Too Like The Lightning

Wendy put quite a lot of effort into getting me to read the book Too Like The Lightning.  It is a science fiction novel by Ada Palmer set hundreds of years in the future.  The technology in the setting is advanced compared to what we have now but this isn't a space opera - humanity is still confined to Earth and a moon base.  Wendy absolutely loved the book and made it clear from the outset that I would find it hard to get into but she was sure I would love it by the end.  Lots of other people raved about the book too; it has plenty of ardent adherents.

I did not love it.  I spent the first 80% of the book thinking it was a rubbish mishmash and felt like reading it was a chore.  The final 20% was better, no longer a chore, but never a joy.

Massive spoilers ahead, by the way.

I have to give Palmer credit for creativity and research.  She obviously knows a ton about philosophers and great thinkers of the past (she is an academic in the history field, and it shows) and she brought a ton of that research into the book with characters constantly referencing philosophers from ages prior to now.  She tried hard to tackle all kinds of fascinating and worthy ideas in the book, and the list of things she attempted to write about is impressive.

Biological families being replaced by families of choice, called bashes.
Transport across the globe being a matter of an hour.
Traditional nations being replaced by nations based on personal characteristics rather than location due to the transportation revolution above.
The outlawing of organized religion and new ways to control thought.
Gender being nearly removed from mainstream society, and the pushback against that.
Children being raised to only interface with computers and never to interact with the physical world.
The ethics of trying to sacrifice the few for the good of the many.
Serious criminals being reduced to a particularly strange form of slavery instead of imprisonment.

And I could go on, this is just the stuff that came to me in two minutes thought.  The trouble is that when you try to do absolutely everything at once you end up not having enough time to do it right.  I suspect Palmer had all kinds of things figured out in her head but when you try to tackle all that stuff at once it becomes just impossible to do justice to any of it.  It ends up feeling like a massive rush of bits and pieces that are ultimately unsatisfying.

Much like she tried to tackle ALL THE ISSUES at once, she also tries to have an enormous cast of characters.  There are a good twenty important named characters and a collection of lesser ones and when you have so many of those everybody ends up being shallowly defined.  There wasn't a single character I empathized with, nor one that I felt I understood.  This is exacerbated by the huge number of societal changes that Palmer tries to tackle at the same time because with all the standards being different you need *more* time per character to let the reader really dig in, not less.  With so many characters interacting in a world where nothing is what you expect and standards are completely new I found it messy and unfulfilling.  People did stuff and I had no idea why, and I never got enough information about them to actually figure it out.

The majority of the plot is about a political intrigue surrounding a list of ten names.  That list was supposed to be a simple list of the ten people a newspaper reporter thinks are most influential in the world, and when the list gets stolen all the most powerful people in the world are terrified of the consequences and world peace teeters on the brink.

How it is that the world isn't a smoking hole in the ground if a simple list written by a random schmuck being stolen is a worldwide disaster?  Shouldn't everyone be dead by now in such a fragile place?

A lot of the way this world is put together feels bizarre like that, as though you can't really follow anything to its logical conclusion.  Technology seems to work randomly, and you have absolutely no idea what anyone can do at any given time.  People will often do things that make no sense at all given the tech they have at their command.  Maybe there are explanations in Palmer's head somewhere, but they didn't make it into the book.

Now there is one other thing that you have to add in to the mess - there is a kid with magic powers.  Not minor stuff either... he is capable of destroying the Earth in an instant, raising the dead, creating new intelligent life forms, curing diseases, wiping out humanity, or nearly anything else.  He has ultimate cosmic power.

And he doesn't matter.  His existence is a subplot, he doesn't make any relevant decisions, and the book ends with him having done nothing of consequence.  He just sits around being a demigod and like all the other characters there isn't enough time spent on him for him to have any depth.

Why is he there?!?

I get why people love the book.  It tries to do all kinds of things, interesting things.  However, Wendy is far more able than I to consume media and just forgive the nonsensical parts of it as long as the rest is fun and interesting.  We had similar differences of opinion on the latest Star Wars movie - I bristled at the obvious gaps in logic and nonsensical plot holes while she just enjoyed the scenery.  I couldn't get past the parts of this book that made no sense to me and while sometimes great characters can make up for that these characters never made me care.