Too Like the Lightning
 First edition cover | |
| Author | Ada Palmer |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | science fiction, speculative fiction |
| Publisher | Tor Books |
Publication date | 2016 |
| Pages | 432 pp. |
| ISBN | 978-0765378002 |
Too Like the Lightning is the first novel by Ada Palmer, published in May 2016. It is the opening book in the series Terra Ignota.
Style
The book starts with in-universe authorizations, disclaimers and trigger warnings. The author explained in an interview that French books of the Ancien Régime period listed the authorities having approved them for censorship purposes, and that such lists provide insights as to the preoccupations and priorities of the society in which they were published. Palmer took inspiration in this to introduce the preoccupations of this futuristic world for the narrative worldbuilding process.[1]
The novel uses the direct address to the reader style, to create a "personal relationship" between the author and the reader, inspired by Jacques the Fatalist from Diderot. The author stresses on a different "emotional experience" when they read this kind of book, and so wanted to try it themself.[1]
The narrator wants to explore the current conversation about gender issues. The novel is placed in a future where people speaking French, Spanish, English or Latin use a Gender-neutral language, but the narrator tries to genderize the pronouns. The author explains the narrator messes up a lot gendered pronoun when they use them, like people nowadays messes up a lot when they try to use the gender neutral.[1]
The book relates four days of history and stops at the end of the fourth day.[2]
Worldbuilding
The book doesn't explain how the future things work, but show them working. Meanwhile, the narrator explains things about the history of the world or how legal system work, but never about information a contemporary reader in the future would know.[1] Information is given describing the world.
The worldbuilding process took five years.[1]
Influences are very various, historical sources, personal feelings, visual images, characters' moral dilemma in other fiction work.[1]
The fictional universe features non-geographical nations, by voluntary adhesion, including an absolute monarchy one can leave if you don't like the absolute monarch.[1]
The set set role is to portray a moral question, a social tension, similar to feminism, transgender, here in the novel the question whether the parents have the right to raise children so happy but not able to interface with life, and can't change, grow, become other people.[1]
The surveillance is universal, people having personal trackers, but they can switch them off, a point not shown in the first parts of the novel.[1]
Title
The title comes from a quotation from Romeo and Juliet, but is not explained in the work.[1][3] In one instance, the narrator refers to lightning as a metaphor of events to come, but the author did not intend to make the title clear in the first book of the series.[1]
The series title, Terra Ignota, is a synonym of terra incognita.
Influence
The author cites the Age of Enlightenment as main inspiration, and authors like Voltaire and Denis Diderot.[1]
Reception
Paul Kincaid in Strange Horizons is disappointed by the gender treatment, deploring the direct abandon by the narrator, preferring the Ancillary Justice style.[4] They consider the book concepts had the potential to be "one of the most significant works of contemporary science fiction" but fails to "[live] up to its aspirations".[4] NPR qualifies the book as "dense and complex" and the worldbuilding as a "thrilling feat", comparing with Gene Wolfe and Neal Stephenson worlds. The critics describes Too Like The Lighting as "one of the most maddening, majestic, ambitious novels – in any genre – in recent years" but deplores the abrupt ending.[5] The New York Review of Science Fiction compares the narrator with Alex from A Clockwork Orange.[2]
Awards
Too Like the Lightning is a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel,[6] and won the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. It also won the 2017 Compton Crook Award for the best first novel in the genre published during the previous year.[7]
Notes and references
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ENEASZ. "Interview – Ada Palmer (Too Like The Lightning)". The Methods of Rationality Podcast. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
- 1 2 Stephen, Gerken. "Two Views: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer reviewed by Stephen Gerken". The New York Review of Science Fiction. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
- ↑ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2.
- 1 2 Paul, Kincaid (2 September 2016). "Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer". Strange Horizons. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
- ↑ Jason, Heller. "Science, Fiction And Philosophy Collide in Astonishing 'Lightning'". NPR. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
- ↑ Trendacosta, Katharine. "Here Are the 2017 Hugo Awards Finalists". io9. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
- ↑ "The Thirty-Five Compton Crook Award Winning Novels from inception in 1983 through 2017". www.bsfs.org. Baltimore Science Fiction Society. Retrieved 6 May 2017.