Seven Surrenders

Alongside the Dune Cycle and Hyperion Cantos, I can only claim this series by Ada Palmer as the latest peak performance of political-philosophical-metaphysical SF. Terra Ignota’s novels depict a 25th century utopia in crisis in light of the ideas of the 18th century Enlightenment.
In this world, the almost complete freedom of the individual has been realized. Seven great systems of philosophical ideas dominate the Earth, which have no boundaries drawn on a map, members of communities live side by side, more than once in the same household as “other” citizens. The automated aircraft system will fly anyone anywhere in a matter of hours, Humanists who love individual and persona values, Mitsubishi in the corporate system, show more Empire-building Freemasons following Roman traditions, Europeans who maintain traditional democracy, citizens outgrown by voluntary aid organizations mapping with the human mind, and Utopia seeking to conquer outer space in the peaceful golden age of three hundred years. Need I need to say more?

Under the surface, however, conspiracies flourish. The top leaders of the seven regions unite in a secret alliance to preserve their own power. A clan of assassins monitors the world’s computer networks and, through tricky accidents, knocks out people who create tension. And a team of historians will prove that the longer a golden age lasts, the more devastating the collapse will eventually be. “The Seven Surrenders” revolve around these questions: which is more important, the present or the future? And how far can you go to maintain peace?

The metaphysical aspect of the story is provided by the appearance of two children with seemingly divine power: one with infinite wisdom and the other with potentially infinite power, if we can believe our cheekily unreliable narrator, who always puts his opinion first, the well-travelled serial killer Mycroft. The existence of these two children causes the future, which is abundant with these philosophers classifying religion as a taboo subject, in order to re-evaluate the image of reality as well. But of course the political status quo is also turned upside down because of them.

In a nutshell and after the first volume, Ada Palmer has once again put a prime, diverse, and high-quality work on the table that could become an instant classic for SF Lovers that go for more abstract yet action-packed and original stuff.



SF = Speculative Fiction. show less

In Ada Palmer's "Author's Note and Acknowledgments" appended to Seven Surrenders she mentions such earlier science fiction writers as Alfred Bester, Jo Walton, Gene Wolfe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Voltaire, Yevgeney Zamiatin, and Yoshiyuki Tomino, among others. She does not include Frank Herbert, but the book that I was most reminded of in my reading of this second of four books in the Terra Ignota series was Dune Messiah, in the ways it expanded on the inventive world-building of its predecessor volume and in the incredible pitch of political and personal intrigue. The scale of Terra Ignota is smaller than the vast interstellar empire of Herbert's Arrakis, but a global terrestrial society of the 25th century seems big enough for serious show more work.

In the midst of the story, Palmer uses a metafictional device to reflect on the ambitions of science fiction: "Apollo didn't really think the war over Mars in two hundred and fifty years would be fought with giant robots, it was just the only way they could describe a war that would be meaningful, conscionable, with space for human dignity" (249-50). I wonder which aspects of Palmer's own sometimes extravagantly-imagined future she finds least likely, but it is clearly not a prognostication. It is an engaging, immersive way to describe in high relief the tensions and vulnerabilities provoked by secularism, feminism, humanism, and other species of thought that have emerged from the Enlightenment with consequences yet to be determined in our present world. It also seems to be trying to sound the humanity that we share with Hellenic antiquity, in order to understand what of us can be maintained and/or transformed in centuries to come.

The four books of the series are evidently divided into two pairs, and this second completes the opening arc concerning the "Days of Transformation" that bring to its end an existing world order. While curiosity does drive the reader toward "the Crisis still unfolding" in the next two books, this one (unlike the first) offers some sense of a plot climaxed and concluded. show less

This book is absolutely insane. I can't even begin to describe it without launching in a retelling of the whole first two books. What's crazy, if you examine the plot, not a very much happens, but because the world building is so detailed and different and the characters are strong, every single action seems monumental. Every betrayal or revelation feels earth-shattering. I've never read anything quite like this and Too Like the Lightning. If you like your books with a a healthy dose of philosophy and religion, some truly bizarre and sadistic characters, interesting takes on gender, romance, and societal structure, these books are for you.

In this second part of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, we are plunged directly back into her 25th Century Enlightenment society (this is certainly NOT a stand-alone novel). We get more of the deeply philosophical exploration of Palmer's future world as the various factions and individuals manoeuvre and plot against each other and sometimes even themselves.

Along the way, we engage in discourse over the nature of God or Gods (like any Enlightenment treatise worth its salt, the role of God in human affairs is taken as given, though at the same time that same subject is definitely on the table for discussion) and also the question of the extent to which the Ends justify the Means - even if the End is something extremely noble that Humankind has show more claimed to be questing for almost all its existence - the quest for peace. A major conspiracy to preserve peace at almost any cost was uncovered at the end of the first novel; this book begins to explore that, especially in looking at the motives of its central character, reformed mass murderer Mycroft Canner. But then the stakes are ratcheted up as other characters begin to contemplate returning War to the world, for a range of reasons ranging from "because we can", via "it is in our nature to do this" to "because it may be a Good Thing in the long run". I'm rather disquieted by the ease with which Palmer embraces this debate because this is usually a view that puts me off many a more overtly militaristic book (a lot of "military sf" is like this, embracing war with all the enthusiasm of early 20th Century General Staffs who saw war as inevitable and were always planning for the next war). But Palmer is a historian and history lecturer, and so this coldly analytical approach should be expected. There is also a veiled warning that because (in the novel) there has been more than 300 years of peace, war when it comes will be all the more terrible because we will be such amateurs at it. By extension, the argument runs that it is therefore better to have regular small wars, so people don't forget how awful it is. I'm not certain I find that easy to stomach.

Despite the density of the writing, I found this a quick and compelling read, though. At times I was reminded of Shakespeare's histories; at other times, I was thinking more of Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. Palmer puts rather more wide-screen set-pieces into this book than book 1; and there are surprises. Not all the surprises were in the plotting, though; although the author makes a big thing of having used an Eighteenth Century style for the novel, there are some surprising infelicities of phrase and one complete failure to follow her own rules for reported speech in a different language at one point. And some naughty impulse made me suddenly switch one character whose English was especially formal, with lots of "thees" and "thous", into a broad Yorkshire accent, which oddly enough worked. Only UK readers are likely to have this problem.

Nonetheless, I thought this novel was better than Too Like the Lightning and I shall move on to Book 3 very soon. show less

It all starts to fall apart, though as is often the case, the seeds of destruction have been germinating for a while. The internal contradictions of a utopia kept stable through murder and corruption and vulnerable to the non-physical 'weapons' of a past age may have been decomissioned but were not put beyond use. Mycroft Canner, the mass murderer turned religious zealot thinks a boy with the power of a God and a God with the powers of a boy can come together and save the world from impending war, but there is deception and there is self-deception, and a lot of truths are about to be exposed.

This second book reads like the final act of the first, all momentum and plot or character resolutions, so I would definitely suggest the two be show more read back to back. It has the epic grandiosity of an operatic adaptation of a Greek tragedy staged as science fiction spectacle full of pomp and power brought low by venality, invoking fate at every aria and intermezzo to give their downfall an aggrandising universality. Whether that universality is noble and foreordained or that of pure human folly remains to be seen. show less

For a book like this, the goodreads review box asking “What did you think?” seems like a taunt. I thought a lot, goodreads review box! I thought so many things! And ... wow, most of it is hard to put into words in this little box. One of my friends said, in her review of this book, that she’s still processing the gender stuff. So am I, but in a larger sense, that’s what I’m doing to all of this book, which is really just the second half of Too Like the Lightning: still processing. I get the sense I will be doing that for some time.

This book is ... wow, a ride. It’s not science fiction OR fantasy in the conventional sense — it’s, like, social science fiction. You know those golden age science fiction classics where show more people live on Mars and fly in FTL ships but their society is still exactly like the world of 1957? This is kind of the opposite. Ada Palmer doesn’t appear too interested in scientific and technological advances. She’s interested in history and sociology and cultural stuff — how human societies grow and change and progress and regress. And it’s great; it’s a great counterbalance to standard science fiction, and it’s a fascinating, wild ride.

I deducted one star from this because of somewhat excessive speechifying — seriously, an amazing number of verbatim speeches are delivered in this book — and for the big reveals that I saw coming. (Same cannot be said of the first book, where almost every reveal surprised me. I’m not sure if she started signaling her reveals a little more or if I just got better at reading her writing.) But none of that matters, because I loved this and read it at a gallop and feasted on it and am sad it’s over.

I am very much looking forward to the next two books in the series, and cannot wait for the fourth to be out, even though I am still processing this book, and probably always will be. show less

Being a long time fan of the 18th century -- although perhaps slightly more for the literature, rather than history and philosophy, I appreciate what Palmer is doing here. She's taken in the ideas of that time and giving them free rein in the best "what if" style. In that odd synchronicity (which happens all the time, really) here is what I read in the Orwell essays I happen to be reading, right after finishing the Palmer: "Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. . . two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have improved the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? . . . The moralist and the show more revolutionary are constantly undermining one another." That, in essence, is what Palmer is so imaginatively investigating. This seesaw. This impossible fact of human development, so that outlawing gender reference across the board doesn't solve the problem. The differences are still there, lurking around, perhaps all the more dark and difficult for being outlawed. As with book 1 I was more engaged in the second half than the first which just seemed to consist of endless palaver and positioning of the characters. Interesting palaver, necessary positioning, but slow. This series is not for every reader, it's philosophical, exploratory, alternate future fantasy -- more like speculative fiction than fantasy, I suppose. [[Mary Doria Russell]] comes to mind as a parallel. I will read the third book, but I will take a break for some lighter reading first. **** show less