Geata Póeg na Déanainn

And doing so kindly January 8, 2022

Ada Palmer’s dense, intense, and complex four-part Terra Ignota speculative fiction series is very hard to summarise, and although I loved it from the very first book, I’ve shied away from reviewing it until this point, as there is so much going on. The series is set several hundred years into the future, in a world that feels at once suitably strange and distant, and a believable consequence of our own current times. Climate change has been solved, and people live long, fulfilling lives (160 years is the norm) free of major illness, hunger, poverty, or the need to labour for hours on end at work whose only purpose is to provide the means to survive. For the most part, nation-states have been abolished, with people instead choosing membership of a ‘Hive’ whose values align with their own, or remaining ‘Hiveless’ and adhering to a mimimum set of laws. There is a recognition that a household unit consisting of one or two adults is insufficient to meet all the emotional, economic and labour needs of most human beings, and so most adults form larger households consisting of multiple likeminded individuals. This system is further sustained by the abolition of the notion of gender, and the banning of collective religion — the two things, along with the nation-state, seen as responsible for past wars, injustices, and inequalities. In addition to this complex worldbuilding, the series is written in the bombastic style of an Enlightenment-era philosophical treatise, with vast passages in Greek, Latin, French (and sometimes Hindi, Spanish and Japanese), dialogues with various philosophers and the personified reader, and extensive allusions to classical Greek literature. And it is an understatement to say that the narrator is unreliable — extremely and increasingly mentally unwell would be more accurate. As I say, this series is a lot, and it’s hard to summarise in a way which conveys the full scope of its ambition and complexity.

As the narrative progresses, it becomes apparant that all is not as utopian as it seems. There are various rots at the heart of the system, and over the course of the series, it collapses under the weight of its unacknowledged flaws, throwing the world into the first war it has seen in several generations. There are two problems with this: first, with this distance, war seems as remote and fictional to these people as jousting knights in medieval tournaments seem to us — and the only models for how to conduct a war are literary works of the past. The second problem is that these people have come up with really hideous weapons and ways of fighting. And in a world with no geographical boundaries, people on different ‘sides’ in the war live right next door to each other.

The fourth and final book, Perhaps the Stars, is an account of the war in all its fraught, terrifying, tragic horror. The book is filled with moments that broke my heart, because it hurt to see these people — so intense and sincere in their beliefs, so ingenious in the ways they approach every problem — find those beliefs challenged, battered, and shattered at every turn as their world falls to ruin.

Palmer does a terrific job of conveying this global war in all its terrifying intensity. The horror at a world — which previously had universal instantaneous virtual communication and speedy travel taking one from Brussels to Tokyo in a matter of hours — returning to the tyranny of distance, with communication networks going dark or subverted with disinformation, was visceral, and hit harder in these pandemic times. (The parallels I felt as an Australian immigrant living in Europe were intense and personal.) And the war throws all the hypocrises of the Hives individually — and the Hives as a system — into stark relief.

The conclusion, when it comes, is both relief and agony. When the dust has settled, and the survivors looking around in guilt and horror at what they’ve done, the conditions are ripe to remake the world. It’s neither a complete replacement of what came before, nor a patchy reform of the old imperfect system, but rather an honest look at the flaws in the old world — where the weaknesses lay, and who was left behind by the smug assumption that their enlighted world was a flawless utopia. Gender, religion, the Hive system itself, and what is morally permissable for a species which wants to consider itself rational and social beings: all need rethinking. There is a recognition — both within the text, and, I would argue, by the author herself — of blinds spots in previous thinking, and a genuine sign that work will be done, immediately, and for as long as it takes, to fix them. I’m left, having completed the series, in awe at Ada Palmer’s ambition, and at the fact that her talent is equal to the scale of that ambition in this, her first published works of fiction. The series is a staggering, compassionately human piece of writing. Those who have read it will know why this is the highest praise I could give.