Terra Ignota - Too Like the Lightning
Nov. 2nd, 2023 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunasarielA good number of years ago now, I got together for dinner with R2 and hamsterwoman . She was more breathlessly fizzy than I’d ever seen her about something that wasn’t Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, or Dragaera, and it was over some apparently very crunchy sci-fi with an unreliable narrator. It was written in the style of, and drew heavily from, Enlightenment philosophy. It was heavy going, she said, but well worth it.
That sounds awesome! I thought, and then proceeded to do exactly zip on it for the next like six years, barring being excited for her when she got to meet the author at Worldcon 2018. XD (For the record, I spent at least five of these years somehow thinking that the book she was talking about was Philosopher’s Flight, which I think she also gave me.) A few months ago, I realized I was in a rut of either fluffy, inconsequential reading, or things that tried to be weighty but failed to pan out in one or more major ways. I remembered that crunchy sci-fi thing thathamsterwoman , who has pretty high standards for this kind of thing, flung forcefully in my general direction recommended, and I thought, “what the hell? Might as well give it a shot.”
...anyway, here I am three books and a 28-page review later. (Spoiler: I liked them a lot.) I’m pretty sure that DW won’t let me post all *checks* 12,260 words in one entry, so I’ll split it up by book.
Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer.
OK, first, The Gender Thing.cyanmnemosyne noped out within the first few pages when it became clear that Mycroft was...intentionally misgendering people is certainly how it reads to me, but in the TI-verse, the concept of gender is more or less verboten, so everyone uses they/them pronouns, and Mycroft assigns he/him or she/her pronouns to people based on a) biological sex and/or b) his perception of what gender their actions and/or personality align with. This is complicated by the fact that it slowly becomes clear that Mycroft is a) very much not in his right mind, and b) quite misogynistic. He's often dismissive of people to whom he assigns feminine pronouns, and breaks people down into courageous/honorable/proactive = male and duplicitous/manipulative/emotional = female. One interesting exception to this is Dominic Seneschal, who Mycroft goes out of his way to inform us is female-bodied, but chooses to present himself in markedly masculine attire and clearly thinks of himself as a man (as he subscribes to a very similar form of gendered thinking as Mycroft, for reasons that will become clear); he also embodies such "masculine" personality traits as being quick to anger/violence, aggressively sexual, and establishing emotional dominance over others through aggression. Bestchat thinks, and I very much agree, that, if Dominic lived in the 21st century he would just be a trans man, so I'm A-OK with using his preferred pronouns. As for everyone else, though, even when Mycroft's reasoning is suspect, Ada Palmer is doing something very purposeful with the way Mycroft uses gender, so I'll follow Mycroft's/Ada's lead until I can actually talk about it in Seven Surrenders.
I was also willing to give Mycroft a pass for the gender fuckery/misogyny because of my favorite tinfoil hat theory, that I developed a ways into TLTL and frankly am still hanging onto in a half-joking capacity: Mycroft is a time traveler; specifically, a time traveler from Homeric and/or Hellenistic Greece. I mean, think about it! He's fluent in Ancient Greek, and defaults to it in moments of high emotion or stress. He doesn't give a shit about any particular Hive or Hiveless group (aside from idolizing the Utopians and being mildly dismissive of the Cousins), but is clearly devoted to his identity as a Greek; particularly Greece as national heirs to Homer, Alexander the Great, etc. He's noticeably smaller in stature than most other modern adults. He's very comfortable with casual violence. He doesn't seem to quite know what to do with a world without a gender binary, and tries to recreate it; ditto for hierarchical power structures such as armies/kings/generals. I even toyed for a while with the idea that he was Alexander the Great, brought forward in time by some Utopian shenanigan or other. He is very (although not exclusively) into dudes, idolizes Homer, and even, very tellingly, once uses "we" when describing Alexander's army - "It made me think of Alexander, of his force, the human thunder of our Mediterranean sweeping through deserts." He's prone to passionate fits of both weeping and violent rage. He's even in his early thirties! And Alexander has been noted to fit the modern description of a sociopath extremely well. But, alas, I'm pretty sure he's not blonde. And, y'know, other considerations too. XD
The question of "just who is this Mycroft guy???" was, at least for me, one of the biggest questions of the book, and was certainly the most fun to figure out. I really loved putting together all of the clues - he's treated with fear and suspicion in a society that mostly seems to have moved beyond violent crime, where most crime is either white-collar or perhaps some sort of thoughtcrime, since both religion and gender are pretty ironclad taboos. So at first I thought that Mycroft's Big Terrible Crime was introducing the use of the eponymous Canner Device, which allows people to appear to be someone they're not by switching their tracker (ID) data with someone else, and thus become digitally untraceable. In support of this, he's clearly a mathematical genius of some kind, since he's constantly in demand for his computational/analytical skills. But he's also very comfortable with casual violence - his first meeting with Carlyle case in point, but also when he parkours down two stories to kick the shit out of like four dudes (who, tellingly, had just threatened to "go Mycroft Canner on you ass" to a third party as a synonym for beating them up). We don't get too many hints as to what Mycroft's background was, but I assumed something of the "wretched hive of scum and villainy" variety, given his propensity for violence and his apparent formerly-close relationship with organized crime. So maybe he was supposed to carry out industrial espionage with the Canner Device, or maybe murder-for-hire but using the Canner Device to cover his tracks/frame someone else? He mentioned in passing that murder-for-hire was one of the things that could result in a sentence of Servicing, and it would be very like him to seed the information like that.
...Aaaaaannnnd then I found out what he's really notable for. D:
It was at this point that I started to notice a divergence between this Mycroft (Mycroft the Servicer, cringing, servile, elaborately and vocally repentant) and The Other Mycroft (Mycroft Canner, notorious sadist, serial killer, and cannibal). Whereas before he was very "forgive me, forgive me, good masters, gentle Reader, forgive me, your humble servant throws himself upon your mercy," this Mycroft was very "huh, so that was the murder you found the worst? Well, no accounting for taste. *shrug*" Up until this point I had been assuming that he was genuinely repentant for whatever reason, but it was about this point that I started to suspect that his repentance was brainwashing, and incomplete brainwashing at that. There was something so clever and insidious about how we got these little flashes of an older (younger?), more predatory Mycroft - clearly not divorced from his current self, but just as clearly not exactly the same.
Oh man, I haven't even talked about the Hives yet! I always love a good sorting system, and this is one of the best I've seen in a long time; it's now tied with ASOIAF for my favorite sorting system ever. It's clear that this world's unparalleled flexibility and stability is because of the Hives. After the violent death of geographic nations and organized religion (more or less), people have decided to organize themselves into governing units called Hives, each with a different mode of government and a different ethos, and people are free to choose whichever one suits them best. Those who like stability and tradition become Roman-based Masons, with theirDictator-for-Life Emperor, whose absolute life-and-death power over his subjects is curtailed by the fact that, if they don't like what he does, they can just leave and join another Hive whenever they want. Those who just want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony join the empathic Cousins, who are governed, essentially, by suggestion box, overseen by the world's Mom, the Chairperson, and their Feedback Bureau. Those who value education as as stepping-stone to economic prosperity (and who coincidentally like trees an awful lot) join the Mitsubishi, with their shareholder democracy and Board of Directors. On if education is more of an end in itself (or if you just really, really like Sortings), join the academic Gordians and their Brill Institute, helmed by a Headmaster (or, theoretically, Headmistress, I suppose?). If ambition, excitement, and Excellence are more your thing, join the aretocracy of Humanists, formed by a merger between athletes/sports fans, really devoted partygoers, and Hollywood actors/fans, whose government constantly changes to reflect anything from one President to two Co-Presidents to a raucous and equally-powerful Parliament. Those who do still feel a bond to their geographic homeland/culture (or those who really like history) can join the Europeans, an expanded but little-changed form of the EU, with their Prime Minister heading a Parliament. And finally, the really dedicated nerds can move to the Moon, get their magitek Griffincloth coat and synthetic dragons, and dedicate their lives to getting humanity to Mars with the Utopians. (Surprisingly, but for good in-universe reasons, this is the least popular option.) And if none of these appeal, you can declare yourself Hiveless - Blacklaw ("no laws, no masters" - they can pretty much do anything they want to each other up to but not including nukes), Greylaw ("I won't bother you if you won't bother me -_-"), or Whitelaw (Lawful Everything).
This is not only one of the coolest sorting systems I've ever seen, but probably the one that's best suited to inducing actual utopia. Every option is a meaningful one, and there's an opt-out mechanism that neither disenfranchises those who don't wish to take part (the Hiveless still have robust participation in the international community and law-making) nor weakens the system as a whole.
I've read PLENTY of authors who have a great idea but don't have the chops to fully execute it (Christopher Paolini's adult stuff, sadly, looking at you), and just about as many who can write lovely words but don't have much to say with them. It's so, so rare that I find an author who can do both - who has equal amounts of fluff and crunch. Her books are just a delight to read on a pure pleasure level. Her plots and her characters are all excellent - apparently she reads through each book multiple times, each time with an eye towards "what if X character was my favorite." (Which, given how many characters there are here, that's quite some dedication. XD) But I also love her ideas - I didn't realize how much I needed to really sink my teeth into something that could stand up to rigorous scrutiny. It seems that so many SF/F titles these days run on The Feels(TM) alone; you the reader are explicitly or implicitly not supposed to ask questions like "why is there a bakery in the middle of a forest" or "where did desperately poor peasants in Fantasy Western Europe get one set of 'everyday china' and one set of fancy china" or "why does this medieval fantasy city have a robust postal system and sophisticated trade networks but no city government whatsoever?" So it's been more refreshing than I can say that I can simultaneously sigh over phrases like "as appalling as a pet mouse's wound" or "he might have passed through the whole house, silent as a plague" and get all starry-eyed over the intricacies of how all of her governments balance each other out, or how the Censor's office analyzes all the world's data and predicts future trends, or try to puzzle out just who is this Mycroft Canner guy, anyway???
At least in part, I think that one of Ada Palmer's biggest narrative strengths is her steelmanning (thanks for the phrase,hamsterwoman and/ortabacoychanel !), which, again, runs so very much in counterpoint to so much I'm seeing nowadays. She treats each and every character and viewpoint, even the absolutely batpoop insane ones, with equal seriousness. It would be so easy, even expected, to divide the novel into Good Guys and Bad Guys, but it's never that simple, and all the better for it. An excellent example of this is the Nurturist debate. Like, of course the Nurturists are a bunch of nutjobs. We've met Eureka Weeksbooth who is a) clearly a fully-formed human being, with her own wants, thoughts, and opinions, and b) enjoying the shit out of her life. But then we see Madame's salon, and people like Heloïse. She's also very happy where she is, and there's technically nothing keeping her from leaving, but wasn't she raised specifically so that the outside world would be scary and incomprehensible to her? Wasn't that depriving her the chance of living a full and happy life? Was it growing up at Madame's that made Dominic, uh, the way he is? (And is that even a bad thing [for him specifically]?) ...But then, who gets to judge what a "full and happy life" is? If set-sets are banned on the basis that the method of raising them damages them irreparably, then what about kids raised in Utopian bash'es? Their lives are very different from most people, and most of them never fully integrate into society, but isn't that their right, to choose their own path, rather than have it be prescribed to them?
I really, really like Mycroft, both as a character in his own right and as the narrator of what is positioned as a historical document, kinda similar to Lord of the Rings/the Red Book of Westmarch. MAD props to Ada Palmer for keeping Ada-the-author separate from Mycroft-the-narrator, because the whole story is so much stronger for being told to us through his own voice and biases. Normally I'm a little meh on unreliable narrators, but Mycroft's narrative voice, unreliable as it is, just adds so much to the story. There are points at which he deliberately lies or misdirects, for reasons that are sometimes immediately clear and sometimes not. There are points at which it becomes clear that he's not deliberately lying, he's just insane. And then there are those where you have to respect his intellectual acumen, even while acknowledging that his biases lead him to DRASTICALLY misrepresent various people and situations. Case in point, that J.E.D.D. Mason, what a guy! :DDD
I think it says a lot about this book that I'm now ~5 pages into my review and I haven't yet mentioned that one, possibly two of the characters are Actually God. One is a child/preteen with the miraculous ability to bring physical representations of things to life (aka dolls become tiny but living and fully-formed people, plastic fruit becomes real fruit, a scribble on a piece of paper can become a healing potion), and one is a dude who can... read minds? see into people's souls? The jury is still kinda out on that regard, but he's very creepy, clearly doesn't know what to do with this whole body situation, and can look at people and know secrets/inner truths about them in a way that's difficult to describe. Bridger is adorable, although I find it interesting that he reads as much younger than ~13. They seem childlike rather than preteen-y; Bestchat thinks (and on reflection, I agree) that this is because childhood in the TI-verse is much extended; there's relatively little pressure to grow up fast. (Interestingly, I thought Mycroft's fellow Servicers also read as somewhat childlike, like when Kosala distracts them from an awkward question with an offer of ice cream - maybe some brainwashing there, too?) I really, really loved Carlyle's conversation with Bridger - it was a really good chance to move the plot forward in interesting directions, slide in some really heavy-duty philosophy, and also make me extremely *heart eyes* at Carlyle.
Speaking of which! My favorites so far are, in no particular order, Ganymede (the sparkliest of them all), Carlyle (at least until Madame's, when he was downgraded from a Very Good Bean to a Very Good Bean with significant shoutypants tendencies), Cato Weeksbooth (just let him join Utoipa!!! T.T.), Martin (also a Very Good Bean and a knight-errant besides), Vivien (see below re: competence porn), Papa (aka what would happen to Sam Vimes if he lived in a largely peaceful, rule-abiding society, aka a husky that needs to go run an agility course a few times), and Mycroft himself (who is a *fascinating* riddle wrapped up in an enigma). Oh, and Saladin, of course! Other characters that I find fascinating but can't exactly call favorites include Dominic and Ockham Saneer.
Other things I don't have a place for but are worth noting:
hamsterwoman . She was more breathlessly fizzy than I’d ever seen her about something that wasn’t Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, or Dragaera, and it was over some apparently very crunchy sci-fi with an unreliable narrator. It was written in the style of, and drew heavily from, Enlightenment philosophy. It was heavy going, she said, but well worth it.That sounds awesome! I thought, and then proceeded to do exactly zip on it for the next like six years, barring being excited for her when she got to meet the author at Worldcon 2018. XD (For the record, I spent at least five of these years somehow thinking that the book she was talking about was Philosopher’s Flight, which I think she also gave me.) A few months ago, I realized I was in a rut of either fluffy, inconsequential reading, or things that tried to be weighty but failed to pan out in one or more major ways. I remembered that crunchy sci-fi thing that
hamsterwoman , who has pretty high standards for this kind of thing, ...anyway, here I am three books and a 28-page review later. (Spoiler: I liked them a lot.) I’m pretty sure that DW won’t let me post all *checks* 12,260 words in one entry, so I’ll split it up by book.
Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer.
OK, first, The Gender Thing.
cyanmnemosyne noped out within the first few pages when it became clear that Mycroft was...intentionally misgendering people is certainly how it reads to me, but in the TI-verse, the concept of gender is more or less verboten, so everyone uses they/them pronouns, and Mycroft assigns he/him or she/her pronouns to people based on a) biological sex and/or b) his perception of what gender their actions and/or personality align with. This is complicated by the fact that it slowly becomes clear that Mycroft is a) very much not in his right mind, and b) quite misogynistic. He's often dismissive of people to whom he assigns feminine pronouns, and breaks people down into courageous/honorable/proactive = male and duplicitous/manipulative/emotional = female. One interesting exception to this is Dominic Seneschal, who Mycroft goes out of his way to inform us is female-bodied, but chooses to present himself in markedly masculine attire and clearly thinks of himself as a man (as he subscribes to a very similar form of gendered thinking as Mycroft, for reasons that will become clear); he also embodies such "masculine" personality traits as being quick to anger/violence, aggressively sexual, and establishing emotional dominance over others through aggression. Bestchat thinks, and I very much agree, that, if Dominic lived in the 21st century he would just be a trans man, so I'm A-OK with using his preferred pronouns. As for everyone else, though, even when Mycroft's reasoning is suspect, Ada Palmer is doing something very purposeful with the way Mycroft uses gender, so I'll follow Mycroft's/Ada's lead until I can actually talk about it in Seven Surrenders.I was also willing to give Mycroft a pass for the gender fuckery/misogyny because of my favorite tinfoil hat theory, that I developed a ways into TLTL and frankly am still hanging onto in a half-joking capacity: Mycroft is a time traveler; specifically, a time traveler from Homeric and/or Hellenistic Greece. I mean, think about it! He's fluent in Ancient Greek, and defaults to it in moments of high emotion or stress. He doesn't give a shit about any particular Hive or Hiveless group (aside from idolizing the Utopians and being mildly dismissive of the Cousins), but is clearly devoted to his identity as a Greek; particularly Greece as national heirs to Homer, Alexander the Great, etc. He's noticeably smaller in stature than most other modern adults. He's very comfortable with casual violence. He doesn't seem to quite know what to do with a world without a gender binary, and tries to recreate it; ditto for hierarchical power structures such as armies/kings/generals. I even toyed for a while with the idea that he was Alexander the Great, brought forward in time by some Utopian shenanigan or other. He is very (although not exclusively) into dudes, idolizes Homer, and even, very tellingly, once uses "we" when describing Alexander's army - "It made me think of Alexander, of his force, the human thunder of our Mediterranean sweeping through deserts." He's prone to passionate fits of both weeping and violent rage. He's even in his early thirties! And Alexander has been noted to fit the modern description of a sociopath extremely well. But, alas, I'm pretty sure he's not blonde. And, y'know, other considerations too. XD
The question of "just who is this Mycroft guy???" was, at least for me, one of the biggest questions of the book, and was certainly the most fun to figure out. I really loved putting together all of the clues - he's treated with fear and suspicion in a society that mostly seems to have moved beyond violent crime, where most crime is either white-collar or perhaps some sort of thoughtcrime, since both religion and gender are pretty ironclad taboos. So at first I thought that Mycroft's Big Terrible Crime was introducing the use of the eponymous Canner Device, which allows people to appear to be someone they're not by switching their tracker (ID) data with someone else, and thus become digitally untraceable. In support of this, he's clearly a mathematical genius of some kind, since he's constantly in demand for his computational/analytical skills. But he's also very comfortable with casual violence - his first meeting with Carlyle case in point, but also when he parkours down two stories to kick the shit out of like four dudes (who, tellingly, had just threatened to "go Mycroft Canner on you ass" to a third party as a synonym for beating them up). We don't get too many hints as to what Mycroft's background was, but I assumed something of the "wretched hive of scum and villainy" variety, given his propensity for violence and his apparent formerly-close relationship with organized crime. So maybe he was supposed to carry out industrial espionage with the Canner Device, or maybe murder-for-hire but using the Canner Device to cover his tracks/frame someone else? He mentioned in passing that murder-for-hire was one of the things that could result in a sentence of Servicing, and it would be very like him to seed the information like that.
...Aaaaaannnnd then I found out what he's really notable for. D:
It was at this point that I started to notice a divergence between this Mycroft (Mycroft the Servicer, cringing, servile, elaborately and vocally repentant) and The Other Mycroft (Mycroft Canner, notorious sadist, serial killer, and cannibal). Whereas before he was very "forgive me, forgive me, good masters, gentle Reader, forgive me, your humble servant throws himself upon your mercy," this Mycroft was very "huh, so that was the murder you found the worst? Well, no accounting for taste. *shrug*" Up until this point I had been assuming that he was genuinely repentant for whatever reason, but it was about this point that I started to suspect that his repentance was brainwashing, and incomplete brainwashing at that. There was something so clever and insidious about how we got these little flashes of an older (younger?), more predatory Mycroft - clearly not divorced from his current self, but just as clearly not exactly the same.
Oh man, I haven't even talked about the Hives yet! I always love a good sorting system, and this is one of the best I've seen in a long time; it's now tied with ASOIAF for my favorite sorting system ever. It's clear that this world's unparalleled flexibility and stability is because of the Hives. After the violent death of geographic nations and organized religion (more or less), people have decided to organize themselves into governing units called Hives, each with a different mode of government and a different ethos, and people are free to choose whichever one suits them best. Those who like stability and tradition become Roman-based Masons, with their
This is not only one of the coolest sorting systems I've ever seen, but probably the one that's best suited to inducing actual utopia. Every option is a meaningful one, and there's an opt-out mechanism that neither disenfranchises those who don't wish to take part (the Hiveless still have robust participation in the international community and law-making) nor weakens the system as a whole.
I've read PLENTY of authors who have a great idea but don't have the chops to fully execute it (Christopher Paolini's adult stuff, sadly, looking at you), and just about as many who can write lovely words but don't have much to say with them. It's so, so rare that I find an author who can do both - who has equal amounts of fluff and crunch. Her books are just a delight to read on a pure pleasure level. Her plots and her characters are all excellent - apparently she reads through each book multiple times, each time with an eye towards "what if X character was my favorite." (Which, given how many characters there are here, that's quite some dedication. XD) But I also love her ideas - I didn't realize how much I needed to really sink my teeth into something that could stand up to rigorous scrutiny. It seems that so many SF/F titles these days run on The Feels(TM) alone; you the reader are explicitly or implicitly not supposed to ask questions like "why is there a bakery in the middle of a forest" or "where did desperately poor peasants in Fantasy Western Europe get one set of 'everyday china' and one set of fancy china" or "why does this medieval fantasy city have a robust postal system and sophisticated trade networks but no city government whatsoever?" So it's been more refreshing than I can say that I can simultaneously sigh over phrases like "as appalling as a pet mouse's wound" or "he might have passed through the whole house, silent as a plague" and get all starry-eyed over the intricacies of how all of her governments balance each other out, or how the Censor's office analyzes all the world's data and predicts future trends, or try to puzzle out just who is this Mycroft Canner guy, anyway???
At least in part, I think that one of Ada Palmer's biggest narrative strengths is her steelmanning (thanks for the phrase,
hamsterwoman and/ortabacoychanel !), which, again, runs so very much in counterpoint to so much I'm seeing nowadays. She treats each and every character and viewpoint, even the absolutely batpoop insane ones, with equal seriousness. It would be so easy, even expected, to divide the novel into Good Guys and Bad Guys, but it's never that simple, and all the better for it. An excellent example of this is the Nurturist debate. Like, of course the Nurturists are a bunch of nutjobs. We've met Eureka Weeksbooth who is a) clearly a fully-formed human being, with her own wants, thoughts, and opinions, and b) enjoying the shit out of her life. But then we see Madame's salon, and people like Heloïse. She's also very happy where she is, and there's technically nothing keeping her from leaving, but wasn't she raised specifically so that the outside world would be scary and incomprehensible to her? Wasn't that depriving her the chance of living a full and happy life? Was it growing up at Madame's that made Dominic, uh, the way he is? (And is that even a bad thing [for him specifically]?) ...But then, who gets to judge what a "full and happy life" is? If set-sets are banned on the basis that the method of raising them damages them irreparably, then what about kids raised in Utopian bash'es? Their lives are very different from most people, and most of them never fully integrate into society, but isn't that their right, to choose their own path, rather than have it be prescribed to them?I really, really like Mycroft, both as a character in his own right and as the narrator of what is positioned as a historical document, kinda similar to Lord of the Rings/the Red Book of Westmarch. MAD props to Ada Palmer for keeping Ada-the-author separate from Mycroft-the-narrator, because the whole story is so much stronger for being told to us through his own voice and biases. Normally I'm a little meh on unreliable narrators, but Mycroft's narrative voice, unreliable as it is, just adds so much to the story. There are points at which he deliberately lies or misdirects, for reasons that are sometimes immediately clear and sometimes not. There are points at which it becomes clear that he's not deliberately lying, he's just insane. And then there are those where you have to respect his intellectual acumen, even while acknowledging that his biases lead him to DRASTICALLY misrepresent various people and situations. Case in point, that J.E.D.D. Mason, what a guy! :DDD
I think it says a lot about this book that I'm now ~5 pages into my review and I haven't yet mentioned that one, possibly two of the characters are Actually God. One is a child/preteen with the miraculous ability to bring physical representations of things to life (aka dolls become tiny but living and fully-formed people, plastic fruit becomes real fruit, a scribble on a piece of paper can become a healing potion), and one is a dude who can... read minds? see into people's souls? The jury is still kinda out on that regard, but he's very creepy, clearly doesn't know what to do with this whole body situation, and can look at people and know secrets/inner truths about them in a way that's difficult to describe. Bridger is adorable, although I find it interesting that he reads as much younger than ~13. They seem childlike rather than preteen-y; Bestchat thinks (and on reflection, I agree) that this is because childhood in the TI-verse is much extended; there's relatively little pressure to grow up fast. (Interestingly, I thought Mycroft's fellow Servicers also read as somewhat childlike, like when Kosala distracts them from an awkward question with an offer of ice cream - maybe some brainwashing there, too?) I really, really loved Carlyle's conversation with Bridger - it was a really good chance to move the plot forward in interesting directions, slide in some really heavy-duty philosophy, and also make me extremely *heart eyes* at Carlyle.
Speaking of which! My favorites so far are, in no particular order, Ganymede (the sparkliest of them all), Carlyle (at least until Madame's, when he was downgraded from a Very Good Bean to a Very Good Bean with significant shoutypants tendencies), Cato Weeksbooth (just let him join Utoipa!!! T.T.), Martin (also a Very Good Bean and a knight-errant besides), Vivien (see below re: competence porn), Papa (aka what would happen to Sam Vimes if he lived in a largely peaceful, rule-abiding society, aka a husky that needs to go run an agility course a few times), and Mycroft himself (who is a *fascinating* riddle wrapped up in an enigma). Oh, and Saladin, of course! Other characters that I find fascinating but can't exactly call favorites include Dominic and Ockham Saneer.
Other things I don't have a place for but are worth noting:
- Madame's is FASCINATING. I kinda want to go there because of the swords and big swishy coats, but I also kinda don't because most of the people there are like Dominic and Madame (aka smart but utterly terrifying). I also love some of the things it gives Ada Palmer an opportunity to do, like playing with the way different people construct gender and "the exotic." Bryar Kosala, who is ethnically and culturally Indian, chooses to wear 18th century Western European dress, because the whole thing is a performance in/fetishization of the exotic, and wearing a towering wig and panniered skirts feels exotic to her in a way that, like, a sari wouldn't. Andō, on the other hand, wears samurai dress because a) he's damn proud of his nation-strat, and b) it sure would read as exotic to everyone else.
- J.E.D.D. Mason is a little creepy. There's definitely An Intelligence there, but I'm coming to agree that it's not a human one. He seems benevolent so far, but I have, uh, Concerns about someone who went straight from Play-Doh to Plato (thanks, cyanmnemosyne!). And see, this is exactly what I mean about the Nurturist debate being a slippery slope - is that just the way J.E.D.D. is as a person? Would he be better socialized if he were raised in a different environment? Would that make him happier? Less happy? Better? Worse?
- Ada Palmer does a helluva job in managing Mycroft's insanity. Like the whole Eighteenth Century With Extra Voltaire prose thing, this could come off as deeply and painfully annoying if she didn't have the chops to actually pull it off. But she's set herself an enormously difficult task, and she carries it off with aplomb!
- Not unrelated: I can't believe I haven't talked about the stunt writing yet! One of the things I'm most in awe of Ada Palmer for is how she pulls all these technical tricks that really shouldn't work, and yet they do. Like, writing a novel in the Enlightenment style, and keeping it up the whole way through, sounds like an incredibly tiresome gimmick. But Ada Palmer (who apparently has some serious chops in academia, particularly classical studies and the Renaissance) manages to pull it off with aplomb, and even uses it to amazing effect - the emotional and intellectual distance that is usually supposed to come along with that format is subverted in such interesting ways. As is her narrator; who knew that a novel narrated by a probably-insane serial killer could have such depths of compassion? And then there are the little one-off narrative tricks she pulls - "hey, I know I promised a huge turning point in the mystery we're trying to solve, but what you really want to know about right now is why that guy is wearing those special shoes, right??" or bringing a tense action sequence to a screeching halt for two pages of philology and then dropping you back in the action without missing a beat.
- One of the most interesting things about Mycroft as an unreliable narrator is the things he presupposes about you, the reader - not just from when you'll be reading it (are you a contemporary of his or a far-future historian?), but how he predicts you'll react to things. Specifically, he presumed that the reader would get annoyed with him for calling Thisbe a witch (I didn't mind; it even seems like a form of honor, given my Ancient Greek Mycroft tinfoil-hat theory), and that if he gendered the characters, we would be forced to read emotionally-charged interactions as sexually-charged. In particular, when Dominic and Lesley had their confrontation, Mycroft's "you're imagining them fucking, aren't you, reader? aren't you???" said a lot more about Mycroft than it did about the reader, I think.
- Mycroft and Saladin were weirdly sweet. I thought that attraction, for Mycroft, was inextricable from fear, from the way he reacted to Danaë and Ganymede (and maybe Carlyle?). But then I got to see him interacting with not just an aesthetically-pleasing person, but one that he was personally horny for. It was, uh, quite a difference. XD It was...weirdly sweet? Even tender? Which is a very weird phrase to apply to people who have literally cannibalized each other (as a consensual act of love!) and have gone on a horrifying murder spree together (the couple that slays together stays together?).
- I've been wracking my brains as to who Anonymous is. Mycroft is fairly consistent in his pronoun use, so it's proooooobably someone he uses he/him pronouns for elsewhere. It must also be someone in their late 20s/early 30s at the earliest, since they were already Anonymous ~15 years ago when JEDD identified them; and they were at a gambling table, so they must have been at least a late teenager. (I assume Mycroft would have mentioned it if they were a J.E.D.D.-like prodigy.) Their command of English is good enough to be colloquial and slangy, so I'm leaning Blacklaw/Graylaw. Or maybe a Humanist? They have the right sort of élan, for sure. To be honest, I was kinda assuming that it was Vivien, given his relationship with Kosala and his knowledge of some fairly high-level state secrets, but Mycroft has torpedoed that. But they clearly still have access to a lot of high-level data. So maybe one of the Saneer-Weeksbooths?? But then everybody would probably have addressed them as such when discussing the break-in...
- Ada Palmer writes some of the most delicious competence porn that I've ever read. So many of my favorites listed above aren't my favorites because I particularly resonate with their narratives or like them as people (although this is also often true), but because they're so *good* at what they do. Even Dominic, who is both objectively and subjectively terrifying, exudes this entirely-justified aura of confidence in his own abilities, gaaaaaah. And Ockham Saneer, who otherwise I would be thoroughly *shrug* on, has that whole "yes, of course I'm the best at what I do. What I do is literally the most important thing in the whole world; ergo, nobody but the absolute best should be doing it" thing.
