Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

I don’t even know where to begin with this one, honestly, which is probably the most common opening line for reviews of this book across the board. Ada Palmer set herself an absurd task, write a 25th century mystery/thriller but narrate it in genuine Age of Enlightenment style, occasionally slipping into actual 18th century diction, with a narrator, Mycroft Canner, who’s a convicted criminal now serving as a kind of universal servant. It should not work. Somehow it mostly does.

The world building is the real draw, flying cars reshaping political philosophy and family structure until the nation-state basically stops meaning anything, people choosing “Hives” instead of countries. It’s genuinely one of the most ambitious pieces of political SF I’ve read in years. But it’s also a hard read especially at the start, and I mean that literally, more than one person mentioned the story doesn’t really get moving until around page 200, which tracks with my experience. I almost bailed twice in the first third.

There’s a real criticism worth taking seriously here too, not everyone read this as a triumph. Some people felt it plays more like a lecture dressed up as a novel, parading the author’s ideas about gender and society with not much effort put into making them land as story rather than argument, one comparison I saw was to Sophie’s World, which is a pretty damning comparison if you know that book. I didn’t feel that as strongly as some did, but I understand where it’s coming from, there are stretches where the philosophy is doing more work than the plot.

Comparisons to The Quantum Thief get thrown around a lot and that’s fair, both books ask you to just sit with confusion until the rules of the world click. If you’re the kind of reader who needs everything explained on arrival, this’ll frustrate you. If you can hold the confusion for two hundred pages, it pays off in a way not many books attempt anymore.