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A review by albon
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
3.0
2018 review:
I don't even have words right now. Too Like The Lightning is the most fascinating book I have ever read, there is no other word for it.
Too Like The Lightning is a dense sci-fi written like an 18th century novel. It explores themes of philosophy, religion, and gender. It's pretentious, which is something I normally hate (in books and in people), but somehow I didn't mind, instead I just felt like I was being challenged. Oh no, this could be my worst nightmare, what if I'm becoming pretentious? Please feel free to murder me if you feel like I'm pretentious.
In short; this book is about a convict, Mycroft Canner, and his secrets. These secrets include a little boy who can perform miracles, which is problematic in a world that has outlawed organized religion, and his own mysterious past.
This book is amazingly well researched, on so many levels. Ada Palmer has clearly studied philosophy. The ways she raises those themes, as well as the ones of gender and religion, is so interesting. It's fascinating to see the way this futuristic society deals with the issues we have today.
Something else that is well researched; our main character Mycroft speaks several languages. The book is in english (or whatever other languages it has been translated into), but it's clear in the text that he speaks different languages to different people, and he thinks in different languages, and each time he thinks in a different language the book is narrated a little differently. "When thinking in English his narration has a strongly iambic rhythm, but when he's thinking in Greek (usually when thinking about his past) it becomes more dactylic, and when he's thinking in Japanese it has less stress generally." - quote from Ada Palmer's twitter. Okay, this is very pretentious, isn't it? Send your murder squads.
It also needs to be said that this book has a killer ending. Good endings are underrated.
I could also talk for ages about the way gender is done in this book, but I don't even know where I would begin. All you need to know is this; gender is obsolete. Everyone is they/them. Our main character still prefers to assign people people genders though, which is very interesting to me. It's not always obvious what he bases his gendering on. I have never read anything like it before.
But despite all of my pretentious praise for this book, I couldn't give it more than 3 stars. But @goodreads, it would be 3.5 if y allowed half stars (!) I had a couple of really big issues with this book that lessened my enjoyment of it.
The first part is how confusing the plot was. As mentioned TLTL is written like an 18th century novel (for the most parts), so naturally that leads to it being a little more difficult to understand, especially for me who doesn't have english as a first language. But I can't get around the fact that the book was very much published in 2016. Ada Palmer could've put in passages that were easier to understand. Don't even ask me what the plot in this book is, because I don't really know. A list of ten important people went missing. Just a list, not the people. I still don't understand why that was such a big deal. And that list going missing kind of led us into the rest of the plot, but with me not understanding the very basics I definitely didn't understand the rest. I don't mean to say nothingmade sende, because then this would've been the worst book ever, but as a whole I found the main political plotline very difficult to understand.
There were also too many characters. I could barely tell them apart. Half of these characters would've still been too many in my opinion. t's difficult to be super engaged in the story when you're not sure if you've even met the characters who are talking before or not. I don't think the plot really needed such a huge cast of characters.
All of this being said, I don't think everything in this book is confusing. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding. The world as we know it has completely changed, but there are no other planets and no lightsabers and no aliens. The main changes are the way society is organized (the concept of family is very different), people live on the moon, and our technology is more advanced. But it's very much a sci-fi.
All in all I really liked this book, I can't wait to read the next one, but I had some issues with it. I would recommend reading a few reviews to make sure this is something you want to read before getting this, because it definitely won't be to everyone's taste.
I don't even have words right now. Too Like The Lightning is the most fascinating book I have ever read, there is no other word for it.
Too Like The Lightning is a dense sci-fi written like an 18th century novel. It explores themes of philosophy, religion, and gender. It's pretentious, which is something I normally hate (in books and in people), but somehow I didn't mind, instead I just felt like I was being challenged. Oh no, this could be my worst nightmare, what if I'm becoming pretentious? Please feel free to murder me if you feel like I'm pretentious.
In short; this book is about a convict, Mycroft Canner, and his secrets. These secrets include a little boy who can perform miracles, which is problematic in a world that has outlawed organized religion, and his own mysterious past.
This book is amazingly well researched, on so many levels. Ada Palmer has clearly studied philosophy. The ways she raises those themes, as well as the ones of gender and religion, is so interesting. It's fascinating to see the way this futuristic society deals with the issues we have today.
Something else that is well researched; our main character Mycroft speaks several languages. The book is in english (or whatever other languages it has been translated into), but it's clear in the text that he speaks different languages to different people, and he thinks in different languages, and each time he thinks in a different language the book is narrated a little differently. "When thinking in English his narration has a strongly iambic rhythm, but when he's thinking in Greek (usually when thinking about his past) it becomes more dactylic, and when he's thinking in Japanese it has less stress generally." - quote from Ada Palmer's twitter. Okay, this is very pretentious, isn't it? Send your murder squads.
It also needs to be said that this book has a killer ending. Good endings are underrated.
I could also talk for ages about the way gender is done in this book, but I don't even know where I would begin. All you need to know is this; gender is obsolete. Everyone is they/them. Our main character still prefers to assign people people genders though, which is very interesting to me. It's not always obvious what he bases his gendering on. I have never read anything like it before.
But despite all of my pretentious praise for this book, I couldn't give it more than 3 stars. But @goodreads, it would be 3.5 if y allowed half stars (!) I had a couple of really big issues with this book that lessened my enjoyment of it.
The first part is how confusing the plot was. As mentioned TLTL is written like an 18th century novel (for the most parts), so naturally that leads to it being a little more difficult to understand, especially for me who doesn't have english as a first language. But I can't get around the fact that the book was very much published in 2016. Ada Palmer could've put in passages that were easier to understand. Don't even ask me what the plot in this book is, because I don't really know. A list of ten important people went missing. Just a list, not the people. I still don't understand why that was such a big deal. And that list going missing kind of led us into the rest of the plot, but with me not understanding the very basics I definitely didn't understand the rest. I don't mean to say nothingmade sende, because then this would've been the worst book ever, but as a whole I found the main political plotline very difficult to understand.
There were also too many characters. I could barely tell them apart. Half of these characters would've still been too many in my opinion. t's difficult to be super engaged in the story when you're not sure if you've even met the characters who are talking before or not. I don't think the plot really needed such a huge cast of characters.
All of this being said, I don't think everything in this book is confusing. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding. The world as we know it has completely changed, but there are no other planets and no lightsabers and no aliens. The main changes are the way society is organized (the concept of family is very different), people live on the moon, and our technology is more advanced. But it's very much a sci-fi.
All in all I really liked this book, I can't wait to read the next one, but I had some issues with it. I would recommend reading a few reviews to make sure this is something you want to read before getting this, because it definitely won't be to everyone's taste.