Too Like the Lighting by Ada Palmer

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer is an ambitious start to a four book speculative fiction epic. It describes a world with fast cheap travel, a taboo against the expression of gender and religion and the abolishment of national borders and asks how society would change as a result. The narrator Mycroft Canner fills the book with details about the three levels of law (Black, Grey, and White), the top five Hives (borderless nations) and the ministry that holds it all together. With so much to think about, my book club had a grand old time talking about the implications of each idea and what it would mean to live in such a world. It was a good conversation.

Too bad I hated the book.

The narrator and main character, Mycroft Canner, is a former serial killer and troubleshooter for the world’s elite and he’s the primary reason why I hated the book. Long before the book club selected Too Like the Lightning, I actually downloaded a sample since I found the title so interesting. It opened with the following:

You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.

He was right. I barely tolerate 19th century style writing from the likes of Charles Dickens; reading that style from a present day book set in the distant future was too much for me so I moved on, not bothering to read past the 10 page sample. When I read it for book club, I found that my initial impression was correct; Mycroft Canner is very fond of odd turns of phrases, its complicated world, and, most annoyingly, Voltaire, whose name I only barely remembered. Looking him up in Wikipedia afterwards, I read that he’s credited with the development of free speech and was fond of criticizing the Catholic church, which explains why religion is banned. While Mycroft tries to sell me on the man and his work, it felt like I was reading the work of a poser. Palmer’s writing is impressive; she renders Mycroft Canner very well.

If the pseudo-archaic style were it, I’d would been only annoyed with the story, but the writing adds further complications. On occasion, Palmer changes points of view as Mycroft gets other people to write for him, guesses what people were doing out of his sight, or, the worst yet, argues with an invisible reader over word choice. That last does a stellar job of turning me off the work even when I’ve finally settled in. It’s jarring to be in the middle of a scene and then end up reading a long passage about whether or not to call a character a witch. While the arguments do a good job of characterizing Mycroft as defensive and high minded, it breaks my flow in a way that feels somewhat indulgent.

In the first paragraph, I mentioned that expressions of gender were taboo in the world of Too Like the Lightning. This fact frustrates Mycroft who decides (using the excuse of his archaic style) to assign genders to characters based on how masculine or feminine he feels they are in that moment, often switching pronouns for certain characters. This tendency is the most controversial part of the book. As a CIS gendered man, I’ve only occasionally had the experience of someone guessing that I was female instead of male, but only based on reading my name, which is ambiguously gendered to most Americans, and never in person. For trans people though, it’s a different story. Imagine reading a whole book where a man spends the whole book assigning gender to people regardless of what they feel or think while living in a world where that exact thing happens to your face. It’s appalling. The best explanation that I’ve heard is that Mycroft’s habits are derived from how he was raised. That’s a spoiler though, so I won’t go into detail here.

Too Like the Lightning is filled with ideas. In addition to what I mentioned already, there’s a child with the ability to bring toys to life, a group of people who have had their senses trained from birth to do math, and an esoteric mystery involving a list of names. With the world filled to the brim, the plot actually doesn’t go anywhere for large sections of the book. The fact that this is only the first half of a book that was split into too is imminently clear when the ending arrives and nothing has been resolved. If you like those idea, enjoy the writing and/or just want to see where it all goes, I think you’ll have a good time with the book. The work is ambitious and Palmer should be commended for bringing all of those idea together in a coherent way. I just can’t read anymore of Mycroft’s thoughts.

 

Armada By Ernest Cline

I was out of town when my book club read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, but I did listen to what they said afterwards. According to them, the book is filled with dozens of pop culture references, the main character is the worst example of a chosen one, and the side characters are stereotyped paper cut outs. The book was popular among people who were nostalgic for the 1980’s and who could remember all of the references. So after that I didn’t really want to read Armada, but when my mother read it, I decided to pick it up despite her warnings.

And yeah, all of Ready Player One’s criticisms apply to Armada too.

Our hero is Zack Ulysses Lightman, a high school senior who plays the titular video game Armada religiously. His long dead fathet left him a ton of 1980’s memorabilia (including a whole car) and a crazy theory stating that all of entire science fiction from Star Wars to Transformers was created in order to prepare humanity for an upcoming alien invasion. There are interesting routes from that starting point. Zach could learn more about his father while following his clues. He could have worked with his mother to prove his father right. He could have acted on this information. Instead he does nothing and an impossible ship lands in front of his school without him having to lift a finger.

Ernest Cline’s writing style is to shove in pop culture references where actual metaphor and emotional description should be, and the first quarter of the book is particularly rife with clumsy similes and awful nostalgia. For example, after seeing an alien ship hovering outside his classroom window, Zach returns home and, before going inside, states that “he felt like Luke Skywalker standing in front of the tree on Dagobah.” The first question I had was “what does that mean?”. Sure Luke was feeling anxious as his mentor had told him that he would find himself in the scary tree, but Zach was going home to his beautiful mother (Cline makes sure that we understand that). That’s just the one I could remember. Over and over again, Cline’s reliance on movie references forced me to put down the book multiple times and recovered from the whiplash. To be fair, there’s a style of writing that uses real world brands like Coca-cola and Toyota to add verisimilitude to writing, but people only occasionally communicate in brands. When Zach’s boss starts talking about his IPhone instead of just calling it a phone and when Zach keeps referring to his car by it’s full year and make, the constant calls to reality just wear me down. Luckily when the aliens attack, the pop culture references die down as story specific jargon (which are only sometimes 1980’s references) takes their place.

That’s not to say that pop culture references don’t have their place. There’s a cute moment when Zach’s mother imitates Gandalf and shouts “you shall not pass” in order to keep him from leaving. It’s something I can imagine my own mother doing, and it emphasizes how such things are used in the real world: to communicate complicated ideas with short hand. Unfortunately moments like that are undermined by Zach’s constant use of them, dulling the effect of the ones that really work. Of course then the characters would need to be filled out more. Once you remove the references from Zach, you’re left with a kid who has a dead dad, a lot of money (from the dead dad’s settlement), anger issues, and a lot of video game experience. The secondary characters are a little better.

I will give Cline some credit; he knows how to subvert expectations. The gamers in the novel are not all like Zach as there’s ethnic, gender, age, and queer diversity in there, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it, though the novel was half over by the time they showed up. Each of these characters has the core of potential that’s wasted by how Cline uses them. Early on Zach points out a bully and his ex girlfriend. They are not important, just details that really add nothing to Zach. We’re introduced to Zach’s two best friends and a boss he really likes, but they are sidelined for the entire middle of the book in favor of a new romantic interest that the aforementioned diverse cast of gamers. It’s annoying because as one of the top ten players of Armada in the world, Zach should have been part of a pretty close knit community, but instead whole casts of characters are cycled in and out, making impossible to get attached to any of them. This extends to the romantic interest, who only shows up in the second quarter and then disappears for a quarter of the book and makes a cameo in the last few pages. She doesn’t drive the plot or sits at the emotional heart of the story where Zach’s father resides.

That leaves the plot. While the book opens with the question of whether or not Zach is going made, it decides that badly written Ender’s Game is what we wanted instead. It manages to up the tension with a pretty good video game action scene full of tension and excitement (it even explains the stakes pretty well), but it comes after a pointless day at school, a lecture from Zach’s mother, and a whole lot of pop culture references. By placing that scene first, the story’s stakes, tension, and theme would have come into focus a lot earlier and the heightened tension would have bought time for Zach to exposit his little heart out about his dad. The second quarter of the book is burdened with a pointless romantic subplot and way too much exposition that honestly was covered in the video game scene. More character interactions would have worked better here, giving Zach something to do while the main conflict ramps up, but sure a description of a video narrated by Carl Sagan works.

So those are my criticisms of Armada. I do not recommend it. I do recommend Skyward (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyward_(novel)) by Brandon Sanderson, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and the X Wing series by Micheal Stackpole and Aaron Alliston. All those have tensions, space, aliens, and characters who feel like real human beings.

 

The Other Series, a Review

I first read the first book in Anne Bishop’s The Others series, Written in Red, for book club over two years ago and found it to be an engaging, fuzzy, and warm story and so last year I decided to read more. While the rest of the series is very enjoyable, Anne Bishop definitely found the limits of her prophetic and physically weak protagonist.

The Others series is set in an alternate Earth where powerful creatures known as the terra indigene (Latin for earth native) rule most of the planet. Terra indigene range in form from classic Western monsters such as werewolves and vampires to more Dungeon and Dragons-like creatures such as Wind and Earth elementals. There are even some classic variations on Greek monsters like Medusa, but the most powerful of the terra indigene are the things that reside deep in the wild, formless and hungry. In the world of The Others, humanity is merely smart prey, kept alive only because they amuse the terra indigene with shiny new things like computers and telephones. In exchange, humanity is allowed to rent land from the terra indigene and people who live deep in these enclaves find it easy to forget what lives beyond the borders and to resent the many controls imposed on them. The conflict between the arrogant ignorance of humanity and the desire of the terra indigene to protect nature forms the core of the global stakes.

The main characters in the series are Meg Corbyn, a young woman who can see the future through the act of cutting herself, and Simon Wolfgard who is the leader of the local terra indigene group. In the first book, Meg escapes a group of humans who want to profit off her prophecies and becomes the human liaison for Simon’s Courtyard (what they call the complex where the terra indigene live). As the humans and the terra indigene try to figure out whether or not humans and terra indigene can work together, Meg and Simon learn to work together and fight to keep Lakeside where they live from being wiped off the map because of various attacks on the terra indigene.

Overall, I liked the stories. Despite being physically much much weaker than the terra indigene like Simon, Meg stills holds her own against the odds, and her desire to save everyone including the terra indigene keeps the Lakeside Courtyard focused on working with the humans instead of against them. I particularly like some of the personalities in the Courtyard such as the leader of the vampires, Erebus, and Simon’s nephew Sam, who spends the first book stuck in wolf form. My favorite image from the books is Erebus and Sam watching cartoons together. As the second protagonist, Simon is always trying to figure out how to deal with Meg and the other humans, and he has a few good moments here and there as well. Overall, the idea of a world where huamnity lives int eh shadow of much stronger creatures drew me in.

Unfortunately some points of the story are a little weak. By book 5 Etched in Bone, the idea that humans would be willing to constantly try to go toe to toe with the terra indigene even though both recent and ancient history made it clear that the terra indigene could wipe them out got harder and harder to stomach. It was pretty clear that every time humanity though of something cool, they would try to use it against the terra indigene, get the stuffing kicked out of them, and get their shiny toys and lives taken away. Also by book 5, I found the constant gender jokes to be rather tiring. Human females are apparently the most confusing creatures on the planet, despite the fact that Winter can just stop in for tea if she feels like it.

Despite that I recommend The Others series, particularly if you want something light to read. It’s not pushing the envelope at least not now in 2019, but the books are a solid read overall.