The Trouble With Peace and shows the decline of Hobbesian Sovereigns

Last year I posted an article about Joe Abercrombie’s epic fantasy novel The Trouble With Peace and how it dramatized the conflicts that made our world. The book is out in paperback tomorrow and I would highly recommend reading it.

The novel is set in a kingdom that is on the cusp of an industrial revolution. The power of Kings and nobles is being challenged by both a rising class of merchants and industrialists and an emerging industrial working class, who are unhappy about the conditions they live in.

You can hear a brief clip from the audiobook read by Steven Pacey below:

Last year I wrote about @LordGrimdark’s novel #TheTroubleWithPeace from @Gollancz & how it dramatises the conflicts that made our modern world. It's a great epic fantasy novel and it's out in paperback tomorrow. Here's a clip of the audiobook read by Steven Pacey pic.twitter.com/zDFwWYDGGB

— Alastair J R Ball (@AlastairJRBall) May 12, 2021

This extract focuses on King Orso, newly crowned king of The Union, who has the unenviable task of leading his country through this time of transition and upheaval. Listening to this clip of the audiobook made me think about this section from my previous article, in which I explored how The Trouble of Peace highlights the arguments made by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s in their seminal work on economic development Why Nations Fail.

The Union and English history

In the United Kingdom (where I am writing from) the origins of the inclusive institutions that led to the industrial revolution can be traced to the political changes brought about by the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of the 17th century. In Abercrombie’s novel, The Union is at a similar turning point.

Like England at the time of the Glorious Revolution, The Union is a monarchy but power ultimately rests with a group of people and is not solely invested in an absolute monarch. The Union is governed by the Closed Council, a group of senior noblemen around the king who hold offices of state. This transition from absolute monarchy to group rule is the beginning of the process of creating inclusive institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson identify two aspects of a society that is needed for inclusive institutions. They are “centralised government” and “pluralism”. Both of these began in England at the beginning of the Early Modern period, when King Henry VII disarmed the rebellious nobleman and created a bureaucracy around the king.

This centralised power allowed for a government to be created. It also created pluralism because with the loss of their arms the barons lost their military power and thus they had to attain power and influence through non-military means. This led to them pushing for more powers for parliament.

Hobbesian Sovereigns

Recently I have been reading about Thomas Hobbes and how he thought of The Sovereign. King Orso is not a Hobbesian Sovereign has he doesn’t have the total power to make decision about his subjects as Hobbesian Sovereigns do. He has to balance the demands of the members of his Closed Council and those of the newly rising powers in The Union.

What I hadn’t appreciated about The Trouble With Peace when I first read it was that it’s not only about the economic changes that Acemoglu and Robinson identify in Why Nations Fail, but it’s also about the political changes that occurred that moved us away from a Hobbesian conception of the Sovereign to something more like the small-l liberal democracy we have today.

King Orso has to bear in mind some (but not all of his subject’s wishes) when he makes decisions for the Union. This is a step on the path towards a nation where The Sovereign is a body not an absolute ruler and is responsive (to a degree) to the wishes of all its subjects.

More on Hobbes soon

I will have more thoughts on Hobbes in a new blog post coming shortly. For now, I will say that if you’re interested in economic and political history and enjoy reading fantasy novels then I can recommend The Trouble With Peace. There’s a lot to dig into with this book.

The Trouble with Peace dramatises the economic and political changes that made our modern world

I wonder if I am the only person who, whilst reading Joe Abercrombie’s new epic fantasy novel The Trouble With Peace, was reminded of Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s seminal work on economic development.

The novel is about a society poised on the edge of the transformation into the type of modern industrial society that we would recognise. Factories are springing up, whilst canals are being dug. Farm labourers are going to work in mills, whilst cities are growing. All of which reminded me of Acemoglu and Robinson’s study of the history of this process in our world.

A new world of factories and mines

The Trouble With Peace is the second book in Abercrombie’s The Age of Madness Trilogy, which takes place in his First Law world that has been established in a previous trilogy and standalone books. The First Law is not a Medieval-eques fantasy setting like Middle Earth or Westeros. The Trouble With Peace is set in a world where kings don’t have absolute power and economic rivalries between nations are becoming more important than military ones. There are warrior kings, like Stour Nightfall, King of the Northmen, but this is no longer their world. Their power is waning, whilst the prestige of industrialists and inventors is growing.

The new world that is being born values skills with finance and commerce, rather than swords. Entrepreneurs like the ambitious Lady Savine dan Glokta are becoming more influential and powerful aristocrats are seeking business partnerships with industrialists and inventors to enhance their prestige, whereas in the past this prestige would have been won on the battlefield. Poor people are pressed into factory and mine work, rather than fieldwork.

The Trouble With Peace is mainly set in The Union, a monarchy that is built on alliances between nobles and regional governors. The Union is beginning to go through the industrial revolution and some of the most powerful writing in The Trouble With Peace is the description of the squalor and danger that the new industrial workers have to live in. Abercrombie vividly renders the callousness of industrialists and how cheap human life is to them.

Economic development as a source of dramatic conflict

Acemoglu and Robinson write about this transformation and the type of political institutions needed for it to be a success. It is the fight over the control of these institutions that is the conflict in Abercrombie’s novel.

The core of Acemoglu and Robinson’s argument is that government is needed to create healthy economic development through making markets inclusive, which is done via education, training, providing infrastructure and helping people start business. Acemoglu and Robinson refer to “inclusive institutions” (rule of law, independent courts, banking and finance systems, property rights, etc.) as the bedrock needed for a prosperous country.

This may sound like a poor source of conflict for an epic fantasy novel, but many times throughout history a revolution has been necessary to create inclusive institutions. The American Revolution is a good example of this. Revolutions are a great source of conflict for a novel and the main plot of The Trouble With Peace is such a revolution.

The Union and English history

In the United Kingdom (where I am writing from) the origins of the inclusive institutions that led to the industrial revolution can be traced to the political changes brought about by the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of the 17th century. In Abercrombie’s novel, The Union is at a similar turning point.

Like England at the time of the Glorious Revolution, The Union is a monarchy but power ultimately rests with a group of people and is not solely invested in an absolute monarch. The Union is governed by the Closed Council, a group of senior noblemen around the king who hold offices of state. This transition from absolute monarchy to group rule is the beginning of the process of creating inclusive institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson identify two aspects of a society that is needed for inclusive institutions. They are “centralised government” and “pluralism”. Both of these began in England at the beginning of the Early Modern period, when King Henry VII disarmed the rebellious nobleman and created a bureaucracy around the king.

This centralised power allowed for a government to be created. It also created pluralism because with the loss of their arms the barons lost their military power and thus they had to attain power and influence through non-military means. This led to them pushing for more powers for parliament.

Liberal bourgeoisie revolution

The Trouble with Peace explores a similar process. King Orso, newly crowned king of The Union has centralised power in his Closed Council and we can see the beginnings of a modern form of government with ministers appointed to key roles such as Arch Lector. At the same time nobles in the larger Open Council, which can be seen as a proto-parliament, are pushing for more authority, which is the beginning of a pluralistic form of government.

The main plot of the novel follows a rebellion against Union King Orso by Leo dan Brock, aka the Young Lion, a regional governor and a popular soldier. He is supported by his entrepreneur wife, Lady Savine dan Glokta and members of the Open Council vying for more influence. Leo’s rebellion can be seen as a liberal bourgeoisie revolution, similar to the wave of revolutions that spread through Europe in 1848.

These liberal uprisings (I mean liberal in the John Locke sense of the word, not the Joe Biden sense) challenged the absolute authority of monarchs and sought to create more inclusive governments based on modern ideas of rights and liberty. Or at least they sought inclusiveness, rights and liberty for middle class industrialists. Although many of these revolutions ultimately failed and led to a conservative authoritarian backlash, they were a step towards creating more inclusive institutions and thus part of the journey towards our modern form of government.

The rise of the middle class

The rise of the middle classes, merchants and industrialists, is crucial to the story of the liberal bourgeoisie revolutions and to The Trouble with Peace. Acemoglu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail argue that the emergence of the merchant class is key to the move towards inclusive political institutions in England in the 17th Century.

The merchant class supported parliament in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution as it was in their interest to get a more pluralistic society that would represent their views. Again, this is shown in the Trouble With Peace through rising middle class industrialists such as Lady Savine supporting The Young Lion’s rebellion. We would expect that if Leo becomes king, then he would be beholden to the Open Council who made him king and will have to share more of his power with them, creating a more pluralistic society.

Proletariat uprising

Pluralistic reforms in the 17th century and 18th century England created greater freedom for the middle-classes and allowed the industrial revolution to happen, but this economic freedom came at the expense of the working classes who were moved from fields into factories and had to endure terrible working conditions. The “Dark Satanic Mills” that John Milton mentioned in his hymn Jerusalem.

This led to strikes, calls for better conditions, more rights for working people and working class led movements such as the Chartists and events such as the Peterloo Massacre. Working class rebellion is a constant presence in Abercrombie’s novel. Groups such as the Breakers and Burners disrupt production and agitate for better conditions for the proletariat or a revolution against the bourgeoisie mill owners. They are a clear parallel of the Luddites from English political history.

As a Marxist, and a lefty, I feel sympathy for the Breakers and Burners who are forced to endure horrendous working conditions and driven to drastic action to improve their lives. The Marxist theorist in me says that the Breakers and Burners need Leo dan Brock’s bourgeoisie rebellion to first overthrow the upper classes and spread power to the bourgeoisie before a proletariat uprising can seize the means of production. The historian in me says that working class agitation, from the Chartists to Peterloo, were important steps towards further reforms such as the Great Reform act of 1832 that led to more inclusive institutions and paved the way for the eventual enfranchisement of all people in the 20th century.

Grimdark fantasy

As you can tell, a fantasy novel with a lot of political and economic history analogies is something that I can really get into. There are a lot of other positive things about The Trouble With Peace. The story of the rebellion is tense and I couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out how it ended. There are a lot of complex, well developed characters that bring the story to life.

Often as a reader, you think that you fully understand a character and then they will do something that surprises you, like Arch Lector Glokta, the head torturer for King Orso being surprisingly nice to his subordinate Vic when he is forced to leave his office. There are also the surprise switches of allegiance, twists and turns in the course of the rebellion that keep the reader engaged throughout the novel.

Abercrombie is known as the master of “grimdark”, a subgenre of fantasy, and this novel doesn't disappoint on that front. It is violent and bloody, although never with a sadomasochistic glee at the suffering of the characters. In Abercrombie’s writing, the suffering is a reflection of how violent society was in the Early Modern period. This novel also dismisses any romantic notion of what a war fought with pike and cannon was like.

No clearly defined right or wrong

There are also no clearly defined right or wrong in The Trouble With Peace or good guys and bad guys. I felt sympathy for Orso, who has unexpectedly found himself king and is trying to deal with a country that is changing rapidly, but before he can get his feet under the table he has to deal with his nobles rebelling. However, I also felt sympathy for The Young Lion, a brave soldier who might usher in the next phase of social reform to make society fairer and more equal (eventually).

This lack of good guys and bad guys also increased the tension. No one is fated to win from the start, so the rebellion could succeed or fail. In our status of omniscient reader, we are not given any more clues to the direction of future events than the unlikely protagonist themselves.

More than a rebellion

What I found most interesting about The Trouble with Peace is how it dramatises economic and political conflict through human conflict. A rebellion is about more than kings and nobles, it is a conflict between different ways of organising the world. What I liked most about this novel is how Abercrombie effectively uses an epic fantasy story to dramatise the economic and political changes that made our modern world. The same changes that Acemoglu and Robinson describe in Why Nations Fail.

The Jane Austen Society

It’s hard to imagine a time when the name Jane Austen wasn’t synonymous with the idea of the English author. Today she casts a long shadow over all English literature and 203 years after her last books were published she is still very popular.

All six of her novels are still in print, on Valentine’s Day this year, the latest high-profile film adaptation of one of her works, Emma, was released and a Jane Austen themed improvised comedy group has sold out a West End Theatre in London. 

It’s easy to imagine it has always been this way, but Jane Austen hasn’t always been this popular. There was a time when she wasn’t a household name. 

The Jane Austen Society 

A new novel called, The Jane Austen Society, by Natalie Jenner takes us back to this time. The book is set during and immediately after the Second World War, in the English country village of Chawton where Jane Austen lived. However, financial hardship has befallen Austen’s descendants and her name is unrecognised in her home village.

The novel follows a range of characters, all who have been touched by Austen’s writing. Her words have given meaning to their fears, hopes, personal tragedies and traumas. Together they form a society to preserve the memory of Jane Austen and to acquire a cottage in Chawton that she used to live in to turn it into a museum. 

The Jane Austen Society is a character-led novel. The book focuses intimately on the lives, feelings and thoughts of these characters. In the style of Austen herself, the book is mainly focused on their romantic desires as exploits of the Society brings the characters together, spark some new passions and rekindles some old flames.

Rich characterisation

The characterisation is rich and every one of the main characters is fully fleshed out. I got a strong impression of them as people, their pasts, their wants and needs. This was mainly achieved through the author’s voice explicitly telling the reader what the characters wanted in a particular moment or by having their backstory explained in detail. 

This novel could have benefited from showing the reader what motivated a character, rather than telling. I would have preferred that the characters reveal themselves for the reader via their own actions or words.

An intimate portrait of village life

Similar to Austen’s novels, The Jane Austen Society is an intimate portrait of English village life. The village of Chawton is as much a character in the story as any of the people. Like the other characters we a rich sense of the place and its history. The book explores the closeness of everyday life, in a world that is yet been changed by the big social upheavals of post-war Britain. 

The novel explores all aspects of such life, the positives and negatives. For example, there is the pressure to appear respectable. Some characters are subject to prying eyes and maybe would prefer the anonymity of a big city. It can be hard for love to bloom when it’s watched constantly. There is also the strong sense of togetherness that comes from living with people in such a small community.

Jane Austen’s whit

The Jane Austen Society has a lot in common with a Jane Austen novel. For example, several of Jenner’s characters cannot see for themselves what is the plain to the reader. They are so caught up in their thoughts that they cannot see the happiness that they could have if only they embraced it. This creates a strong sense of dramatic irony, as the reader understands much more about the situations than the characters do.

This novel has dramatic irony and the small rural community setting in common with a Jane Austen novel, but it lacks the whit that Austen is well known for. There is none of the witty sparing between characters or the wry observations that Austen did so well.

By contrast, the recent film adaption of Emma starring Anya Taylor-Joy found a way to make the humour accessible to a modern audience. Jenner’s prose is emotive and her dialogue is poignant. Many of character have suffered personal tragedies and their pain, sadness and fear is powerful portrayed in the novel. 

This creates a very different tone to one of Austen’s novels. Jenner’s novel is much sadder, which is not what I expected from a novel about one of English literature’s great wits. This isn’t a flaw in the novel, the descriptions of pain and loss in Jenner’s novel are very moving, but it wasn’t the tone I expected.

Passion for Austen

The character’s passion for Austen is tangible. I believe in their love of her writing, how it has touched these people and awoken a passion for her work. The characters spend a lot of time discussing Jane Austen, comparing the motivations of her characters and mentally casting themselves in the roles to help them understand their own lives. This is what fans of great stories have done throughout the centuries and continues today.

A lot of the novel is given over to characters discussing Austen in detail. It may not surprise you for a book titled The Jane Austen Society, but this is a book about characters who are chiefly concerned with Austen. This is certainly a novel for fans of Jane Austen as this is not just the focus on the book, but is almost exclusively its content. 

Happily married

Readers who love Jane Austen as much as Jenner’s characters will love this novel. I can imagine this book being well received by reading groups. There is certainly a lot to discuss. Which characters from the novel most closely align with Austen’s characters? Do you agree with how they interpret Austen’s characters? 

The Jane Austen Society builds to a neat and satisfying conclusion. In true Austen style, each character marries their true love and lives happily ever after. This leaves the reader with a content feeling that everything worked out for the best in the end, despite any upsets along the way. Much like a Jane Austen novel.

Audiobook review

The standout feature of this audiobook is Richard Armitage’s narration. His deep, rich voice is a pleasure to listen to. I have admired Armitage’s stage, TV and film performances for years, but I was struck by how well suited he is to reading audiobooks. 

Aside from Armitage, the production is a little flat. The audiobook lacks music or other embellishments to bring the story to life. However, this is more than made up for by Armitage’s excellent reading. I highly enjoyed this novel in audiobook form.

Our Child of the Stars

Space can be a frightening place. It is the great unknown and as such it inspires fear in us. Films from Alien to 2001: A Space Odyssey and novels such as Dan Simmons’s Hyperion have captured our fear that the darkness of space holds things that are terrifying as they are beyond our ability to understand them.

We are used to being frightened of space, which is why it was so refreshing to read a science fiction novel with a different take. Stephen Cox’s Our Child of the Stars has at its core a fundamental optimism about space. The book follows Molly and Gene Myers, a childless couple in 1960s America who adopt and raise the only survivor from a crashed alien spaceship. They name him Cory and try to keep him a secret from the government. Thus the central premise of this book is that love, not horror, can come from the great unknown.

Throughout the book, the central threat to the Myers’s family is not strange creatures from outer space but other humans who work for the government and want to exploit Cory. In this novel, it is people who are familiar to us that are frightening and dangerous, not the unknown of space or people who look different to us.

This tallies with my experience of the world, which is one reason that I related to this book. Many human characters are dangerous and can cause pain to the Molly, where the alien character, Cory, provides her with love and completes her family. I can relate to this in a world where the greatest dangers come from authoritarian strongmen or raving populists - who are generally heterosexual men like myself - who tell us to be frightened of refugees, migrants or members of ethnic minorities - who are different. It's easy to be frightened of the unknown but the real threats may wear a familiar face.

Our Child of the Stars 1960s setting is connected to this. In the 60s many people, like Molly and Gene, realised that they had more in common with people who were different to them (both in America and overseas) than they did with their leaders who bombed villages in Vietnam and sent young people off to be killed in the war.

The 60s was a time of great change when old values were questioned and there were existential threats to the human race. This reminds me of the time we live in now, however, the 60s also had a current of optimism about people's ability to overcome these problems. This optimism is summed up in the novel by the way that Gene talks about people living in the moon in a UN run city of all nations that has no violence and weapons, one year before Neil Armstrong first ventures there. Today we are faced with threats on a similar scale, but we seem more pessimistic about our abilities to face them and could do with a dose of Gene’s optimism.

Reading a book that has tinged with hope for a better tomorrow, that people like Molly and Gene fought for in their activism, was a welcome change from cynicism. The book is also about being a parent, which is a statement of optimism about the future. People need a belief that tomorrow can be better and children offer this. When Molly loses a pregnancy early on in the novel her belief in the future is lost as well and through finding Cory she is able to find it again.

There is a lot to praise about the novel, it is well written and Cox has distinctive prose style that draws you into the head of the characters who feel like a family from our world, despite one of them having tentacles. Yeah, their family is a little strange, but isn't every family? The Myers are a relatable family, despite their difference, and we need to relate to families that are different to ours if we have any chance of saving our world.

What I liked the most about this book is that it sums up the best in humanity. It is a book about flawed, complex people who can do good things. This is what the science fiction genre needs right now. At WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, I attended talks from both Cyberpunk and Weird Fiction writers who said that they were tired of stories in these genres about people broken down and crushed by society. They wanted stories about resistance and hope. In dark times we can't afford to be pessimistic, which is why it was great to read a book that shows that humanity can transcend petty hatred and selfishness to care for people who are different. 

We need radical hope in a dangerous and threatening world. We don't need fear of the unknown. We need to be reminded that what comes out of the darkness can offer hope, love and healing as Cory does for Molly. We need positive messages right now and Our Child of the Stars does this. If you need some positive science fiction in your life to make you feel less hopeless about the fate of humanity then go read this book.

The Fifth Season

N K Jemisin’s The Fifth Season has one of the strongest opening lines of any book I have ever read. It begins with the fantastically doom-laden:

“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.”

The rest of the novel lives up to the promise of this opening with a powerful story of people struggling to survive in a hostile world.

The reader feels the sadness that is the core of the story. At the start of the book, both the protagonist’s internals world and the actual Earth itself are broken, perhaps beyond repair. This makes the reader highly invested in the characters as we learn how they have suffered in this dangerous and volatile world.

In the first chapter, we get a gut-wrenching description of a mother's grief as she discovers the body of her young son, murdered by her husband. In the early stages of the novel we meet a woman forced to have sex against her will by a hierarchical organisation that controls her. We also meet a small girl taken from her family because she is different, who is then hurt by the person she thought would protect her.

Oppression and the many forms it comes in is a theme of the novel. In this world those with the ability to move the Earth, the Orogenes, are hated and feared by those who can't, the Stills. In a world where the Earth beneath your feet is a constant danger, having a connection with it is a dangerous thing. This is a world that is hostile to the Orogenes. It is because her son is an Orogenes that he has been killed in the opening chapter. It because she is an Orogenes that the child is taken from her home and given a harsh lesson in discipline. Throughout the novel we feel how much the Orogenes are hated and what they have to do to survive.

Science fiction describes the world we live in better than it describes the future or fantastical alternative realities. What does The Fifth Season, a portrait of a turbulent and oppressive world, says about our world? It shows what the social dynamics of our world would be like in a world where the environment was more hostile. It shows how we will turn on the weak and minorities in times when resources are scarce. It does not show our future in a world of environmental disaster, it shows our present social structures imposed onto a world of environmental disaster.

Although the world of The Fifth Season is alien to us, with its constant earthquakes, creatures made of stone and giant obelisks floating in the sky, deep down we know that this is our world. We know that when we are pushed as far as the people of the Stillness have been pushed, we would turn on each other as the Stills have turned on the Orogenes. Our world’s divisions are along lines of race and gender, these will be the faults along which we will tear the human race apart if we irreversibly break our Earth.

The Fifth Season has a complex narrative that is set over a long period of time and has several staggering revelations along the way. I won't spoil them now, because you should certainly read this book. The events of The Fifth Season take in the whole world of the Stillness (or at least a significant part of it) and show how it came to be the way it is - not just in terms of the natural disaster that have befallen this world, but also the root of its social structures and systems of oppression. This is fully-realised world, in terms of social science as well as natural science.

Jemisin has clearly done a lot of research into the geology and physics of her world (as well as its social structures). Despite it being a book about people who can move the Earth with their mind, it is hard to categorise this book as clearly fantasy. The degree to which the physics are worked out show a level of scientific research that goes beyond a lot of science fiction novels. The Orogenes are more believable than the hyperdrives or aliens in a lot of science fiction. Ultimately, this book is a bit of both genres, which is something we also see in the writing of Ada Palmer, whose novels touches on issues of divinity as well as social science.

Whether it is a sci-fi or a fantasy novel doesn't matter, what matters is that it tells a powerful story about a broken world and people struggling to live on it. It also tells a story about human nature. About how we turn on each other and hate each other when under pressure.

A book about humanity plagued by earthfire and hatred has a lot to say about how we hate each other in our world.

Too Like The Lighting

As I chatted to fellow sci-fi fans at Worldcon 75, dashing between panel events and signings, there was one book on everyone's lips. You could hear its name whispered with quiet reverence in the halls of the Helsinki Messukeskus Expo and Convention Centre. It was mentioned by fans, authors and publishers as a great work of the genre. Those who had read it, found it hard to describe but were full of praise.

The novel I’m referring too was Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning, which won The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the Worldcon 75 Hugo Awards. It has been a huge hit with sci-fi readers and has catapulted debut author Palmer to fame amongst sci-fi fandom. It was the talk of Worldcon, and I had to read it.

Upon reading Too Like The Lightning, the first thing I noticed was that is not a hugely accessible book. This is not a negative point, if you this is the type of book that you enjoy. One of my least favourite features of a sci-fi novel is clunky info-dumping, describing exactly how a star ship or society functions. Making a novel accessible can come at a cost.

One of my favourite novels is Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, which drops the reader straight into a far future universe and expects them to find their own way. Too Like The Lightning is not dissimilar. The book throws a lot at its readers and expects them to keep pace. This is a book that respects the reader's intelligence.

The narrator, Mycroft Canner, does explain a few features of life in Palmer's twenty-fifth century Earth, such as example how their society idealises our own eighteenth century. It does help, reading this book, if you have a basic knowledge of Voltaire, De Sade, and other luminaries of the eighteenth century. Their ideas are central to Palmer's world and the story she is telling.

Where many sci-fi novels delight in the particulars of particle physics or cosmology, this novel is hard-social-science fiction. Having a basic grasp of the principles being discussed will help the reader. I have always been more interested in the societies and politics of sci-fi worlds, as opposed to their gadgets or weapons, and so I really enjoyed this aspect of the novel.

The world that Palmer has created seems complex and strange to us, but after spending a few hours there it becomes as believable as our world. The rich details that Palmer has used to develop this world and the philosophy behind it - drawing on her own expertise as a professor of history at the University of Chicago specialising in early modern Europe and the Renaissance, make it an entirely plausible future where we don't have nation states, genders or wars.

Palmer's world is not perfect. This society is not utopian or dystopian. They have solved some of the problems of our world and created some new problems of their own. Like any society in our world, some of its aspects we could learn from and others we would find frightening. This world is as detailed, complex, flawed and beautiful as our own.

The plot of Too Like The Lightning is engaging and interesting. I will avoid saying too much about it here, as I think you'll enjoy the book more coming to it with little prior knowledge of the plot, as I did. The opening chapter is especially strong, grabbing the reader's attention and immersing them in the story while the strangeness of this world unfolds around them.

There are a lot of interesting meanders along the way, although I felt the plot did lose some focus in the final third. It's worth noting that this novel is the first in a series, and it doesn't have a definite conclusion. The final chapter of Too Like The Lightning is a work of brilliance, transforming much of what has just been experienced in the mind of the reader. It left me wanting to start the sequel, Seven Surrenders, as soon as possible.

The characters are very strong. There are many of the them and each has their own life and a sense that they are an independent person with their own fears and desires, not just pieces being moved about in a story. Some of the standout characters are the narrator, Mycroft, who is an excellent guide to Palmer's world. Carlisle Foster stands in for the reader as someone new to the events of the plot and asks the questions that we want answers too. The Alphas, the seven leaders of this future, are all really interesting characters whose personalities reflect the diverse societies that created them. The Alphas’ court politics is both fascinating to read about and is as believable as any history of the nobility of the eighteenth century.

Too Like The Lightning is a really interesting book, filled with the imagination that makes science fiction such a fun genre to read. Palmer's world is a great place to spend a few hours and her characters are likeable companions while you're there.

If the description above has intrigued you, then go read it. I strongly recommend it - but, be warned, this book is not for everyone. Those who like this type of interesting and imaginative social science fiction will love this book.