![]() ![]() If you, like the “Reader,” experience impatience during the novel’s first 100 pages, you wouldn’t be alone. Shifting points of view and breaking the fourth wall could have easily led to a fractured reading experience, but Palmer weaves the narrative in such a way that the structural and stylistic flourishes are more exciting than they are jarring. ![]() Mycroft Tanner-a convict sentenced to a life of public servitude-narrates the collapse of Terra Ignota’s political system in a voice reminiscent of Dante and Candide. Throughout the novel, the “Reader” interjects his or her own opinions, questioning Mycroft’s version of the story, and sometimes additional narrators provide the Reader with a new perspective. Ada Palmer’s debut, Too Like the Lightning, set in the 25 th-century world of Terra Ignota (Latin for “land unknown”), is so chock-full of philosophy, sociology, and technology, you could create an entire semester’s syllabus out of it. ![]() What happens when a University of Chicago history professor writes science fiction? Apparently, you get an ambitious, sprawling, four-book series written in the vernacular of the Enlightenment. ![]()
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