Too Like The Lightning - Softcover

Palmer Ada

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1786699508 ISBN 13: 9781786699503

Publisher: HEAD OF ZEUS, 2017

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best SF Novel. The year is 2454. Humanity has engineered a hard-won golden age, forged in the aftermath of a bitter conflict that wiped both religion and nation state from the planet. Now seven factions or 'hives' co-govern the world, their rule fuelled by benign censorship, oracular statistical analytics and technological abundance. But this is a fragile Utopia - and someone is intent on pushing it to breaking point. Convicted for his crimes, celebrated for his talents, Mycroft Canner is the indentured instrument - and confidant - of some of the world's most powerful figures. When he is asked to investigate a bizarre theft, he finds himself on the trail of a conspiracy that could shatter the tranquil world order the Hives have maintained for three centuries. But Mycroft has his own secrets. He is concealing a much greater threat to the seven Hives, a wild card no degree of statistical analysis could have prophesised. This threat takes the unlikely form of a thirteen-year-old called Bridger. For how will a world that has banished God deal with a child who can perform miracles?

About this title

About the Author

Ada Palmer is an author, historian and composer. She did her PhD at Harvard, teaches History at the University of Chicago, blogs at ExUrbe.com, composes close harmony folk music and performs with the a capella group Sassafrass.

From Publishers Weekly

Palmer's fiction debut is the ambitious and colorful first installment of her Terra Ignota series, following the political intrigues of Mycroft Canner, a convict who, as punishment for his crimes, becomes the servant of all he meets. The setting is a richly depicted future where gender is concealed, people live in carefully coded sects, and theology is pick-and-choose. Mycroft is tasked with hiding a child whose existence could cause chaos; this is no easy feat, and he and those around him are soon plunged into the world of high politics. Palmer's prose is written with an Enlightenment sensibility, deliberately dense and ponderous. This stylistic decision can be engaging, especially in the tête-à-têtes between Mycroft and the reader, but the heaviness detracts from what might otherwise be an engrossing plot. Mycroft is a witty unreliable narrator whose own biases color the world brought before the reader; it lurches between hellish and utopian. Palmer proves that the boundaries of science fiction can be pushed and that history and the future can be married together. Agent: Amy Boggs, Donald Maass Literary. (May)\n

Edition details

• Publisher: HEAD OF ZEUS
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1786699508
• ISBN 13: 9781786699503
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 533