Too Like the Lightning

Hardcover, 432 pages

English language

Published Oct. 9, 2016 by Tor Books.

ISBN:
978-0-7653-7800-2
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OCLC Number:
918994531

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(4 reviews)

"The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labeling all public writing and speech... And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destabilize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life..."--Book jacket.

6 editions

reviewed Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota -- Book 1)

Too Like the Lightning

This is a temporary DNF, and one of my big disappointments of the year. I read to approx. p220, giving up during an extended (and frankly inane) overstuffed dialog sequence.

I like the author. Palmer is intelligent, and passionate about her chosen subjects. I share a stack of the same interests, particularly censorship (she has a couple of great lectures on YouTube about the subject, explaining what censorship regimes really do, how they work, how universally slipshod they are, etc.)

I also like the book's key ideas. My social milieu DOES matter more to me than the country on my birth certificate, and that SHOULD count for something. But I couldn't grok her writing style. It's baroque. Too wordy, too 'mannered'. The framing device she employs is original (a history of events, about which extraneous details are included, like editorial decisions and commentary on people) but I can't help but …

reviewed Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota -- Book 1)

Too Like the Lightning

I reread this book for the SFFBookClub this month.

Personally, I deeply enjoyed this book and series, but I think it is not for everybody. I highly recommend folks read the first two chapters online here to get a taste of the voice: www.tor.com/2016/04/12/excerpts-ada-palmer-too-like-the-lightning-chapters-1-and-2/. Mycroft the narrator is self-deprecating, frequently addresses the reader, and is most definitely a very unreliable (and heavily edited) narrator. You can read it in the link above, but never ever have I ever seen a book do so much world-building via content warnings.

This book (and series) is trying to do so much, and regardless of whether you feel like it worked or not, it's hard not to be in awe of the ambition and the sheer density of ideas threaded together here. In the first chapter we've got flying cars, a secret magic kid who can turn toys into real life, mention of a …

Review of 'Too like the lightning' on 'LibraryThing'

Starts out packed with interesting ideas, gradually devolves into the author's Enlightment fantasy (super Eurocentric with a tokenistic Japanese presence) and by the end veers completely off the rails into a Renaissance-francophile sexual fantasy. I'm not sure why I read to the end.

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Subjects

  • Utopias
  • Prisoners
  • Twenty-fifth century
  • Fiction
  • Third millennium

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