultural shorthand. Another nice coinage I enjoy in the books is vocateur. “Amateur” comes from the Latin amare — or at least so Google tells me — and it means to love something, in contrast to a professional. (Tragically, I first learned this fact from the marketing arm of an expensive running brand who got bought out by private equity years ago.) Palmer coins vocateur from vocation: a vocateur is someone who sees their work or their pursuits as vocational, and who devotes their life to them. Palmer’s world is in some unspecified era of technological plenty, where nobody needs to work more than 20 hours a week to get by, and so vocateur singles out those few who work their obsessive 60 hours a week despite that. I can see how it’s a useful word in that context, and I think it’s useful in our world too.

One nice thing about vocateur, as distinct from amateur, is that it seems like it more commonly refers to ideas or motivations or aims, than to the exact hobby or activity one pursues. You might be a passionate amateur runner, say, or author, or hacker, but in Palmer’s world, one is a vocateur for the mission of getting to Mars, or making the transit system run well, or ensuring stability in politics — there’s a blend of activity and of telos in it, which I like a lot.

Systems of government. Having all these different Hives and their different methods of government is a morass of ideas, thought experiments on steroids. To recapitulate how they’re governed:

There’s lots to love here already, and the books just keep on getting broader and deeper. As you might expect from what I’ve said so far, a big propeller of the plot of these books is the suppression of religion and of gender. In particular, the books are focused on a group of people who are interested in bringing back old philosophies and old social technologies to control the powerful; Palmer is interested in power, and small groups and corruption, and the nuts and bolts of how these systems might work. One selling point of the Hives is the individuality and uniqueness, and the lack of tyranny, they promise. In practice, we see how this falls down and falls apart: the constraints on changing Hives that come in later, or the different ways in which one’s job or one’s family or one’s commitments can make it impossible to change to one’s true Hive, or the ways in which the leaders are actually all socially entangled in more and more dubious ways.

Our narrator, Mycroft Canner, is a wonderful unreliable narrator, and has committed a series of heinous crimes in the past for dubiously philosophical/political reasons. The books are very interested in the tension between the present and the future and what we’ll do to get to a future, and who can decide, and what that world might look like. There’s a tension, too, in how much the people should know about what is going on — whether you’d unsettle the masses with the truth, or break a finely balanced system in the unrelenting pursuit of honesty. There are questions about war and how inevitable it is, and how it should be conducted best, and whether man is essentially warlike; there are questions about human excellency and the masses. These are books obsessed with, and propelled by, ideas — not necessarily in a desperate or heavy-handed way, but rather, playing around with them, rolling in the mud with them, picking up your two favourite intellectuals and making them kiss, etc.

The book is written in this style that’s not quite pastiche, not quite homage, something between the two, calling back to older texts. It’s not fully old-timey; it’s actually a pretty easy read. But our narrator is sort of elusive and ceremonial, almost cringing before us. There are periods where the action gives way to dialogue laid out like a script: it felt like an interesting combination of what I’ve been told Voltaire is like, and also, an airport thriller. We get digressions from other characters every now and then — Mycroft wants to take us aside and tell us all about Diogenes.

This sounds very annoying, but I don’t think it is, and “self-indulgent” also isn’t quite the right word. It’s definitely a book that wears its indulgences on its sleeve. It is a book that Ada Palmer wanted to write. She’s clearly a woman of strong tastes and strong opinions and pretty uncompromising in just indulging them. It is a baggy book; there is lots going on; it is not streamlined. You may occasionally roll your eyes at it. Personally I thought it was lovely — it was like a tour through the attic of someone’s mind, but all bound up together in an interesting plot with interesting characters and interesting ideas.

Another point I really liked about these books — I think Palmer does something that very good historical novels also do, which is that she very convincingly gives us a real sense of the future as a different world. She also, I think, convincingly paints what life looks like — not the day-to-day exactly, more like the kinds of people, or the kinds of thinking, that one would do in this world. The people in this novel are not “us, but transported into a world with flying cars and world governments”; they are the people of their own time. You get a glimpse into the strangeness of other ways of being.

I think this is very hard to pull off: Hilary Mantel comes to mind as someone who can do this really well for historical fiction. In many ways — not just the 18th-century dialogue resemblance — Terra Ignota feels a bit like historical fiction of the future, feels like stepping into another culture entirely.

I think the characters are pretty good, not great. You will not read this book for the three-dimensionality of its characters. They’re vehicles for ideas, though they are better done than most books of ideas. One comparison I might draw is with Greg Egan, another kaleidoscopic science fiction writer: Palmer’s characters are have more depth than his. I was charmed and aggravated and really enjoyed spending time with Mycroft Canner, the narrator, and I think her other characters are maybe 2.5-dimensional.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the plot and the pace. I’m a little biased here, as the series is structured strangely: the first two books were originally written as one book, and then split up for publication. The first book is almost all build-up, setting the scene, and putting things in motion, and you get just enough pay-off, narratively speaking, to sustain you. Then, almost all of the second book is pay-off after pay-off after pay-off. Since I’ve just finished that book, it will be coloring my impressions, but at its best, I found these books surprisingly propulsive.

Palmer writes in set-piece chapters, building and building over several chapters to one massive climactic chapter, where multiple threads of narrative are resolved. Reading the books is surfing a wave of delayed gratification. You build and build and build; there are subplots or different focuses on different characters, and things ratchet tighter, and then you get a glorious set-piece chapter, often in this script-like style, just dialogue tags, no disruptions, and everything unfolds/explodes, a firework display. When you time this right, the experience is almost kinetic. It’s a way of resolving narrative and moving plot forwards that I really enjoy, and I had a lot of it to like in this series.

Some not-quite-complaints, but things I want to mention:

This is not hard science fiction. The flying cars enable the government and political system Palmer is interested in; other technologies (e.g. trackers) enable important features of the plot, i.e. important features of how people think and what they think about, but they are not explored technologically at all. Technology is soft focus in the background; we are left to assume that things work, and it’s not really discussed how or why. I personally was fine with this — a thing I really enjoy in science fiction is thinking about how the world/people would change, given some new technology, and I think Palmer is really good at this. But I expect that people who are interested in systems and technology, and how they work, would be unsatisfied.

One area where I am with the perhaps-dissatisfied hard sci-fi enjoyers is on the overall shape of the technological landscape. Terra Ignota is a very strange world; parts of it don’t make sense. We have flying cars, it seems, and general abundance — but for some reason it’s not general abundance that means nobody has to work, and everyone is still working 20 hours a week. We have flying cars, but we don’t have extremely advanced artificial intelligence, or precise industrial manufacturing. The distribution of technologies is confusing.

I’m sympathetic to Palmer here. I think that writing science fiction which takes technology seriously is very hard, and most scifi about the future is going to have to either grapple with worlds with AGI (which I think is extremely hard to write interestingly), or worlds where this consciously has not happened — we’ve banned it, or it’s an infohazard ,or all the compute is centralised, or we did WBE first, etc. Palmer doesn’t discuss any of this. Terra Ignota is not, then, a well-reasoned picture of what the world might look like, extrapolating forwards; it’s also not really internally well-reasoned (flying cars and we still work? Utopians and we’ve not solved manufacturing?)

Similarly, the prose is really nothing to write home about. It’s a bit stronger in book one, and then gets purpler as the series goes on: Palmer could have done with a little more constraint from her editor. It’s not egregious, and there are moments where the styling really works for me, but there’s a lot of overloaded similes and metaphors; some of it drags, and it very rarely made an impact on me.

The sheer density of stuff in these books is amazing. They’re kind of perverted books; there’s a living doll and sex toy symbol (kinda) who is also an Olympic pentathlete; everybody in the corridors of power is sleeping with each other; a lot of the action takes place at a high-class brothel of ideas in Paris. It’s not all sex, the book is just overstuffed (complimentary) with ideas: e.g., one dead hero of the book is rewriting the Iliad, but with space mechas, to restore the nobility of individual heroism to war.

Reconstructing an ideology from these books is interesting. Palmer might not explicitly endorse it, but I think her heart, at least, is with the great man theory of power. (And it at least is with the Humanists’ theory of what counts for progress.)We spend all of the book, notably the first book, especially around implausibly successful and talented and unusual people. The main character is a Servicer — someone who is serving unpaid life-work for past crimes — but he also lives in one of the most important bash’es in the world, he’s best friends with all of the major world powers, he’s an incredible analyst and speaks every language, he’s constantly translating things for the Emperor of the Masons. We are later given in-universe explanations for this, so I’m not claiming it’s implausible necessarily; I’m just giving it as an example of the kind of people we engage with.

Other characters include a multiple Olympic medallist sex symbol and secret propper-up of the Humanist president; a Helen of Troy-type twin; a witch; a boy with magic powers. Basically every character in this book is exceptional and exceptionally powerful. I am right on the verge, I think, of being the kind of person who really likes this and the kind of person who’s repulsed by this. I certainly found it very interesting to see in fiction, especially given the book’s otherwise utopian liberal tendencies.

There are highs and lows in the writing. I think the Humanists and the Utopians are extremely well written; the Mitsubishi feel like an identikit Japanese megacorp, straight from William Gibson. The books throughout are quite sneery about the Cousins.

It’s kind of a pretentious series — not in terms of the prose being pretentious or the vibe being pretentious, in the cleaner original sense. These are books which nakedly want to be in conversation with Voltaire and Diderot and Rousseau and Hobbes and the ancient Greek philosophers, who say this proudly. Does they reach those heights? Obviously not. But I really like this kind of unvarnished pretension in a book, and I think it certainly is the better for it . More books should try to put themselves in the canon.

I’ve read reviews criticising this book because they think it doesn’t answer the questions it raises very well. I think that’s silly — it’s not what the book is trying to do. But I’ve also read reviews criticising it for not asking the questions it wants to ask very well.

How do I feel about this? I’m definitely more sympathetic to this as a line of criticism. Do I think it’s true of this book? I’m not sure. I think if you read it as trying to very narrowly and precisely ask a few questions about politics or human nature and hammer them home, then I am sympathetic to the thought that it doesn’t do it that well or that interestingly.

There is some way of reading this book where you’re like: okay, the fundamental question is just the tension between idealistic, utopian, otherwise very well-run, very varied forms of government — and the base, corruptible, and corrupted humans it runs on, both the populi and the elites who work behind the scenes to maintain and influence it. That’s one read. Another read is that the book is very interested in fate or providence and human agency. A still other narrow question you could read the book as being very interested in is utopias — maybe utopias and the future and the current world — and what we’d sacrifice, what we’d spend to get to utopia, and what we might be spending already without noticing.

I agree that if you pick just one of these questions and claim it is the central question of the book, then the book is not answering it precisely or well; it’s also not necessarily bringing the most innovative, nuanced, or surprising angle on any one of these questions. But I think these criticisms are mostly missing the point. One of the great things about these books is the variety and richness of the ideas and attendant questions it asks about. It is not just a book about politics and about humans, it is not just a book about utopia and the future, it is not just a book about morals and providence and free will and human agency; I can keep going; it’s not just a book about cosmopolitanism and government, religion and spirituality, sex and gender, heroes and giant robotcs — it’s a book about all of these and more. The variety and richness of this — and the way in which it embeds these questions into what feels like a whole strange new world — is a tremendous achievement.

I’m worried this review has a bit of a missing mood, as I tend to inadvertently get kind of sneery and distant when I try and review books. I’ll close by saying that I really enjoyed these books — They were some of my favourite reads of this year, I would buy them and recommend them to my friends, and I’m excited to read more of Ada Palmer.