The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer
Too Like the Lightning 2. Seven Surrenders 3. The Will to Battle At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Too Like the Lightning 2. Seven Surrenders 3. The Will to Battle At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Read: 2018-02-27
Rating: 3/5
Pages: 368
isbn: 9781466858763
Back in 2016, I wrote that I felt Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning was my favourite sf novel of the year, knocking aside strong competition from Cat Valente and Adrian Tchaikovsky. Last year, the sequel Seven Surrenders was equal in every way to that book, bringing the first part of Palmer’s dizzyingly complex tale to a suitably complex and saisfying climax. So when I saw that the first book of the second part of the story, The Will to Battle, I practically ran to get it onto my ereader, fully prepared to dive back in to the Seven Hive-world on the brink of the global cataclysm to come.
It is with deep, aching regret that I have to say what I found therein was… not what I’d anticipated. The book is fine, its just that all it is is fine.
While its probably unfair to judge the second part of the Terra Ignota
on the basis of just one half of the narrative, the simple truth is that this book felt like a wasted opportunity. The last ended with the total collapse (or so we were told) of the Seven-Hive system, the world was on the brink of an apocalypse of unimaginable proportion. This book takes up that tale and… none of that happens. The Seven-Hive system continues, more or less as before. The world-changing events which seemed assured on “day seven” changed almost nothing. Cornel MASON still rules the greater part of humanity, the Mitsubishi may be fractured, but they endure, the same goes for each of the other Hives. The narrative structure underlying the first two books is, therefore, shown to have been an utter conceit, a build up to a glorious continuation, not the revolution which was assayed.
Most of the book is spent on two primary foci: the floor of the Senate and the Hunt for Ojiro Sniper; the first is interesting and involving, the other tedious and limp, in the end both are horribly unsatisfying. The Senate chapters run the gamut from being merely complex to being utterly unfathomable, fixated on points of procedure and rhetorical stances. The Sniper chapters are utterly pointless, an excuse to move the narrative gaze out from the dull as dishwater Senate and into some other equally dull spaces.
It is in the parts of the book which aren’t part of the two main strands that the book gives hints, glimpses, of what it could have been, the Olympics in Antarctica being a highlight, as are the machinations of Achilles. Palmer’s primary interest is clearly in the philosophy that she protrays, and when she does that, her book soars like a Bach fugue, the problem is that where before that philosophy formed a carefully woven whole with the plot, in this book the dialogue has just stopped, the philosophy is just set apart as philosophy, and the book as a whole stutters as a result.
Another mis-firing element is the character of Mycroft Canner - everyone’s favourite cannibalistic mass-murdering unreliable narrator! The choice of Canner as the ‘Vox Dei’ in these novels has always been problematic, but in this novel he goes from merely unreliable to simply incompetent. Half-crazed for most of the book, dissolving into tears on a near-continual basis, almost dying, stabbed, left to die, stabbed again, falling into fugue states, crying, collapsing; the Seven-Hive system is clearly an advanced civilization, but it appears to have picked up on Palmer’s Enlightenment-era prose and adopted mental health care from the mid-1700s as a result. Canner can barely function as a human being, never mind as a narrator, and noone in the novel appears to notice this. As a result, Canner’s internal dialogue, which started as a clever dialogue with the presumed reader, now becomes a crazed argument with Thomas Hobbes (among others)
I realise this review sounds like a long list of complaints, but I think that’s because my hopes for this were so high, perhaps too much so. I adore the world Palmer has created, I wanted this book to be excellent, triumphant, incredible. The most positive thing I can take from it is that so little has happened in the months chronicled here that the last book in the series can just pick up where Seven Surrenders left off (thematically and narratively) without much in the way of consequence. I will, naturally, be as eager to read that book as I was this one, but my eagerness will be based on a hope and a desire, not on expectations.
It is with deep, aching regret that I have to say what I found therein was… not what I’d anticipated. The book is fine, its just that all it is is fine.
While its probably unfair to judge the second part of the Terra Ignota
on the basis of just one half of the narrative, the simple truth is that this book felt like a wasted opportunity. The last ended with the total collapse (or so we were told) of the Seven-Hive system, the world was on the brink of an apocalypse of unimaginable proportion. This book takes up that tale and… none of that happens. The Seven-Hive system continues, more or less as before. The world-changing events which seemed assured on “day seven” changed almost nothing. Cornel MASON still rules the greater part of humanity, the Mitsubishi may be fractured, but they endure, the same goes for each of the other Hives. The narrative structure underlying the first two books is, therefore, shown to have been an utter conceit, a build up to a glorious continuation, not the revolution which was assayed.
Most of the book is spent on two primary foci: the floor of the Senate and the Hunt for Ojiro Sniper; the first is interesting and involving, the other tedious and limp, in the end both are horribly unsatisfying. The Senate chapters run the gamut from being merely complex to being utterly unfathomable, fixated on points of procedure and rhetorical stances. The Sniper chapters are utterly pointless, an excuse to move the narrative gaze out from the dull as dishwater Senate and into some other equally dull spaces.
It is in the parts of the book which aren’t part of the two main strands that the book gives hints, glimpses, of what it could have been, the Olympics in Antarctica being a highlight, as are the machinations of Achilles. Palmer’s primary interest is clearly in the philosophy that she protrays, and when she does that, her book soars like a Bach fugue, the problem is that where before that philosophy formed a carefully woven whole with the plot, in this book the dialogue has just stopped, the philosophy is just set apart as philosophy, and the book as a whole stutters as a result.
Another mis-firing element is the character of Mycroft Canner - everyone’s favourite cannibalistic mass-murdering unreliable narrator! The choice of Canner as the ‘Vox Dei’ in these novels has always been problematic, but in this novel he goes from merely unreliable to simply incompetent. Half-crazed for most of the book, dissolving into tears on a near-continual basis, almost dying, stabbed, left to die, stabbed again, falling into fugue states, crying, collapsing; the Seven-Hive system is clearly an advanced civilization, but it appears to have picked up on Palmer’s Enlightenment-era prose and adopted mental health care from the mid-1700s as a result. Canner can barely function as a human being, never mind as a narrator, and noone in the novel appears to notice this. As a result, Canner’s internal dialogue, which started as a clever dialogue with the presumed reader, now becomes a crazed argument with Thomas Hobbes (among others)
I realise this review sounds like a long list of complaints, but I think that’s because my hopes for this were so high, perhaps too much so. I adore the world Palmer has created, I wanted this book to be excellent, triumphant, incredible. The most positive thing I can take from it is that so little has happened in the months chronicled here that the last book in the series can just pick up where Seven Surrenders left off (thematically and narratively) without much in the way of consequence. I will, naturally, be as eager to read that book as I was this one, but my eagerness will be based on a hope and a desire, not on expectations.