Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota

Palmer, Ada

ISBN 10: 0765378000 / ISBN 13: 9780765378002

Published by Tor Books, 2016

First printing with number line to 1. Signed by Palmer at the title page. 432 pages. Grey boards with red spine titles, very good with bumped spine tips, bumping to bottom fore-edge corner of rear panel, light edgewear to bottom fore-edge corner of front. Spine square. Binding sound. Dust jacket very good in Mylar with lightly bumped spine tips and light edgewear to bottom fore-edge corners. Pages bright, text unmarked. Seller Inventory # BBS-2016021

Synopsis:

From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality

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 competition 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 destabilize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...

About the Author: Ada Palmer (she/her) is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a cappella vocal music on historical themes, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. She writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com. Too Like the Lightning was her debut fiction book.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra ...
Publisher: Tor Books
Publication Date: 2016
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Signed
Edition: First Edition.