Too Like the Lightning

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Science Fiction / General / Palmer, Ada	4-week checkout	Due 05-17-2024

Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away. The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life. And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life.

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Incredible submitted by judahorli on August 16, 2021, 10:27am Absolutely incredibly book that starts off an incredible series. Ada Palmer is a delight to read. Too Like the Lightning is an incredible work of sci fi, a challenging philosophical read. I would absolutely recommend this book to all fans of sci fi and speculative fiction.

Prepare to get out your dictionary submitted by OfaValley on June 30, 2023, 12:29pm Too Like the Lightning lost me right at the start. The 4th wall breaking, smug, pretentious narrator constantly refers to us the reader, interjecting and abruptly stopping the story. Not only that, the narrator uses Enlightenment era English to tell us a story set far in the future. That would be like us using Middle English to tell a story to those in the present? Why? It's annoying and makes no sense except to flex the author's knowledge of the Enlightenment and beat us over the head with it.

I did not finish and could not get very far because the style is just so infuriating. Allegedly gender roles don't matter (or do depending on how the narrator "feels"), but if you want to read some sci-fi with actually interesting gender dynamic, I recommend Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.