The Will to Battle—the third book of 2017 John W. Campbell Award winner Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series—a political science fiction epic of extraordinary audacity“A cornucopia of dazzling, sharp ideas set in rich, wry prose that rewards rumination with layers of delight. Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent.” —Ken Liu, author of The Grace of KingsThe long years of near-utopia have come … The Grace of Kings
The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end.
Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location.
The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world’s stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held.
The Hives’ façade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past. But as the great secret becomes more and more widely known, that façade is slipping away.
Just days earlier, the world was a pinnacle of human civilization. Now everyone—Hives and hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and the downtrodden, warriors and saints—scrambles to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war.
“Seven Surrenders veers expertly between love, murder, mayhem, parenthood, theology, and high politics. I haven’t had this much fun with a book in a long time.” —Max Gladstone, author of Three Parts Dead
Terra Ignota Series
1. Too Like the Lightning
2. Seven Surrenders
3. The Will to Battle
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I’ve been thinking about how to review this book for a couple of days, and have come to the conclusion that I can’t review its events without massive spoilers, and even then, those won’t convey the impact to someone who hasn’t read the two previous books.
So I’m going to talk about it by talking around it.
In the last few days, it so happens that I’ve been either watching or reading stories that focus on the problems of power and human nature. The fuzziest of these stories was my viewing of The Last Jedi in which the conflicted history of the Jedi is touched on.
I find these issues handled much more effectively in a Chinese drama I’ve been rewatching (Nirvana in Fire, and to a lesser extent, so far, its sequel), but the most detailed scrutiny is Ada Palmer’s The Will to Battle, the third of the Terra Ignota series.
In this one, we find out what ‘terra ignota’ means in the context of this fascinating, highly stylized, deeply complex and rapidly fracturing future Utopia as secrets emerge to devastating effect.
A story this layered is going to read differently to different readers. In talking it over with various people, I’ve been fascinated by the diverging reactions, so far with a meetpoint of awe at the sheer scope, the enthusiasm (and the familiarity with) ancient as well as modern thinkers.
One reader finds the future Utopia, with its Hive and bash’ (stemming from the Japanese i-basho, what I understand to be a term for a made family), implausible in the sense of how we got there from here; another reader looks askance at the mix of science fiction and fantasy; a third is ravished by the unreliable narrator, who, admitting freely to disintegrating sanity, claims to be telling the absolute truth, which puts a spin on perceptions of miracles and madness.
As I was reading this third book in the series, during which the Utopians deal with the fact that they are on the brink of total war for the first time in three centuries, I kept reflecting on our own phenomenally uneasy times.
No matter how Byzantine Palmer’s future world is, how incomprehensible or even unbelievable this or that element seems, I can’t help but wonder how we—right now, January 2018—ended up with a handful of oligarchs doing their best to divide the world between them. And how we, here, in our two hundred year old republic, managed to saddle ourselves with so venal, ignorant, narcissistic, and incompetent a dictator-wannabe as President, something I never would have believed possible in the half-century I’ve been reading history as well as current events.
If today’s situation had been posited in a science fiction book, say, in 1984, I would have stuck it back on the bookrack, my eyes rolling out of my head.
Tying that to The Will to Battle, I am beginning to think that those very elements that seem so far-fetched to many readers make it possible to—in the guise of a highly entertaining story—pose some searching questions about human nature on the personal and global levels. Questions such as why we always seem to opt for war, and how we manage to surrender insane amounts of power to kings. (Whatever they call themselves.)
“Tully, while it’s true I’ll never rest in peace until I kill you, you’re low on the list of reasons I’ll never rest in peace.”
Reflect on the title for a moment. The will to battle. This is not a story about an Evil Sith Lord coming to attack our doughty underdog heroes who must then band together to fight back. This is a story about people who have the freedom to move anywhere in the world, even up to the city on the moon, who can be or do pretty much anything, who are permitted to believe anything, who first in hidden groups then more and more flagrantly, as their numbers grow, effectively lick their lips in anticipation of destruction and annihilation. Some out of anger, some out of conviction, and some—the most chilling of all—consider themselves motivated by benevolence.
And, creatures of contradiction that we are, we watch in fascination.
Terra Ignota
In this book, as in the previous, we’re largely in the gods-eye view as intelligent and powerful people discuss ideas of war, and humanitarians think about supplies and hospitals, and those who are lethally trained . . . do what they do best, sometimes with minds brilliant at calculating the statistical balance-point of action and consequence behind them. This book does not overlook the potency of statistics.
An imagined world, however byzantine, only works if there is resonance with the reader in the now. The glimpses of crowd movement—what sparks individuals to form into crowd, then follow the flashpoint emotion into action—strike with chilling verisimilitude. Palmer’s familiarity with history echoes through all three books.
There’s also an insightful, thoughtful, benevolently adamantine examination of the conflicts in human nature, reflected in the action and accelerating tension in this book. Characters (and readers) are fascinated by the darker impulses in humans—mirrored in our longest-lasting literature and philosophy, drama and social patterns—even when yearning toward the light. (However one defines that.)
I love these books, beginning with the beguiling narrative pyrotechnics. What resonates strongest for me is the love for humanity, even in its most profound folly, that breathes through the pages, beckoning toward human excellence, however rocky a path to get there.