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A review by xkrow
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
3.0
You might criticize me, reader, for not greatly enjoying this tale. It has great worldbuilding! It has vast politicking! It is a future sci-fi story that is complex! Thou must recognize the genius of these ideas! I hear you, dear reader, but in these few words, I hope to explain myself. If you have already heard my complaints, you may click away. If not, give it a read, and see if it makes you hate me. And if so, do not worry: I hate myself too.
I will concede that all your assertions of this tale are true in many parts. I too concede that the pen with which this narrative is spun is a careful one. Words and sentences are put together in a manner that sings. Different languages are put together on the same page to present a global picture. The form of prose we are used to is itself challenged as Mycroft switches the way he tells his story. And I will also concede that Ada Palmer is qualified to discuss many of the elements present here. She flows from politics to philosophy to history, making comments on the way humans might arrange society differently in the future to the different ways technical advancements might change them. She also does work in putting together a dangerous history, one full of war and religious conflict, an outbreak of the bubbling tensions that we see today and have witnessed many times in the past. Get on with it then! Enough concessions! If thou concedes this much, then what is thine issue?
The issue is one that has plagued many others tales that I have experienced, and one likely to always get in my path. For, you see, I hold true within me the truth of the one great object, the element within any medium that makes art worth the effort of experiencing. And that truth is one of the good story. Bah! You may interject. You, you so-called fans of narratives are of a kind lesser than others. What is a narrative if not characters doing things within a world? It is simply a connecting thread between the latter two, and thou yourself admitted to the prowess of them! I will clarify first that my compliments to the characters are given mostly in the abstract. I evaluate them rather than understand them; appreciate them rather than like them. And this is where I said you may hate me, because I do not think good characters can truly be great in the absence of a good narrative. Plato in his dialogues wrote characters with these vast views of the world, but that does not immortalize them in the halls of legends for there was little narrative for others to latch onto. Before you interject again, let me amend that statement myself: there was little for me to latch onto. And the same problem has cropped up here. The narrative has strong elements but it fails to provide the structure I need to fall in love with a book. Call me a lunatic, a weak reader, an idiot. But I could not produce a thimbleful of interest in the philosophical discussions and character interactions that cover the majority of this book because I had no idea what it was all leading to. That is what separates fiction from the papers upon papers I have read in my philosophy and politics courses, for the emotional value that they provide alongside their ideas.
To make myself a window to you, dear reader, I will also narrate something. In my fraught attempts at discovering the larger vista of this story, I was informed by others reading that the second half of this first part was quite a lot better than the earlier. Especially, I was assured, the last few chapters, which make the tale worth reading through. So, was it? Yes, I will answer, but in the most marginal sense. It improved my mood from something I was begging to be finished with to something I was mildly interested in. But as readers past and future have experienced, expectation is the killer of enjoyment, and my hopes for a satisfying ending were murdered in their cradle.
In the end, I make one final concession: the book has within it a lightning that thunders with all its might. But you, who love this, must make one concession in return: the window through which we observe that awesome power is one choked full of mist, grime, and a frustrating narrative style that leaves that lightning unseeable for most of it. This might improve on a subsequent read, but there must be something present there on a first to build that desire, and sadly, dear reader, I found that missing.
I will concede that all your assertions of this tale are true in many parts. I too concede that the pen with which this narrative is spun is a careful one. Words and sentences are put together in a manner that sings. Different languages are put together on the same page to present a global picture. The form of prose we are used to is itself challenged as Mycroft switches the way he tells his story. And I will also concede that Ada Palmer is qualified to discuss many of the elements present here. She flows from politics to philosophy to history, making comments on the way humans might arrange society differently in the future to the different ways technical advancements might change them. She also does work in putting together a dangerous history, one full of war and religious conflict, an outbreak of the bubbling tensions that we see today and have witnessed many times in the past. Get on with it then! Enough concessions! If thou concedes this much, then what is thine issue?
The issue is one that has plagued many others tales that I have experienced, and one likely to always get in my path. For, you see, I hold true within me the truth of the one great object, the element within any medium that makes art worth the effort of experiencing. And that truth is one of the good story. Bah! You may interject. You, you so-called fans of narratives are of a kind lesser than others. What is a narrative if not characters doing things within a world? It is simply a connecting thread between the latter two, and thou yourself admitted to the prowess of them! I will clarify first that my compliments to the characters are given mostly in the abstract. I evaluate them rather than understand them; appreciate them rather than like them. And this is where I said you may hate me, because I do not think good characters can truly be great in the absence of a good narrative. Plato in his dialogues wrote characters with these vast views of the world, but that does not immortalize them in the halls of legends for there was little narrative for others to latch onto. Before you interject again, let me amend that statement myself: there was little for me to latch onto. And the same problem has cropped up here. The narrative has strong elements but it fails to provide the structure I need to fall in love with a book. Call me a lunatic, a weak reader, an idiot. But I could not produce a thimbleful of interest in the philosophical discussions and character interactions that cover the majority of this book because I had no idea what it was all leading to. That is what separates fiction from the papers upon papers I have read in my philosophy and politics courses, for the emotional value that they provide alongside their ideas.
To make myself a window to you, dear reader, I will also narrate something. In my fraught attempts at discovering the larger vista of this story, I was informed by others reading that the second half of this first part was quite a lot better than the earlier. Especially, I was assured, the last few chapters, which make the tale worth reading through. So, was it? Yes, I will answer, but in the most marginal sense. It improved my mood from something I was begging to be finished with to something I was mildly interested in. But as readers past and future have experienced, expectation is the killer of enjoyment, and my hopes for a satisfying ending were murdered in their cradle.
In the end, I make one final concession: the book has within it a lightning that thunders with all its might. But you, who love this, must make one concession in return: the window through which we observe that awesome power is one choked full of mist, grime, and a frustrating narrative style that leaves that lightning unseeable for most of it. This might improve on a subsequent read, but there must be something present there on a first to build that desire, and sadly, dear reader, I found that missing.