Ada Palmer

From the 2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner for Best Writer, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars is the final book of the Hugo Award-shortlisted Terra Ignota series...

Perhaps the Stars

The final instalment in Ada Palmer's award-winning, critically acclaimed Terra Ignota series. 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' facade 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 facade 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 scramble to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war.

Gavin

Of the war between Myopia and Utopia.

Hold on until page 125. That wait would be fatal in a first book, but everyone who makes it here, to book four, has proven hardier and will eat it gladly.

Not a lot of war in this war novel before then. Instead, a Hufflepuff hum - faint in previous books, risen in this one. I don’t mean to be mean: the philosophical principle that nice things are important, philosophically rich is one of mine. But 9A, the narrator, is too much the overgrown child. They say “snugglier”. They emphasise snacking. Someone cries in every chapter I think. Like Odysseus. They also rave against free speech (though Palmer is a historian of censorship and should not be identified with 9A). 

Neotene domesticity is all very well for Becky Chambers, but it doesn’t gel with the other gigantic aesthetic banners of this work (the Enlightenment consummated and their language appropriated; a society transformed, deluding itself to be peaceful; the ideological roots of conflict, the inexorability of war’s logic, thus this realistic war between lovers and friends).

The achievement of this book - besides the truly baroque prose, the truly insane narration - is that it nearly succeeds in making every faction reasonable. Uncertainty justifies terrible things, the most terrible: distrust, surveillance, subterfuge, war.
(view spoiler)[Palmer slips a few times. Kosala freaking out and blowing up the Almagest ex ante doesn’t change anything; Utopia-Mason already have the Alexander, space weapons. Moreover, her killing MASON is bound to kill many more people, and she’s not a consequentialist. I cover the great emptiness of Brillist anti-exploration in the spoiler below. (hide spoiler)]
I can’t remember this being done so well. Maybe in Hugo or Dumas.

I am a big fan, but, so I dislike a lot about this series. I find the central conflict arbitrary, and the central psychological claim wrong. Actually maybe I just dislike the Ninth Anonymous, puppy Odysseus. 

—-

* Meme: “in the grim darkness of the C25th, mankind has divided into the elemental archetypes: jock, fash, hufflepuff, freud, stemlord, landlord, libertarian, people with a country of origin instead of a personality”. (This is no critique of Palmer when we remember that all such groupings will arise through weird partially random historical contingencies: the resulting categories don’t need to make sense and probably won’t.)

* Common bit of silliness: 
  “…languages are precious enough to be worth people dying for. A human life has infinite value, infinite consequences over the universe of space-time, but apparently They think a language is another order of infinity.”
 Piety. I can’t think of any language worth anyone dying for.

(view spoiler)[In fact naive infinite ethics is the root of the conflict. Gordian says each human mind is infinite and so infinitely valuable; Utopia says the light cone is larger if not infinite. Jedd in the middle goes hmmm yeah can't see anything wrong with treating each person as equally valuable with a universe full of people, what a moral puzzle. (hide spoiler)]

* I like the Renaissance conceit of calling god The Great Author, and Jedd's conceit of calling the Utopians "small authors", small gods. Later, this is expanded into a huggy thing where all humans are small authors - in the afterword Palmer implies more: that we're all obeying the Utopian oath by working so much as 40 hours a week. I honour this thought - for instance a cleaner is in fact doing something of moral significance when they work, is in fact imperceptibly pulling on the rope that leads to the future. But it's a piety to say that all stories are equal-sized, that all pull the same. 

  Many have described to me the journey from feeling they could never maintain such a high standard to realizing that we already are.

No, there is more to do.

* So many hundreds of details, like the Brillist / Gordian double name (ideology and instantiation). Recalls GNU / Linux. The verisimilitude of mess.

* The office of Anonymous doesn’t make sense. Has there ever been a writer who successfully spoke for humanity? Is solving epistemic logic puzzles really the only qualification you want for such a person?

* The stable stagnation following the exponential age seems pretty implausible. Then there's the laughable smallness of the AI threat - one serial killer(!). (I suppose Utopia solved AI alignment. But then set-sets would have to be obsolete, unless the other Hives hated U-beasts, which they don't seem to.)

* There’s a moving sequence about chronic fatigue, also one of Palmer’s personal crosses. Wheelchair as throne.

* The book takes a slightly absurd view of the wisdom and effectiveness and moral stature of the UN. Maybe they get better over 400 years of irrelevance.

* The plot is excessive, and I think it's intentionally difficult to track all the threads. Fine, but one bit goes too far for me: (view spoiler)[Achilles' dying speech implies alternate timelines and him as a multiverse hopper. And this in turn makes Palmer’s god less stupid, if he is the multiverse maximiser, the only theodicy I find even vaguely satisfying. Palmer's mainline theodicy is different: the universe is the offering of a blind mute god who wants to talk to a solipsist god. It's pretty cool. (hide spoiler)]

* The main characters spend lots of their most critical resources on documentation, history monging. Sniper’s chapter is bought at extreme expense, Mycroft’s whole shtick… This is sorta realistic - militaries have war artists and official bookworms. But it’s not usually the commanders and chief strategists scribbling for posterity as the death squads stalk their corridors. Palmer uses epistolary devices to great effect, but I find myself wishing they’d focus on the war for a sec.

* I like the Mitsubishi a lot more in this one. (view spoiler)[disregarding their purported sadism in Mycroft’s literally hallucinated odyssey. (hide spoiler)] Palmer makes me notice that the rich are a minority. Less vulnerable than the others, but there's a high floor to the vulnerability of any small group.

* a bit of body horror and mind rape, be warned. (view spoiler)[Largely unpunished (hide spoiler)]

* The novel could do without religion. Jedd could be a vast noble alien, and we would have no need for This World’s Creator or even Bridger. (view spoiler)[The relics are Faust’s stated casus belli but others are easy to imagine. (hide spoiler)] The narrators’ abjection before Jedd makes their tweeness worse. If there’s a god, you should wrestle him, not kneel. I could do without the extended (view spoiler)[Iliad plot mirroring too. (hide spoiler)]

* Yet another fundamental problem: (view spoiler)[Jedd is not actually morally superior, which is why I don't like people kneeling to him. Absolute caring is not actually the perfect morality. He beats the monsters and Kosala and beautiful primitive Mason, but not Huxley. This is stupid for instance:
Some occupations, mainly medical, may be judged too essential to subtract from, but for the rest, even the most important projects in the world”—tremble, Utopia and Gordian—“we must give up a portion of what would have been our life’s works to restore what we can of the devastated life’s works of the dead
Postponing a death from heart attack is essential, but preventing deaths from aging isn't?? A debt to the past is lexicographically above all present and future people??

He is good at cutting knots, removing the bizarre theory-blind fatalism of the Censor, Gordian, the Mardis, and even Utopia. Nothing like the stupidity of a group with an overfit predictive model.

I understand why there's no retribution in the aftermath of the war - the hugginess wins - but there's not even any proportionality. Utopia suffers more than Gordian!

No repercussions, then, for Gordian’s deceit? They get it all, even their collaboration, Bridger’s relics shared, thy Jehovah’s great wealth shared with the twin projects? That does not feel like justice.

It does not feel like goddess Nemesis, reader, who ravages the guilty, paying pain with pain. It feels like something better.This shows an unreasonable level of trust in Faust; if someone commits mass murder and mind rape once, you should expect them to do it again. By all means let them work on great projects for the world they defiled. But defang them first, and watch them. (hide spoiler)]

* The Masons are shown as heroic and vast in numbers, and yet they seem most of the way to fascism. With one bad MASON, they could ruin everything. Their superiority complex, retributive deontology, lack of individualism, and willing lack of freedom, are in far more severe contradiction to the Hive Alliance than the conflicts Palmer chooses to emphasise. Cornel is a liberal tyrant and a longtermist, and so they do good despite their terrible potential. (It’s not just their power - Utopia is powerful too. It’s the sheer lack of checks.) I wish I could say I find it unrealistic for a billion people to larp full-time as a Roman pleb or Mussolinian. (view spoiler)[Palmer knows all this and nerfs them in the denouement. (hide spoiler)]

* This book will age better than most, but parts of it ring trendy, sarky, Whedony. (view spoiler)[Like the reservationists coming out of nowhere to save the day. (hide spoiler)] The bold, unclichéd treatment of gender of past books - as gravity, as a seductive force that can be covered up but not ignored, dimorphism as transgression, feminine arts as mind control, pronouns as a spicy personality marker. 

  Their comportment invites it, that toxic artificial helplessness that coded feminine in olden days, and makes us all fall over ourselves wanting to do things for Heloïse, so much so that we stifle when they try to do things for themself.

Here it gives way to a soppy constructionism, gender as conspiracy:
(view spoiler)[ Madame toiled fifty years—fifty!—to revive patriarchy, narrowing the gates and cramming all high offices she could with the prey this mantis matriarch found easiest, all masculine in mind and genitalia… The Big Three leading this World War: matron Danaë, nursing Lesley, me, and not a dick among us. Where are they now, Madame? The artificial creatures, stiff and male and defined by their penises, you said would rise once war dispelled our supposedly fake equality? Well, you did contrive two dozen of your own male characters to coincidentally fall, to yield this panel. (She returns to the interesting moderate view in the great denouement.) (hide spoiler)]

—-

But the main gripe:

(view spoiler)[The Gordian / Utopian split, the heart if the whole series, is not at all crisp. Earth vs Space. In vs Out. Unity vs fragmentation. Variety vs far greater variety. Life extension vs space exploration. Just let the ones who want to stay stay! People often pose life extension and space exploration as opposites, but they just aren’t, and so they are an unsuitable pair to base thousands of pages of conflict upon. I can’t take Faust seriously when he arbitrarily prefers current people to all of the thousands of worlds’ worth of people that space exploration would bring. He misses the great daily loss of entire galaxies, lost forever. He says he wants ems, which could pack the earth denser with minds. Well consider the greater packing of galaxies full of ems! The only way it makes sense is if they’re selfish, scrabbling to keep themselves alive. His war, his terrorism, is thus rooted in repeated errors, and the books are rooted in his war. I cannot love this.

How to have them clash deeply? Make Utopia pro-death! Science advances by funerals! (hide spoiler)]

(view spoiler)[In fact almost no part of Brillism makes sense. They hate set-sets for reducing natural personality and cognitive variety. But every set character we see is different from the others - and different from all natural characters! Sets are strictly increasing the variety of humanity. There’s nothing wrong with depicting bad philosophy, but it’s presented as a serious dilemma and I don’t think Palmer thinks Brillism is mistaken, just ruined by extremism and instrumental harm. (hide spoiler)]

That said, nearly all the main characters are Explorers, taking one side.

What would I have as the war’s great theme? The one from the last book is fantastic and underemphasised here: faith in a benevolent dictator vs pragmatic, aggressive scepticism. The second? Past-regarders and future-regarders. Long reflection vs Builders. Noble lie vs radical honesty. Bioconservatism vs transhumanism (represented already, a little). Theory vs praxis. Academia vs autodidacts. Stamp collecting vs engineering. All better than the chosen (view spoiler)[inwards vs out. (hide spoiler)]

What about Jedd’s philosophy? Like Yahweh, he has serious problems with respecting boundaries. That his subsumption and illiberal eternal hugging is taken so seriously is annoying. His lack of socialisation is half stupidity (demanding unconditional surrender at the cost of millions of lives), half defamiliar genius (why do people die, father?). (view spoiler)[That he is a particularist, favouring his family to the point where this has a serious chance of outweighing every other being and the course of history he chooses, belies his being particularly alien or godlike. Kin favourites is classic mammal.
 (hide spoiler)]

One more deep disagreement: (view spoiler)[the war is said to be needed because humans are growing too comfortable to go to deep space. But this seems completely backwards to me. Just as a small minority of people in the richest parts of the world strain unprecedentedly without needing to - marathons, free soloing, biohacking, psychonautics, workaholism, and yes, space - I expect greater wealth and tech to inspire a similar proportion of contrarian strivers. And it only takes a few hundred offworld to seed all else. This is Utopia’s bizarre error / overconfidence, or Palmer’s error which makes itself true for them. Gordian have no blame in it, it’s enough for Utopia to believe it. (hide spoiler)]

(view spoiler)[Cato as Hephaestus, the divine inventor, yields a funny insight: all of this could have been avoided with sufficient technological progress. Can everyone have what they want, with sufficient technological progress? No, but it gets you pretty close. (hide spoiler)]

And yet I am so glad. There is nothing like it in C21st literature. I am only able to attack its philosophy (philosophies) because it’s so clearly and sympathetically drawn, because so intellectually ambitious. I am certain there are readers out there who view Utopia as trivially wrong, though it’s hard to imagine anyone loving (view spoiler)[terrorist Gordian. They’re from Ingolstad! (hide spoiler)] 

Characters routinely do the reasonable thing, including positive-sum trades with their mortal enemies, including instrumental harm for enormous stakes. It is one of the few works which sees the full stakes so clearly, which sees the world-historical significance of nerds, science fiction, and technical tat, both beneath and beyond the average novelist.

Over-the-top, wrong, and great.

---

Clippings:

  I could see you, across the sky, the crowded sea, a thousand black and winged shapes for every tardy, well-meant Peace-dove. But humans began digging a canal across the Gulf of Corinth more than three thousand years ago and finished it in 1893. It’s worth trying things again. Apollo Guardian of Strangers knows that it’s worth trying things again. Especially for such a goal as peacefall.



(view spoiler)[
  Why not both, Mycroft?
A week ago, I could not have answered you, reader, but now I think I can. The light is almost out. Space is too terrible, and Earth too good, not only space too hard but Earth too good, the gifts of Nature, more, for we have spent this hundred thousand years not only building boats and braving seas but tilling fields and planting cities, cultivating Earth’s great human garden. Even in the Exponential Age, when we wounded Mother Gaea with our garbage and our growth, we coaxed her back to health. Perhaps with Master Hobbes still there beside you, you imagine struggles are a constant of humanity’s condition, but our ancestors worked hard to make a better future for their children, and it worked. Life now is good. Not just for most, for all of us, such health, such plenty. And every year, as art and gardens prosper, we make this rich blue world that much harder to leave. Since we don’t have to. Not even to find our next frontier. Gordian has its own infinity which will not make us brave an airless sea, or weep upon a rock alone. Ever. They bypass grim Poseidon, leave the god who rings the Earth to stand mote-keeper of his black kingdom alone, and chance not to his mercy. Their branch is warm and easy, happy, without aspera, their frontier the Institute’s own motto Profundum et Fundamentum, the boundless deep and foundation: the mind. As progress husbanded by Gordian’s genius makes Earth yet happier...
 (hide spoiler)]


  Free Speech, that old tool of plutocracy, the intoxicating, rosy blossom under whose petals parasite lies can breed and multiply until they devour all the garden. None of us wants that. I hope none of us wants that, but there are still Free Speech zealots in this day and age, and they’re just the type to have communications tech, to build a radio or study Morse code, and volunteer to join our network as a link and pass on . . . ​death. I’m panicking, I know it. Everyone understands why we need censorship... I do believe it was a pretty thing once, Free Speech, such a lofty notion, but we outgrew it with our communications revolution, as with our machine guns we outgrew pretty chivalry. 

 Odium! Also odious:

  our true beliefs are visible in what pokes above the psyche’s surface in those moments when the overflowing heart sings out in gratitude, and then we learn what name it calls: Nature, Humanity, Reason, God, Gaea, Fate, subtle Prometheus, or Providence that takes so much but gives this.

(every worldview a religion - I spit. Some less so than others!)


  I hope the ideas, the fragile and imperfect Hives of 2454, and the battered but changing-for-the-better Hives of 2456, will help you rise with strength tomorrow morning as you lift your oar, or pack, or first aid kit, whatever task at hand, they’re all the oar so long as you still carry in your breast the ancient spark, contagious, shared from breast to breast, that has died out a thousand times, but never yet in every breast at once. We will.

Amazing payoff for the investment in reading the whole series. 

Brian Alderman

Mundy Otto Reimer

TL;DR - A treatise on Theology & Philosophy masquerading as a science fiction novel. Includes some neat social & linguistic commentary. A rather suspenseful arc, emotionally moving, & aesthetic story as well :)

Small sample: "If we the portrait alphabet of our many-faced Maker cease our restless aim, that means the First Mover, the One Who aimed across a darkness no being had senses tuned to see, will someday Move no more."

Some longer samples with somewhat spoiler-ish content, though if you were to start at book 1, you'd totally forget all of this since there's way too much content and eccentric writing style for you to get used to:

(view spoiler)[
  

  

  He Who Visits in the ship of flesh we call Jehovah Mason said, “I Am a God,” and we believed Him. And now He says that we were made for Contact, we a living alphabet of greeting from the far-aiming First Mover to His strange First Friend.
  

  

  “If the made thing reflects the maker’s character, and especially the made thing’s ethics-consequences reflect the maker’s ethics-innerness, then Death, Time, Distance, if I Hate-which-is-not-Love these things, My Peer’s creations, do I then Hate-which-is-not-Love the ethical Being That Is My Peer? Who Makes small authors and then crushes them, Who conceived Death and Distance, yet Who Wants to be called ‘Friend’ so much, They bent Their very Making to ensure I could still call Them such—do I Hate My Friend?”
  

  

  Softly: “I believe we had no reason to assume First Contact would come to us in a ship of steel across the darkness that we happen to have senses tuned to see. Why not a ship of flesh? Why not across a darkness as unknown to us as starlight to the creatures of the deep sea? I believe a Being boundaryless and unfamiliar with time, accustomed to an existence where everything within Its perception is directed by Its thoughts, would find it very hard to understand our physics and experience, hard to explain Itself to us. And I believe that, if the first humans to teach this Being language were Madame’s, It might well learn from them the word ‘God’ and cry out, as we know this Child cried out, ‘That is What I Am!’” I knew this anecdote, the moment that forever changed that house in Paris. The little Prince Jehovah Mason, not yet four years old, had demanded that a tutor define every word in some old Latin hymn, and hearing ‘Deus’ defined as an immortal, limitless being that wills into existence worlds and smaller sentiences, the struggling Stranger cried out in Their shaking, toddler voice, « Why, That is What I Am! » Certainly at Madame’s one would meet the word ‘God’ long before the word ‘alien.’ “Do you believe because of science?” I asked. “These tests you all keep running on the Prince’s brain? Is there proof? Or do you just … believe?” “I’m no neurographer. Our adepts say the brain that Micromegas uses as Its interface did not grow as known brains grow, is not structured as known brains are structured, and that there are jumps in the neural signals, easiest to track when Mike does complex math, which defy our current understandings of neural pathways, electricity, computation, possibly even time. But I’m a novice in such spheres. Science made me open to this possibility, but what I believe now I believe because I have observed this Being for myself and find it Alien.” “And … Jehovah’s Peer?” I pressed; in such a moment, it feels right speaking the Prince’s most forbidden name. “Do you … what do you think…” Huxley hesitated less this time. “If our First Contact says there is another being like Itself, which has a macrocosmic relationship to us, as we have to the bacteria that grow and war inside our bodies, that hypothesis is worth testing, with what science we have and what new science we gain every hour that we study the Alien, and study the objects affected by what It claims are actions of another of its Species.” “Bridger’s relics,” I supplied. “So, you believe in First Contact.” “And you believe in Gods.”
  

  

  Gently, so gently as this Kind Cosmos strokes the shaking shoulders. ┌“«I’m sorry it took Me so long to recognize You, Self-portrait of My Peer.»”┘ I blinked—had I blacked out? Had time skipped something? ┌“«What do You mean, Ἄναξ?»”┘ ┌“«Look, Mycroft. [You plural] long said [you plural] were a Portrait, but I did not understand.»”┘ I blinked. ┌“«I still don’t understand, Ἄναξ.»”┘ ┌“«¿You see? My Dominic, he gropes though there aren’t stars to grope toward in a darkness which he has no senses tuned to see, yet he groped on and found Me. This, this is the image of thy Maker, Mycroft, One Who Groped, Who reached beyond His own Infinity, imagining beyondness as I never did, and found Me. [You plural] do image Him, Him only. There may be a trillion Beings of Our Species scattered in Our trillion cosmoses, Each unique and alone, but His uniqueness is that He is the God Who Groped, Who Moved, Who conceived—inconceivable to Me—of Beings beyond Himself. You were right who called Him First Mover, for He is the One Who Moved, Who reached, though there was no direction to reach in, but He imagined Motion, Distance, and Direction, casting Himself into a void as blind as Time. And so He found Me, Other, Alien, Peer, Interlocutor, Addressee, Stranger, Outsider, First Contact, Friend.»”┘ ┌“«One Who reached out,»”┘ I mouthed, struggling to breathe, ┌“«Who found You without senses … »”┘ ┌“«As [you plural] reach out, [you plural] creatures of His making, all of [you plural] from the first cell that groped for nutrients in the warm sea of salt. But He Moved, groping far more blindly than you who grope, for from the first cell you have all had senses, touch and hunger, more, while He had nothing, blindness beyond blindness, lack-of-senses-ness. And from that state, from lack-of-senses, He created Time, the unperceivable direction, reflecting and portraying His unknowing reach into the dark, from which trust, hope, love, curiosity, and learning, all are born. Blind-to-the-future-ly we move here, as He Moved, and Distance, Mycroft, He conceived Distance, not as a cruelty made for [you plural] but for Himself first, His state ever since He first conceived of other, that there could be separation, Otherkind. That thought made Him begin to suffer Distance, worse, darker than yours, for Distance as He crafted it for [you plural] is full of lights, and stars, and clues, and stepping-stones that you have many senses tuned to see, while His Distance was all unsensable to Him as Time, with nothing, no proof, no sign that there was anything beyond Himself, yet still He hoped, and groped, and found Me. ¡And I was ungrateful!»”┘
  

  

 (hide spoiler)]

Perhaps the Stars

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