A rare Reading Wednesday: Terra Ignota edition

[dolorosa_12]

I don't usually do Reading Wednesday, but while flailing at naye on Twitter about The Will to Battle, the third in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, I realised I had thoughts about the book, and wanted to discuss them with others in a more permanent, longform location.

So, anyway, scattered, spoilery thoughts ahead! Don't expect a coherent review or plot summary - these are just a few bullet points of things that really stood out to me.

I came to the conclusion when discussing things with naye yesterday that what the story most resembled to me was an account of the years/months/days leading up to World War I, with the same kind of horrifying inevitability of chances to avoid war pushed aside by people who had no way of comprehending the scale of the destruction that was about to unfold, because they had no frame of reference for the kind of war that was going to happen.

Of course, naye summed this up perfectly: If WW1 started as a pub brawl with blokes pitching in to punch whoever shoved their mate TWtB is like a duel: everyone lining up oh so politely at the agreed time and place to do murder or be murdered. This was such a perfect summation, and so true.

One of the things I find endlessly fascinating about the Terra Ignota books is the tension between whether the future it imagines is a utopia or a dystopia, or neither. In some ways a world with no geographical nations (but rather a set of governing philosophies which people choose to align with once they reach a self-determined point of maturity; it's also possible to never make this choice, or choose to affiliate with no philosophy at all), no public, group expressions of religion, and no gender, sounds like a paradise (certainly the abolition of nation states would be welcome to this migrant!). On the other hand, the more you read the books, the more you realise that far from abolishing gender, religion or nationality, the people of this world simply put them in a 'too hard' basket, blamed them for all wars and inequality, and, instead of addressing the reasons why this had occurred (e.g. misogyny causing inequality, and doing something to address the way stereotypically 'feminine' things had been traditionally devalued), people simply made these things taboo and refused to discuss them. The end result is, of course, that far from being abolished, gender, religion and nation-states become these very naughty things that can be played with in secret by the privileged, and also become ways to manipulate and control people.

The Will to Battle in particular forces you to confront disconcerting things about yourself: what injustices you'd tolerate in order to be able to live in an otherwise utopian society, what kind of world, what kind of humanity is worth saving, and so on. In some ways, your answers will depend on which of Ada Palmer's 'Hives' (the political/philosophical affiliations that the characters choose to adhere to, and which have replaced nation states) you feel aligns most closely with your own ethical code; likewise, your choice of 'Hive' may have some correlation with how utopian you find her world to be.

It's really strange to me, because the series is by necessity focused on the privileged, powerful people of the world, and they're all kind of terrible people (I have my own preferences for some of the Hives, but even these Hives' leading politicians are pretty awful), but the painful inevitability, the inflexibility of different Hives' governing philosophy, and the corners into which this has painted them made me feel sympathetic to almost everyone, even characters I'd previously despised. I find stories about the collapse of societies, about people fighting hopelessly against the tide to salvage something beautiful in the midst of chaos and destruction, about worlds brought down by people who were never able to see their value really poignant and affecting (see also: The Lions of Al-Rassan), and I guess that's why this book speaks to me.

Anyway, feel free to jump into the comments and discuss anything you want about this book. naye and merit, I know you've both read it, and I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Comments

[halfeatenmoon]

I'm still waiting on The Will to Battle (supposed to arrive today!!!) but this pots is not really spoilers + meshes with what I've read so far.

When I read the first two books there was a lot of online discussion about the utopia/dystopia matter, and it led to me really questioning what a utopia even is. I think Terra Ignota is pretty close! It has flaws, but it's made by humans so of course it's fucking flawed. None of them are perfect. But I can see how it's tempting to view religion, gender and nationalism as the causes of war - they're easy to solve, and kind of easier to get angry about that the simple fact of people wanting more power. Those people will always exist, and there's nothing you can abolish that will stop that.

A lot of the stuff about gender has me rolling my eyes a bit. The "gender roles are soooo sexy and intoxicating that you can control people's minds!" bit reminds me of nothing so much as those fluff pieces from a few years ago about 'normaling' or people kinking on traditional gender roles and claiming it was transgressive somehow. But I also really appreciate what Palmer's trying to do in upsetting people's notions of gender and things. I do feel like sometimes it desexualises androgyny, but then Sniper is a sex symbol, so that's not entirely right either.

I really like the WWI comparison. The final chapters of Too Like The Lightning and Seven Surrenders both reminded me a lot of Les Miserables, in that section where the revolt is starting to stir but hasn't yet broken out into fighting, but the WWI thing is right on, too.

The whole series also reminds me of Les Mis in the sense that it has rambling asides and sometimes makes me go "Well why don't you just go MARRY VOLTAIRE, THEN" in much the same way I did about Victor Hugo and Napoleon.

[dolorosa_12]

Exactly: much easier just to abolish religion, gender and nation-states than address the reasons why those things caused war, exploitation and inequality. And of course what happens is inevitable -- they're not abolished, just driven underground and made into taboos. That's why the 'intoxicating' traditional gender roles thing made sense to me -- it's just like any other taboo, with one rule for the powerful and one for ordinary people. Just as powerful people in our world can be manipulated, blackmailed and so on by their vices/transgressions (unlike ordinary people, they are allowed to gamble, use illicit drugs, be sexually transgressive -- but always with the threat that these vices may be made public, and the potential to become addicted and manipulated that way), so the powerful in Terra Ignota can be tricked and manipulated by gender and religion, because they have access to these things that ordinary people are denied.

Your Les Mis comparison is very apt -- naye also compared it to Hamilton, and I can see that too.

[I]t has rambling asides and sometimes makes me go "Well why don't you just go MARRY VOLTAIRE, THEN" in much the same way I did about Victor Hugo and Napoleon.

This made me laugh and laugh. So, so true!

[pax_athena]

I'm so glad you talked about the books here - it made me finally go and look them up and realize that I have stumbled over them or at least the first volume before. But it never made it onto my to-read list because I what I read about it did not make it clear how nuanced the books were and your post does :)

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, I'm very happy to have converted you to this series! I'll give you the standard warning I give everyone going in: it's written deliberately in the style of Enlightenment literature, with a self-conscious ornate style, constantly referencing dead philosophers and so on. You do not need to have a comprehensive familiarity with either this style of writing, or the philosophers being alluded to, to understand the story, and it's deliberately written in this way to be distancing and alienating, but it can be quite a shock when you first start reading the books.

If you do end up reading the series, I'd love to hear your thoughts when you're finished!

[naye]

I'm actually really curious about what you said about coming to like Mycroft. How did that feeling develop over the course of this book, since I think you said you didn't like him previously? And how do you like him? Skuld and I discussed it, and came out on really interesting sides of it!

My stance was:
I don't like (or trust) him, but I want to protect him - I don't want more awful things happening to him

And hers was:
I love him and want to see him suffer (because it's so interesting to watch him crack and also he deserves it)

Also, how do you feel about the 9A reveal - that Mycroft was actually a lot more cracked in the previous two volumes and someone just edited out the worst of his delusions? Because one of the things that did my head in was when I started noticing him just casually mentioning dead people. Just. Getting calls from Kohaku Mardi. Listing Apollo and Bridger among people at a meeting. And he knows the prison wraiths aren't real (I think he knows?) but there's no self awareness about the... uhh, no, Apollo really isn't chatting with you right now on account of how you murdered him?

That and the whole bit where he writes a couple of pages with himself (Mycroft) arguing with Sniper and Tully to make a call that could stop the war and then he's all "Wait, no, that wasn't me! I was just ranting. It was Tully who said all those things that made the call happen, my bad." But by then I'd already read that bit and taken Mycroft's word for events happening the way he wrote them and it's so weird in the best way.

But yes also all the huge questions. Does humanity need this particular war? I'm mostly on the side of horrifed UM NO HOW ABOUT NO but then the dream (the prophecy) of how it's this or a worse war or this and losing the stars forever... Damn but Utopia know how to get me in a really uncomfortable spot. (Also I want a U-beast please.)

[dolorosa_12]

I guess I didn't like him because he seemed so arrogant in the earlier books (of course what he did was so horrific and unforgivable, but leaving all that aside as a reason to dislike him for now), so the reveal that how he wrote and what he wrote in the first two volumes was cleaned up and thus not necessarily all him forced me to look at him with new eyes. But seeing how messed up and broken he was by the terrible weight of his knowledge of what was to come (I mean, so many parts of the book just have his little asides going, oh, yeah, and I was just sitting in a corner howling and screaming while this whole conversation was taking place), as well as all the things you point out -- him chatting with dead people and so on (which led me to wonder whether Saladin was even alive, actually) just led me to find him a lot more sympathetic. The fact that he genuinely seemed to care about other people (Carlyle in particular) also did a lot to change my opinion of him.

It's so interesting that you and Skuld had such completely different reactions to him -- I guess that's the power of the series, that it can have this unstable, polarising, disorienting narrator, who has done one of the most abominable things possible, and yet who still sparks pity, concern, and an odd kind of affection.

As to your comments on Utopia, you can see from my comment below why they and their aspirations don't hit me in quite the same way as they seem to do for so many people, but I can really understand why they do spark this reaction. I think the books I read as a child really imprinted on me in a major way -- a lot of dystopian (especially climate-related) YA fiction which always talked about space exploration as a kind of cowardice, like giving up on a ruined Earth and the here-and-now in order to pursue the next shiny new thing, and that attitude rubbed off on me more than I realised! As I say below, I think you need both kinds of people, and both kinds of aspirations: those who help in a practical, concrete immediate way, and those who dream in terms of centuries into the future, not for themselves, but for their distant descendants. We can't survive without both kinds of thinking.

[naye]

I think one of the most stunning reveals in TWtB regarding Mycroft is when the Nurturist (Cookie?) lists him as an example of what happens when adults are allowed to raise set-set and set-like children. Because in his own recollections of his childhood his bash had been hand picked because they were all awesome and it was super cool to grow up smart and stuff, but from a Nurturist POV tiny Mycroft was brainwashed. Almost like a set-set; he was being formed into... we're not quite sure but there were definitely Powers That Be with Plans for him?

Which makes him feel like more of a victim though obviously "childhood issues" never condone "violent murder streak"! But it did make me see him from a new light.

Is Saladin alive. GOOD QUESTIONS. I think so? Because I think Madame really is using him as leverage but. He could also be dead? The only thing that makes Saladin different from the rest is that if he is dead, we don't know when and how he died. He must have been alive and well 13 years ago, that much we know. But all of Mycroft's other hallucinations (prison wraiths aside) are of people we know for a fact died (or altered out of existence).

Speaking of alive: how is MYCROFT still alive?? And how did he get everyone to persume him dead (and be all sad about it), annotate the manuscript with a "BTW still alive" and then disappear again what is going on with that?! I really want to know. Really really really.

The interesting thing with the Utopians is that when it comes down to it, they can't help but get involved in the practical and concrete immediacy of the war. Instead of hiding out, they get rid of the harbingers. Instead of hunkering down, they execute an audacious first strike - and Mycroft is very clear on what that will very possibly cost them. So the Utopians' ideals might be to strive to the stars, but more than half of them can't abandon present-Earth for a star-faring future. Which is also really interesting.

[merit]

That's an interesting allusion to WW1 and it does make sense. The political leaders were often tied quite closely (the royalty by blood) and Mycroft did push the idea that MASON, Kosala and the rest were a very odd 'bash. I'm curious if Palmer will kill off any major characters in the next book (so many dying in the first few months of the war, is this what Mycroft feared for the Utopians?). Or even bring back Bridger (or a version of Bridger).

Unreliable narrators can be done so well and I really enjoyed Mycroft as one. When Apollo first appeared I wasn't sure if we were supposed to take it as another visitor like Hobbes - but no, Mycroft is hallucinating. The others know he has mental health problems and it isn't seen as a priority because Mycroft has never been a priority. He'll be useful but I can't imagine they saw him living long.

And then there's Mycroft mysterious disappearance. So not only were the writings edited by 9A, Mycroft subsequently edited them after he came back. The layers increase!

[dolorosa_12]

Exactly -- the painful inevitability of it is so much worse because you can see that the leaders do all care about each other, and really, really don't want what's about to unfold, but they feel pushed into the situation and bound to react to events in specific ways because of the specific ideologies of their respective Hives -- there's a kind of inflexibility about Hive affiliation that works well when the world as a whole is working well, but is a recipe for disaster when things are teetering on the verge of collapse. I wouldn't want to speculate as to character deaths, as this series is so good at confounding expectations, and it's so disorienting that the usual narrative signals are hard to spot or interpret.

Mycroft's deteriorating state (although was he always like this, and we were just shielded from it in the previous volumes?) is really well written here. All those casual references to dead people (people he killed in horrific ways), the throwaway lines where he's like, oh, that sound you can hear is me screaming, I was just sitting in a corner screaming while this conversation was taking place, the weird jumps from location to location and between interlocutor to interlocutor are so well written. It made for a really tense and stressful read! It's almost as if his unravelling mental state mirrors the unravelling of the world.

[naye]

Relevant to the interests of those who like this post: Ada Palmers AMA from Jan 11th on Reddit is EPIC. She literally spent six hours answering lots of thoughtful questions.

My personal favorite tidbit so far (I'm still reading!) is that she hears JEDD Mason as Japanese voice actor Toshihiko Seki - a long time favorite of mine. PERFECT.

[dolorosa_12]

That AMA was magnificent. The only thing that I found quite upsetting was the implication in a number of questions and replies that of course all Terra Ignota fans (and SFF fans more generally) will identify with the Utopian Hive. I, personally, found the Utopians in the books (and their philosophy as far as I understand it) frightening and just emphatically Not For Me. I've never really understood that attitude that your life is wasted if you don't spend all of it doing enriching, meaningful work, and that work is only meaningful if it involves striving for the stars on behalf of the distant, future descendants of present-day humanity. I've always been much more interested in people who work to make the current world better in small, concrete ways for as many people here right now as possible -- the people who ensure children are vaccinated, who make contraception available for free to teenagers, who clear snow from roads and footpaths, who join local politics to advocate for social housing, and so on. I guess I'm the textbook definition of a Cousin? And it bothered me that everyone on the AMA just assumed that everyone would share their guiding philosophy, when the whole point of Terra Ignota is that you need people from all Hives and none to ensure that you have both a comfortable, safe present and a secure, ambitious future.

I did discover from the AMA that there's apparently a Dreamwidth comm, toolikethelightning, so that was cool.

[naye]

I really need to read the whole thing!

To be flippant for a second - it's the coats and U-beasts. Who doesn't want what basically amounts to a magical cloak and a familiar??

But yeah, it's interesting that people have gone all Team Utopia - though to be fair, Mycroft is pretty Team Utopia himself, which would definitely influence the Reader, since that's what Mycroft does.

I love that you see the conflict, though, and the human cost in the here and now as THE most important thing. Those are very good priorities to have, and you would be a great cousin. (I'd be a half-assed European or something. I don't feel nurturing enough to be a Cousin.)