And so the Terra Ignota saga draws majestically to a close. The ambition and complexity of this series is truly incredible. I've never read any other sci-fi quite so dense with historical and literary material. The plot, style, world-building, and characters are all distinctively erudite. Each book demands the reader's full attention to keep up at all, let alone get the most from it. I'm sure that I missed a great deal, but definitely benefited from some familiarity with [b:The Iliad|1371|The Iliad|Homer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1625333695l/1371._SX50_.jpg|3293141], [b:The Odyssey|1381|The Odyssey|Homer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390173285l/1381._SY75_.jpg|3356006], Hobbes's [b:Leviathan|91953|Leviathan|Thomas Hobbes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1326788684l/91953._SY75_.jpg|680963], and Rousseau's [b:The Social Contract|12651|The Social Contract|Jean-Jacques Rousseau|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388197284l/12651._SY75_.jpg|702720]. Knowledge of French and Latin also helped. As with the previous books in the series, it took me at least fifty pages to adjust to the narrative style, remember the characters, and recall their basic allegiances. Once I did, the book became extremely compelling.

In the previous Terra Ignota books, war threatened. In [b:Perhaps the Stars|35424671|Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota, #4)|Ada Palmer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1609718655l/35424671._SY75_.jpg|56800624], war breaks out; a war unlike any other I've read about. Ada Palmer asks how a utopian global society would conduct a world war while attempting to minimise casualties and damage. The ideological splits that precipitated it are real and complex, but none of the sides want to wholly destroy the others. Their means of harm reduction are suitably ingenious: non-lethal weapons that cause lasting fatigue ('tiring guns'), unilateral suspension of global communications and travel systems, and agreement that combatants and non-combatants must be visually distinguishable by uniforms, among other strategies. The 9th Anonymous has taken over chronicling duties and recounts the outset of world war from the city of Romanova. There are echoes of the pandemic in the bandwidth lags during video calls, fears of local plague outbreaks, and similarity of tiring gun symptoms to Long Covid.

I had the satisfaction of yelling, "Called it!" twice during the ensuing thrilling web of events. The first was ten chapters in, when Mycroft returned. Bridger's lasting power has cast him as Odysseus; the similarities of his account of being lost at sea to the Odyssey are immediately evident. This is the first example in the book of an unsettling yet fascinating concept: characters being forced (seemingly by Bridger) into literary narratives that subsume their identity and free will. Mycroft must play out the Odyssey; reborn Achilles must play out the Iliad (again) with Cornel MASON as Patroclus and Sniper as Paris; Madame abruptly dies off-page as a victim of 18th century drama plots. Despite these threads of irresistible narrative determinism, overall the war follows an unpredictable path as it fragments. I think this exchange is too oblique to constitute spoilers:

"Older and more immortal is the enemy we knew we would awaken with our war. Distance."
"Distance," I repeated, and felt an oceanic echo in the word, a new and crueler facet of Jehovah's unrelenting Peer. "It is your war, Kohaku? I thought it wasn't, that it was Jehovah's war instead, but here we are Mitsubishi battling Masons over land, just as you predicted."
"My war has come," the number-prophet answered, slowly. "So has Tai-kun's, Perry's, Danae's, Apollo's. Distance makes one war a hundred wars. They speciate, like sparrows breeding alone on every island until they no longer recognise each other's chirps. See these Cycladic freedom fighters? They wage a rebel's war for home and liberty; they would no more abandon their islands to escort you to distant Tai-kun than your Shearwaters would abandon their dream of Tai-kun's better world to guard the Cyclades."
A dry sob hurt. "Then was it all for nothing?" I had to ask. "Jehovah's Act, trying to make two sides worth dying for? Did it all fail?"
"No. This is a fractal war. The larger shapes still lend their structure to the whole, and larger powers, by forging their macro-peace, will forge the thousand micro-peaces, too." His smile was shadow. "And not everything has fractured."

The narrator's and thus the reader's expectations of the war are repeatedly challenged and subverted. There are some spectacularly tense and exciting action sequences, as well as unexpected twists. The second event I correctly predicted was Sniper's return to kill Achilles in chapter 25, appropriately titled 'The Wrath of Achilles'. Of course, I predicted this because of the Iliad replay going on. Sniper's reappearance after a long mysterious absence was perfectly timed for dramatic effect and their subsequent role particularly memorable. Sniper manages to stand out in an enormous cast that, frankly, I struggle to keep track of. The range of honorifics do make this tricky - even the helpful dramatis personae at the beginning can only assist so much when titles and allegiances keep shifting, plus new people turn up. I kept up sufficiently to follow and enjoy the plot, without necessarily knowing who everyone referred to was.

Although for much of the book there is no global communications network, the narrators are so central to events that this does not meaningfully restrict their account. When Mycroft returns, they share narrative duties with the 9th Anonymous. I really enjoyed the conversational nature of these shared chapters and was genuinely chilled when it emerged the two were becoming one person. Godlike Bridger and Jehovah need Mycroft, so they gradually take over the body of 9th Anonymous. The final interview with Sniper before 9th Anonymous essentially dies so Mycroft can live is very poignant. The end of 9th Anonymous is prefigured by the creepy chapter when they are deliberately kept helpless and incapacitated in hospital by someone they thought was a friend. Giving their final chapter the title 'No-one' is a neat Odyssey reference.

A strong theme of the whole series is the importance of roles and titles over and above the individuals that hold them. While the godlike children need Mycroft preserved, this is because no-one else seems able to perform his particular role of translating between them and humanity. Emperor, King, Censor, and Anonymous roles are all passed along. The war disrupts both global political dynamics and changes the leaders representing prominent groups. Yet the value of individuals is certainly not discounted; Jehovah declares his hatred of death as it extinguishes unique souls. On a lighter note, why would anyone trust a person named Felix Faust? That's a comic book villain name if ever I heard one. Sure enough, he turns out to be untrustworthy.

This review is rambling as there is just SO MUCH going on in [b:Perhaps the Stars|35424671|Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota, #4)|Ada Palmer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1609718655l/35424671._SY75_.jpg|56800624] and Terra Ignota as a whole. Palmer dissects themes and tropes of hard sci-fi such as the pursuit of immortality, space exploration, and first contact with aliens via Homer and 18th century philosophy. Other writers have attempted elements of this, e.g. [b:Ilium|3973|Ilium (Ilium, #1)|Dan Simmons|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390894862l/3973._SY75_.jpg|3185401], but this is by far the most ambitious and thorough synthesis of far future and literary past that I've read. The series is deeply concerned with humanity's past, present, and future. Questions given significant attention in this book include: should humanity perfect ourselves or explore the stars? Are there reasons not to do both? How can we govern ourselves to ensure social stability, individual choice, and universal comfort? What is important to preserve from the past? After a war, who judges what crimes were committed and how the guilty are to be punished? The narrative is full of striking comments like this:

The trolley problem does not describe our reality. Physics is cruel in many, many ways, but not that way. Yet because we all debate it, normalise it, know it, we live psychologically in the trolley problem, expecting it to be the default ethics of our world. Yes, there are corollaries - deadly missions, quarantines - but if we had admitted our kinder reality, that Nature rarely burdens us with such a choice - Cinna? No, Martin! Martin! - might the Saneer-Weeksbooth founders, who saw they could save 50,000 lives by taking one, have asked themselves: Is there a better way to use this data than to kill? Did we poison our ethics with the trolley problem? Is it bad for us, our minds, our souls, to dive, even in thought experiment, into a universe so artificially unkind?

Other favourite moments I'm tempted to quote include the Diary of a U-beast chapter told in code output, the speech on empire, 9th Anonymous moving the mountain, and the rise of Alexander. This is getting too long, though, so I will simply praise the quality of Palmer's writing instead. How to summarise my thoughts on Terra Ignota? I would describe it as sincerely grandiose, inaccessible, and demanding. While reading [b:Perhaps the Stars|35424671|Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota, #4)|Ada Palmer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1609718655l/35424671._SY75_.jpg|56800624] I struggled to recall the many events of the prior three books from years ago and wondered if I should re-read them all. I can only imagine that reading the four books together as a single narrative would be utterly overwhelming, albeit probably glorious.

I'm not sure how widely to recommend Terra Ignota, as I do not think everyone would get on with it. I think if you can digest the first fifty to eighty pages, you'll be hooked. (Read a wikipedia summary of the Iliad and Odyssey first if you've never read either.) Then let the elaborate narrative style sweep you along, without dwelling on who every single character is and exactly what they've done. There were too many for me to keep track of, but this did not prevent me from greatly enjoying the profusion of ideas, allusions, debates, dilemmas, and dramas. I think this series would require utter obsession to fully appreciate its every nuance. I am not that reader, as I flit about in search of variety and novelty. Terra Ignota would reward exacting re-reads, as every line has significance. The one thing I feel this series lacks is visuals. It is rich in thoughts, feelings, philosophy, and incident, but descriptions of the characters and settings are layered in Homeric metaphor or intellectual details rather than being visually evocative. I do not intend this as a criticism, as it seems a function of stylistic priorities. Interesting, though, that I have a very visual imagination yet after circa 1,800 pages lack any mental images of Terra Ignota. Perhaps my mind was too preoccupied with the challenges of decoding the text to find space for visualisation. Nonetheless, this is undoubtedly a series that will linger in my mind and act as a catalytic link between other books in several genres. I wonder what Ada Palmer will write next. ( )

The first book in this series was quite good, but they went slowly downhill, until this unreadable one ( )

Several hours after finishing the book, I am overwhelmed and happy. Terra Ignota series is such an impressive literary achievement – ambitious, challenging, intricate.

Like all great sci-fi, Perhaps the Stars is a novel of both BIG IDEAS and characters that pierce your soul. I find it impossible to fit all my impressions into one review. But here are a few thoughts:

It is rare (in my experience, at least) that a book packed with philosophy, metaphysics, and ideas about the future of society and humanity is also emotionally exhausting. I had to take a break after nearly every chapter to take a few deep breaths or do something else for a while.
- The writing is consistently sublime.
- I loved how the Greek mythology, the Iliad and the Odyssey were integrated into the narrative.
- I loved 9A’s narrative voice (and 9A, of course).
- I have mixed feelings about the big reveal/the root of the conflict. While I was immersed in the book, it made sense. Now I find myself wondering why such a conflict would exist in the first place, the two goals should not negate each other, not in the future as Ada Palmer describes it. (Unless you are fanatic, of course…)
- The ending is beautiful! I went to a very happy place after finishing the last page. ( )

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 ( )

What a train wreck. Why did I finish this entire series? ( )

This fourth book of Terra Ignota provides a conclusion worthy of what has come before. It is longer than any of the previous volumes by at least 50%, and it involves more narrative lacunae and changes of style. It does not resolve all of the enigmas raised in previous books, nor even those opened within its own pages, but it does complete the story and give it greater context and significance.

Terra Ignota has an unreliable and culpable narrator addressing himself to a posterity even further removed from the (actual) reader, but represented by a Reader character whose identity is in some measure disclosed at the end. It entertains metaphysics, and it vaults into the very highest political arenas of its imagined world. For these reasons and others, it has invited comparison to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, and Ada Palmer has admitted to her admiration for Wolfe's work. There is an especially Wolfean development in this final volume when the narrator A9 is retroactively revealed to have sacrificed their own life and physical substance for the resurrection of the earlier narrator Mycroft Canner. Poignantly, Wolfe died in 2019 as Palmer was finishing Perhaps the Stars, which has for a recurring theme the ways in which the death of a writer is neither the death of the author nor the death of the story.

I feel petty to notice it, but there is grammatical tic that recurs through all the volumes of Terra Ignota: the use of nominative pronouns where objective ones are called for in subordinate formulae at the tail end of sentences, like: "Who knew that such things could happen to we who had accomplished so much?" As I saw this oddness repeat, I grew to wonder whether it was Palmer or Canner who was to blame, and if the latter, what it could portend. It certainly seems wrong that the academically-accomplished writer of these books should have included such nonstandard English as mere error.

The scale and complexity of these books are impressive. They are still new, and I think that they will have staying power to gain in popularity and acclaim, like the Book of the New Sun and Herbert's Dune books. Attempts at scholarly criticism and substantial intellectual response began already after the release of the second book Seven Surrenders. I was not surprised to find out that there is a fan wiki to attempt to trace the sometimes bewildering details of character, place, and plot, but disappointed to discover that it is still sparsely populated.

I would advise prospective readers of Terra Ignota to view the four books as a single work and avoid setting it aside between volumes--perhaps especially between the third and fourth books where there was in fact a delay in publication. Do not skip past the fanciful-seeming publication conditions and dramatis personae front matter in each book. These supply important (p)reviews of the social structures, factions, stakes, and characters. If you've never read Homer, or if it's just been decades, consider reading an encyclopedia article for an overview of the Illiad and the Odyssey. Ditto for Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan, and perhaps Voltaire and Diderot to boot.

Let's get the problems I had with Perhaps the Stars out of the way first. It's a year, almost to the day, since I finished Book III of Terra Ignota, The Will to Battle; in that time, I've been to sleep around 365 times, been to work, seen films, ballet performances and live music, and read other books. Quite a few of them. So when I started on Perhaps the Stars, I quickly found that there was a lot I couldn't remember from the previous books. Some of the characters' names looked familiar; plenty more didn't. And there were details of the political stances of different Hives which escaped me. What I ought to have done at that point was close the book, pick up The Will to Battle, and re-read the last couple of chapters. But by the time I realised that, I was perhaps a quarter of the way in and I didn't really want to break off once I'd got even a little traction with the narrative.

So I carried on, treating this as an historical novel where i knew the broad outlines of the history but was coming across the characters anew. We have also changed narrator for the opening of Perhaps the Stars, so this helps, too. But I also struggled on a practical level. Ada Palmer has written a highly detailed philosophical novel with complex ideas which she had taken a lot of time over committing to the page. But this does tend to mean that the chapters are long and paragraph breaks indicating pauses in the narrative are few and far between. When circumstance forces you to read in 20-30 minute chunks most of the time, this is not helpful.

In short, the philosophical speculation almost completely bypassed me. So I had to park my appreciation of that side of the book (or rather my lack of it) and concentrate on what I usually read science fiction for - the world building and speculation about how we might make life and worlds better. At least with this series, if one aspect remains a mystery, there is always something else to get to grips with. In The Will to Battle, the system of Hives that transcend national boundaries and which people select allegiance to once they have attained their majority collapses into warfare over a set of rivalries and political schisms. This book opens with an account of the outbreak and initial stages of that war, and how a small group of neutrals attempt to mitigate the worst excesses of military strife and the disruption of ordinary life. Though with real war raging in the Ukraine at the time of writing (early 2023), this all seems a bit idealistic. Eventually, after a series of quite wide-screen events (including the destruction of a space elevator), a powerful figure, J.E.D.D. Mason, achieves supremacy through intrigue and imposes a peace. The imposition of peace is followed by an accounting in which all are held to answer for their actions, including J,E.D.D. Mason themself.

I understand that Ada Palmer intended the whole series of Terra Ignota to be a work that poses philosophical and theological questions. As I said above, this is not something which I was able to fully appreciate, partly because of the interval between reading the last book and this, but also because those philosophies and (in particular) the view of the nature of God are not things I share with the author. Throughout, however, I have been interested in the politics and (in part) the economics of Ada Palmer's world. And in that respect, this book has many revelations. For one thing: the Utopian Hive was known to be working on spaceflight and building new worlds, but nothing in the previous three novels suggested that this would be at all central to the narrative. Well, that isn't the case here. Utopia isn't just planning space exploration, it has access to four space elevators, a permanent base on the Moon, is commencing the terraforming of Mars and has ambitions to travel to Titan. I did do a slight double-take as all that emerged; other double-takes followed. The flying car network turns out to be powered by antimatter, though I felt that this might just be because antimatter is less hand-wavy than, well, handwavium. Perhaps my biggest one was when I discovered that there are uplifted apes in Palmer's future, revealed in a (literally) walk-on appearance by "an orang-utan chieftain and their translator". It's wholly consistent with the milieu that Palmer describes, and yet there was no hint of this elsewhere. Gender fluidity is also a key feature of the milieu, and there are some moments when I thought "Oh - I was wrong about them, then."

The reshaping of societies and economies was, for me, a big feature of the earlier books. I recently encountered some discussion of current conspiracy and right-wing thinking which centres around the concept of the "sovereign citizen", a superior individual whose mental brilliance and business ability makes them superior, not only to the rest of us, but to all the petty laws and restrictions that democratic legislatures shackle them with. In Palmer's future society, we see one possible end effect: the trans-national Hives are all run by "sovereign citizens" who make the laws around them; a series of basic laws apply generally, but these are restricted to quite broad principles, and the whole series is based around what happens when some Hives decide that even those laws are too restrictive. True, some Hives elect leaders, though the details of the franchise are glossed over. Palmer's take on this is quite utopian; looking at our world leaders today, with so many different shades of authoritarianism rearing their heads, I wonder if we could ever get there from here.

But the action of this book does end with the world in a different place than we started at. And this rather looks like the author considering her starting point, and proposing ways to make it better. Yet even with all the action, there's a feeling that so much of it happens off-stage, with characters describing events or watching them via video or satellite feeds. For all the action that happens, we are rarely there with it. Also, be aware that the author's passion for Classical mythology is given full rein here. When we were talking about political manoeuvring in the previous books, this was acceptable: but when we are talking about warfare in the 25th Century, to continually describe it in terms of conflict and with reference to heroes of a good three thousand years previously certainly began to stretch my credulity. The wars of the Twentieth Century saw slaughter and barbarity on a scale previously unknown, yet Palmer's characters keep branding others as "most accursed ever" for some transgression or other that by our standards might be considered mild. Just when this was pushing my bogglement to extremes, someone referenced the World War I poet Wilfrid Owen as an example of the sort of tragic casualty of war, killed between the time that combatants have decided to cease conflict on a near, upcoming date and that date itself.

This review might be thought of as unduly critical. Not so. It's just that for many reasons, I was unable to get the most out of this book. That is not to say that the book itself is deficient, just that it takes a lot of attention and commitment on the part of the reader. I have now scheduled this book - indeed, the whole series - for a re-read when I have more time to devote to a concentrated bout of reading. I suspect that Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota will become in future years a classic of the genre, to be attempted by readers who believe they have matured sufficiently to tackle its scope, themes and speculations. The series is a challenge, and Perhaps the Stars no less a part of that challenge.

Now that I’ve finished the full series, this final review – 5,500 words – will also serve as my thoughts on the full series, starting with one of the fundamental issues underlying the series: theodicy.

I’ll also discuss some other stuff that wasn’t fully to my taste this time, and I’ll end with a few short discussions: on free will, on J.E.D.D’s. nature & the fallacy of fiction being a real world guide, on J.E.D.D.’s trolley problem motivation, on J.E.D.D. & Palmer’s theodicy cop-out, on the trolley problem itself & on a few of the series’ gender aspects.

In short, I think Palmer did an amazing job – an insane amount of work – crafting her narrative construction, providing tons of great ideas and sets and characters and twists and genuine moments of awe – but, and this may seem paradoxical for a novel full of really insightful stuff, I think the main philosophical foundation of the four Terra Ignota books is uninteresting and unproductive. How’s that for a cliffhanger?

(...)

Full analysis on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It ( )

After no small delay, Terra Ignota finally comes to an end. This four-book series by Ada Palmer was about an attempt at a utopian future, a world that was better than ours but still flawed. At the end of book III, the flaws reached the breaking point of war finally breaking out, and the last book, Perhaps the Stars, chronicles the war and what came after. There are a lot of different ways you can think about these books, and I'm just going to highlight a couple that stuck out to me.

Orson Scott Card has a concept he calls the MICE Quotient: stories are about milieus, ideas, characters, or events. Once a story sets out its flag as one of those things, he argues, it needs to stick to it, because it's created a pact with the reader. If you write an idea story—there's a problem that needs to be solved—the story can't end without that problem being solved. Now, like all writing rubrics of this kind, it's certainly an oversimplification, and I especially wonder if it's fair to apply a system that I think Card devised for discussing short stories to a story that is over two thousand pages long now that it's complete.

For me, Terra Ignota was a milieu story. If you go back to my review of the first volume, the thing that fascinated me most was the world itself. I like the idea of how nations might have to be redone when people can travel around the world almost instantaneously; I would have happily heard no end of detail about this. Now, I don't know if Palmer saw herself as writing a milieu story, but the milieu is what drew me in here. (It's definitely, though perhaps to a lesser extent, an event story as well.) The times when the series has worked less well is when it moves away from this: I struggled with book II a lot, because that volume "revolves around the political, sexual, and political/sexual intrigues of the Hive leaders... and I just really don't care about this at all. I kept losing track of who did what to whom, and I wasn't incentivized to spend the time to care." It felt like the series had suddenly lurched into being a character story, but I didn't care about these people very much, except as a vehicle for exploring the world. (Think of the Oz books here: Dorothy isn't a deep psychological portrait of a little girl, but Dorothy doesn't have to be; she just has to be a character capable of letting us see what Oz is like.) Which is to say, I feel like these books expect me to care about Mycroft Canner in particular much more than I ever did. I liked Mycroft as an unreliable guide to the future, but I never really cared about him.

So, the way this book begins is quite excellent. It had been almost four years since I had read book III, so my memories were quite fuzzy, but I soon oriented myself enough to enjoy what was going on. We were in a world at war... but a world that had not known war for centuries, and a world poorly organized to conduct it. How does war come to utopia? This is the focus of the early chapters, which are mostly told from the perspective of the Ninth Anonymous, Mycroft's successor as chronicler of events. It's lovely stuff, well thought out and well told, about human resourcefulness, about humanity at its best and at its worst. Our main viewpoint is people who are trying to not take sides, but to simply make the world a better place for everyone involved, in spite of it all, and it works really well. It was a milieu story, maybe crossed with an event story: what is utopia like when it's at war?

But, at a certain point, Mycroft comes back, and with him a whole slew of characters and conflicts that I struggled to engage with. Now I was in a character story again, and I just didn't care about these characters. Unfortunately, this material is quite a bit of an 800-page novel, and by the time the book went more milieu-focused again with the coming of peacefall, I was much less invested than I had been at the beginning. So I am glad I read this series all the way to the end, but I am not sure I ever really got the set of books I imagined I was getting when I read and enjoyed book I.

Okay, other thing to think about. These books are complicated, and are filled with small details. The way they were released and even more so the way I read them worked against my appreciation of that: I had a seven-month gap between books I and II, an eight-month gap between II and III, and a four-year gap between books III and IV. Were one to read them (relatively) straight through, I think one would appreciate them more. I also think they would benefit from a reread; Palmer is up to so much here that's not apparent right away, and small clues can portend big things. Or small clues can be big things: about halfway through book IV, I discovered the Terra Ignota subreddit, which has been doing a chapter-by-chapter reread of the whole series, and was most of the way through book IV when I found it. I began reading the commentaries from the posters there, and realized there was so much I was missing because I wasn't noticing it; this discussion in particular (note: contains massive spoilers) revealed that something hugely significant to both the Ninth Anonymous and Mycroft had happened, and I had failed to understand it or even notice it. Now, that's on purpose, I think, but man.

So these books were never quite what I wanted them to be... but what they wanted to be might be something quite extraordinary that I haven't given a fair shake to. I almost never reread books. Who has the time? But clearly at some point I am going to need to reread these. I glimpse greatness when I read Terra Ignota. My failure to see it might be the books' fault, but I can't shake the feeling that it's my own.

As readable and engaging as this book is, it is still way longer than its content requires unless the energetic passionate invention of the author's voice through seemingly endless elaborations is necessary to your fulfillment. The base internal realities of a caring outsider and the worthiness of some humans for the stars, well, they aren't the sells for me that Palmer seems to expect and the length at which they are advanced diluted what I found worth reading. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2021/10/2021122-perhaps-stars-ada-palmer.html ( )