Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

This book is very hard to review, due to reasons that were entirely my own damned fault. I read the first two-thirds of the book before the Hugo nominees were announced, and then dove into that for months. As a result, it was three or four months later that I made it back and read the last third. I perhaps should have started from the beginning, but at the time, I didn't quite feel like it. So this review may be hazier than usual, because it's been such a very long time.

Too Like the Lightning is a very challenging book, in what I mostly think are very good ways. It posits a future built on Enlightenment ideals, but then incorporates the darker sides of those ideals in ways that are truly unsettling. I never knew what was going to happen next, and was frequently uncomfortable, but the writing was so good that I couldn't stop reading.

It is, however, perhaps not a neatly rounded book. We don't so much end at the end as much as the book just breaks off, to be picked up in the second volume. There's not a really sense of rising and falling action in its own separate form, but I have hopes that the second book will do that for us.

One important note: I do not know that much about the Enlightenment and Enlightenment philosophy. Ada Palmer evidently does, and mixes new ideas of human freedom with sexual debauchery behind closed doors that rivals the Marquis de Sade, and incorporates a mythic "free man" whose freedom is expressed in violence and terror, because he is bound by no laws.

As we get deeper and deeper into the psyche of that particular character (and I won't say a lot more), it becomes more and more uneasy - there are things so very wrong with him, and then, spiralling out, with the society that he exists within. It's on the surface a utopia, but to run as a utopia, it has to embrace the very irrationality it is supposed to despise.

The world has been broken up into Hives, something that is not a nationality, but an affiliation based on preference. Families, too, look very different, combining multiple adults and children into a "bash."  Gendered pronouns are not a thing anymore, except for our narrator, who is unable to use the "they" that is common in the rest of society. This dilutes the impact of such a choice on the world, but also brings it to our attention fairly often. Bashes are kept healthy by frequent visits from Cousins, who fulfill some of the same function of priests, but without being able to express any particular religion in their conversations with their charges.

Okay, add into this a ton of machinations between the leaders of the different Hives, a bash that has some of the most sensitive and important information to the running of the world as it is, and then, on top of that, a child who has the ability to make what he thinks real, from dolls to more mental pictures. It's a lot, but it does mostly work.

A list has been stolen, a list of influence that comes out yearly, stolen before publication date, and, as it turns out, a version of the list that was never meant to be seen. Further to that, the way it was stolen - with a device that allows one to avoid the constant surveillance present in society. On these small pegs, the story turns, and it is difficult and intricate and sometimes it feels like Palmer almost loses all the threads she's trying to pull together. But the writing was excellent and if I don't understand everything yet, and if I feel like the book doesn't so much end as stop, we'll see what the next book brings.