Perhaps the Stars

I'm not really sure what to make of this last entry in the Terra Ignota quartet. Some parts were absolutely brilliant – the way that war spirals out into tiny fractal battles with the motivation behind each becoming increasingly personal and complex. I loved the way that Palmer as a historian thinks about not just technological changes but how government, family structure and social mores will change in 500 years. As she reminds us, the American Experiment is not yet 500 years old and there's no reason to believe that 500 years in the future people will continue to idealize democracy and free speech, as dear as that is to us today.

I loved the tension between: do we do everything we can to dream of a better world, or do we work incrementally on this one? I thought that ultimately, after The Will To Battle being overly sympathetic to the Masonic Empire, Palmer in this book shows more of the nuance between these sides and ultimately the arc for the original Saneer-Weeksbooth bash and for Carlyle Foster are pretty satisfying.

But there's just too much in this book. There are three pieces that just don't really fit and I feel bad because I think they're really Palmer's favorite parts: The Homeric references, JEDD Mason and Mycroft. Each is central, but ultimately distracting. Perhaps the least clear complaint is Mycroft – part of what made Terra Ignota stand out is a literally criminally insane, unreliable narrator, whose scandalous secret past is definitely scandalous. But by the third book, Mycroft's deification of JEDD Mason and commitment to the monarchy of the Masonic Empire was starting to really dilute the richness of the setting. Palmer's responded to this criticism by saying that it's just the lens of reading via Mycroft and that readers can read past him. But she had a rich opportunity to provide a foil for his narrative with 9A, and instead 9A too became a JEDD cultist. I think this is simply a theory of mind failure – as the reader, I cannot completely see past an unreliable narrator to pick up clues from a highly complex setting from only seeing first person narration from said highly unreliable narrator. Also, Mycroft's schtick is that he really is an unforgiveable person and I think Palmer got wrapped up in her own creation and ultimately found him sympathetic in a way that I did not find deserved.

So complex world-building + interesting philosophy + futuristic homeric retelling + morally complex unreliable narrator + exploration of novel divinity = too many things to fit into a quartet