Too Like the Lightning
"The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labeling all public writing and speech... And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destabilize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life..."--Book jacket.
Stats for nerds
20recommend
33mentions
29people
2017–2026years
64% recommend33% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- >Anyone reading War and Peace will need at the very least a list of characters
Indeed, I almost gave up on it for that reason. Great story but does the character really need 6+ different ways to refer to them. "Too Like the Lightning" and its sequels are also great but Ada Palmer suffers from same of the same desires to refer to characters in far too many different ways to keep up with. That said, I also scored poorly on the face blindness test so maybe it's a cognitive inability keep up with too many names on my part.
- Project Hail Mary is light reading sci-fi. Which is fine, I enjoyed it, but if you are looking for something meatier, covering broader themes and character development, here's some other recent stuff (there's a lot of old stuff covered already in other comments):
Stories of Your Life and Others; Exhalation (Ted Chiang) - both are short story collections vs novels, though
Dissolution (Nicholas Binge)
Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer) and sequels (wordy, philosophical, interesting future society)
Tell Me an Ending (Jo Harkin) - more near-future and grounded
Void Star (Zachary Mason)
- In recent years I've also enjoyed Too Like The Lightning. It's not sci-fi, but it's complex, and twisted, and the language is used in delightful and brain-breaking ways.
- I beginning to think we should have separate legal systems for different people. One where people have more agency and responsibility for the consequences, and one where they are treated like children, but taken care of.
There is actually a fantastic sci-fi novel I highly recommend written by a professor of enlightenment philosophy that uses the as part of the premise. too like the lightning by Ada palmer. [1]
- > Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better.
Do we? https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts "According to the latest estimates, as many as nearly 14 million children in the United States live in "food insecure" homes."
> The gender and color barriers are broken.
Are they? https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/roe-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/report-black-people-are-...
> All the rivers are mapped
Not really, plenty of unmapped rivers in jungles, also the ocean, and also, you could always FOSS map it: https://www.mapillary.com/app
> Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet?
Maybe a world like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Doctorow_novel)
Or this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Like_the_Lightning
Or this? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41637112-a-half-built-ga...
Maybe? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13651.The_Dispossessed
This? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41824495-fall-or-dodge-i...
- I love when books keep making me think about the world we live in now, that keep feeling pertinent. To that, some of the #hopepunk / #solarpunk style books have been really fun. Malka Older's Infomocracy, Emry's A Half Built Garden.
I also loved being transported to the space-Byzantines in Arkady Martines's A Memory Called Empire; a reverberation of the past set far in the future. The interwoven Hives & world of Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning / Terra Ignota are an incredible backdrop for such a story of many powers of the intersecting and overlapping and coming against each other.
Or the rollicking fun and action, the oppressive decadent space elites & politicking and rebelling of young-adult+ Pierce Brown's Red Rising.
