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Notes -
Is your reading that all of the supernatural stuff is in Mycroft's head?
I kind of love the "Ada Palmer is weird, yo" aspect of the whole thing. It's like she had a list of interests:
And decided to throw it all together in a book. And, idk, my take is that she did it quite well! Some it is a little hard to believe, but I still think it's a world that "fits" and makes sense. What aspects of the hive system do you think are underdeveloped?
Not so much in Mycroft's head as irrelevant? The whole story is in Mycroft's head, and we have no way of sorting what's 'true' in the context of the imaginary world from what isn't. Mycroft tells us a lot of things, most of which are to some extent completely implausible, and often it's the non-magical parts that are the most implausible. Is it plausible that, say, a midget clone of Achilles pilots a giant robot magicked into existence from a kid's reading of some guy's awful Iliad fanfic in order to deflect a couple of nuclear missiles away from Mars? Well, no. But then, is it plausible that the whole world is run by a conspiracy of half a dozen people who all go to the same weirdly-specific brothel where people dress up in 18th century outfits, as part of some lady's attempt to control the world by addicting its leaders to a fetish for gender roles? If anything that part is less plausible! Who's more plausible, Bridger or JEDD? Bridger is the one to whom Mycroft attributes explicit magic powers, whereas JEDD is just an extremely mentally ill person, but nonetheless JEDD is the one I find harder to swallow. I can believe that a magic kid with the ability to rewrite reality exists, but I cannot believe that every world leader, much less the public, are willing to give ultimate power to a person so autistic that he does not understand object permanence.
But it doesn't matter because, well, Terra Ignota's world makes no sense. I think you have to take the whole thing as a glimpse into Mycroft's mind. Nothing here is plausible except insofar as it makes sense to Mycroft. And Mycroft is a lunatic.
(There is that part from 9A's perspective, but 9A's narrative voice is extremely similar to Mycroft's, shares all of Mycroft's values, and eventually 9A is turned into a Mycroft clone via Bridger-magic, so for all I know 9A doesn't exist and Mycroft is just taking the piss. It might just be that Palmer struggles to write more than one narrative voice, but there was one chapter from Martin Guildbreaker's perspective which was nicely differentiated, at least?)
My frustration with the books, really, is that Palmer tends to bring up big questions that she is either unwilling or unable to address. Is it about novel political systems? Well, she sort of sketches out the outline of one, but the system she sketches out makes no sense and she makes no attempt to answer even obvious questions about it. This goes for legal questions (hang on, how does crime work between people of different hives?), cultural questions (somehow Brillist mind-reading remains an exclusive Brillist secret, even though you can change hive at will, there are millions and millions of Brillists, and the skill requires no technology or assistance of any kind? no one has stolen this technique yet?), or economic questions (there's that chapter with the yakuza human traffickers; wait, why is human trafficking a thing in a world without borders? how is crime even possible in a world where everyone wears tracker implants anyway?). The idea of opt-in legal systems and non-geographic nations is interesting, but once you start asking questions about how it actually works, there are too many questions that Palmer just glosses over.
There's a certain type of science fiction author who comes up with an odd idea and then spends all their time trying to break that idea. Isaac Asimov is probably the most famous example of this type. He produces an elegant system and then repeatedly puts that system under stress. He pedantically looks for every place the idea might fail and then sees what happens when it does. Ada Palmer is the very opposite of this type of author. She throws out big ideas, does not bother investigating them at all, and then jumps to the next big idea. The result, at least for me, is a book that has the appearance of depth but not the reality.
One example, for instance, might be her interest in gender. She has a lot in Terra Ignota about the concept of gender and its cultural power. Gender and religion are both, in Terra Ignota, concepts that nobody is willing to talk about in public (gender is just crass; religion is actually banned), and yet the shadows of those concepts hang over the text. Gender and religion both matter even though nobody can admit to them mattering. This is interesting, except that the shoe never drops. By the end of the fourth book, the place the books get to on gender is, "huh, gender is interesting, let's have a committee to keep the conversation going". Really, that's the conclusion? The spectre of religion comes up repeatedly, but it never goes anywhere.
This is most obvious to me when it comes to the books' central conflict. By the end of Perhaps the Stars, the war is about two issues. (Three if you count "should we make JEDD unaccountable dictator of the world", but apparently everybody is in favour of that. It's bonkers.) The first issue is O. S., and the question I've often seen asked along the lines of, "Would you destroy this world to save a better one?" Does the end of preserving Terra Ignota's current political order justify a very small number of political assassinations? JEDD promises to reorganise the world's politics so as to make O. S. unnecessary, but refuses to explain how he's going to do that, or what his new constitution would be. The second issue is the trunk war - should the future of humanity be brain uploading or space travel?
But neither of those issues are actually addressed in any depth. JEDD does take over the world, but his new constitution is to just make some minor tweaks on the existing system, none of which seem like they obviate the need for O. S. How does making the Cousins into a strat, merging Mitsubishi and the EU into a super-hive, capping the number of Mason senators, and adding representatives from the Reservations to the senate address that issue? That seems just as unstable as the prior system. It seems strange that after a thousand pages and a global war over the issue of O. S., nobody actually answers the O. S. question. How does this world remove the need for O. S. again?
And the trunk war is simply bizarre. There doesn't seem to be any reason why the Brillist and Utopian paths are incompatible - heck, Faust himself says that there is plenty of time for space travel after digital immortality is achieved. This 'conflict' is two different research projects with different priorities; the only actual clash is that both parties think the other is being somewhat wasteful in the face of their grand dream. The Brillists believe there is a pressing global imperative to abolish death, and the Utopians believe... er... they never get to this part. But they think that going to space is very important. Maybe there's a contrived conflict because both groups want to study Bridger's relics, but... what, we're going to have a world war because NASA and MIRI couldn't figure out how to share? It makes the conflict seem bizarrely petty.
At any rate, the fundamental problem there is that no one ever makes the case for Utopia. Here I'm just recapping Balioc, but I think it bears mentioning again. All the narrators are passionately on the Utopian side, and portray the Utopian dream as beautiful and heroic, and the Brillist dream as contemptible and narrow-minded, but no one ever reflects on why Utopia's dream is so important. It just axiomatically is.
I guess the problem I have is that Terra Ignota is, fundamentally, a bunch of things that Ada Palmer thinks is cool, all free-associated together. It never really coheres into a world or even really into a story.
There are a lot of things in the series that are difficult to swallow, but make sense once you realise that it's not trying to be a realistic work of political fiction. Something that struck me was that Terra Ignota is a world of utter sincerity. There are no liars or cynics; no world leaders who just opportunistically cheat. The closest you can find to that is Perry-Kraye, and even he's deeply embroiled in romantic melodrama. The Mason hive is an absolute dictatorship constrained only by the leader's determination to hold true to an oath that nobody but himself has ever read, and apparently this works! But every single character is like that. No one is corrupt. Everybody deeply believes in this or that philosophy. Mitsubishi are a bunch of calculating corporate imperialists, and yet when JEDD questions them, every member of the board is able to wax rhapsodic about the spiritual value of land. The blacklaws come together and make this lovely idealistic city called Hobbestown, rather than being the sorts of poorly-educated low-impulse-control people you might expect to live outside the law. Moral suasion is an incredibly powerful force in Terra Ignota - this ties into all the incredibly ropey gender stuff about the power of women and seduction and Marie Antoinette. It's just a world without cynics; a world without pragmatists.
I suppose I'm just ranting incoherently at this point.
My point is that I think Terra Ignota is an interesting look into Ada Palmer's brain, conveyed by way of Mycroft's brain.
I don't find it particularly sensible as a story or as a world, though.
Yeah, this bothered me.
Thanks for all your other thoughts, no particular comment on them.
Sorry, that's been backed up for a while. I apologise if I came off as trying to tear down a novel you love.
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