Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders (2017)

Author: Ada Palmer

Title: Seven Surrenders

Format: paperback

Pages: 365

Series: Terra Ignota #2

Seven Surrenders is the second installment in Ada Palmer’s acclaimed Terra Ignota series, following immediately after the events depicted in Too Like the Lightning. Spanning only a couple of days, it’s packed with pivotal events, heightened emotions, and operatic drama. As its predecessor, it tries to say something meaningful about utilitarianism and religion, about gender and sex and war, maybe about determinism and free will as well. It saddens me to report that this time around, however, it failed on all fronts – at least  for me.

I’ll be frank, and succinct. I did not enjoy reading this novel. I still can’t believe it was only 365 pages – it sure felt much, much longer. The reading was a chore, and at least twice, after some particularly melodramatic reveals, I was ready to DNF it. I didn’t, and I’m glad I persevered, because I feel Palmer’s ambition deserves to be read and talked about. But the sheer amount of improbability, both psychological and physical, the overabundance of coincidences and twists of fate, didn’t feel like proving the existence of Providence – only like lazy writing. I guess Palmer’s 18th century hangup, while arguably charming, has some very serious drawbacks – the main being that philosophy, and social sciences, not to mention science, have developed significantly since that time, and no amount of secret brainwashing sects ruling the world can change that. It’s not a criticism aimed solely at Palmer – much of our modern SF literature seems to be more obsessed with the past than with what will come next, populating humanity’s future with artefacts from humanity’s history.

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Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning (2016)

Author: Ada Palmer

Title: Too Like the Lightning

Format: paperback

Pages: 432

Series: Terra Ignota #1

This was a recommended read – both Bart and Jeroen were enthusiastic about this series, and wrote such lengthy reviews of the books, that I had no choice but to join the discussion – and here I want to offer my thanks to them both. 

Palmer’s debut novel seems to evoke strong feelings across the aisle – people seem to either love it or hate it, with not much in between. And that’s why writing this review proves harder than usual – for usually I’m one of the firebrands with strong opinions delivered gleefully and with no compunction, equally passionately for both positive and negative reviews. And here I am left in the middle, not too moved either way, able to appreciate the many strengths of this book but equally able to point out the weaknesses. So, then, let’s dive into it.

Palmer’s novel is set in the 25th century. In her world, humanity has changed drastically, at least in terms of culture and worldviews. After brutal wars religion had become more or less forbidden, a taboo, but spiritual need is recognized as legitimate and universal, and non-factional (or are they?) people of the cloth pay weekly visits to their parishioners to talk about ethics and afterlife. Gender has also been deemed outdated, though no real reason is given for this, and everybody sports neutered pronouns and frowns when an uncouth “he” or “she” enters the discussion. Anne Leckie’s example has been waved over Palmer’s head long enough, so I’m not going to dive into the motivations, I will just proceed to dissect the illogicalities of Palmer’s execution of this choice. But that will come later. Nations have also been dissolved, as well as nuclear families; people live in Hives, large global organisations divided into bash’es, which in turn are small, mostly voluntary groups of mostly unrelated members who share similar views and vocations, and Hive affiliation. Because nuclear families, and multi-generational too, for that matter, were removed from their dominant position as a fundamental unit of social organisation, sex has become an idle pleasure akin to grooming among apes – shared without jealousy between many consenting individuals and deprived of significance we tend to assign to it – but with an exception I’ll write about later. Work is also a big theme, for in this world of abundance everybody works of their own will (mostly, I guess economy wasn’t Palmer’s concern, and that’s fine) and works a lot – a sort of Marxist utopia of people spending most of their waking hours on things they love to do and being paid for it. Death penalty is non-existent; prisons have been removed from the picture entirely – instead, we have a form of institutionalised slavery where criminals cannot possess anything and work for food. Everybody in this world is tracked; instead of one Big Brother we have an oligopoly of them, a tight-knit group of rather incestous world leaders who nevertheless seem to have humanity’s best interests at heart. Which also leads to me the sadly typical shortcoming of depicting the political scene as something consisting solely of cliques and conspiracies, here in full regalia of Emperors and Presidents and Madams and some such.

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The Worst of 2022

We’ve presented The Best of 2022 in our previous post; now, it’s PSA time 😉

Fortunately for you, it’s going to be a much shorter post. There’s no need to wallow in misery of the disappointments and unfortunate choices, or to taste the lingering, unpleasant rot of bad books, movies and TV series more than strictly necessary. And also, this past year was marked by careful deliberation and lucky strikes on our part, thus rendering the list of the bad and worse rather short.

Ola: Let’s start traditionally, with books. My biggest bookish disapointment of 2022 was, in a way, something to be expected: Joe Abercrombie’s The Wisdom of Crowds (2021) did not constitute a sudden dip in quality, a remarkable pivot in writing skill or storytelling panache; on the contrary, this was a culmination of a long and winding way to perdition through the sins of authorial hubris and sloth. This was the moment of parting ways between me and Abercrombie, and although I’m certain he and his fanbase won’t notice my absence, it does bear some significance for me – a confirmation of a long-held suspicion that grimdark is in its essence as juvenile and simplistic as whatever it rages against.

My next disappointing read came from Netgalley and could serve as the illustration of the adage “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Gideon Defoe’s An Atlas of Extinct Countries (2021) promised a fun romp through history and geography, but emphatically did not deliver. Avoid this like a plague. Ooops, these days this saying kind of acquired additional meanings ;).

The title I want to mention belongs to the manga category. One of them is Tite Kubo’s Bleach, a long-time fan-favourite which proved so traumatically bad that I renamed it to Bleh. If you want to see the worst in manga, you don’t need to look any further. Try Bleh, or One Punch Man, and you’ll realize manga also has its tropes, weaknesses, and shameful pandering to the lowest instincts of teenage boys. To be fair, there were also some pretty weak volumes of Naruto along the way, but I am willing to overlook their weaknesses because they are followed by some truly great ones. That’s the thing about manga – it lasts for hundreds of volumes, and inevitably some of these will be fillers, but for the titles I read and love the overall quality remains astonishingly high.

And lastly, one re-read. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Even the wonderful narration of Stephen Fry couldn’t help this rotten egg of a book. Oh, the teenage angst! As I mentioned in my GR review,

“It’s way too long, boring and terribly angsty, and for me it’s simply the worst part of the whole series. I had a hard time going through the entire book, because Harry’s angry special snowflakiness just grated on my nerves so much. Also, the glaring logical holes that this time around I couldn’t overlook even when I tried.

It was a re-read, and sadly looks like none of HP books can entirely live up to the first encounter – the first time around this one got 6/10 stars ;)”

Piotrek: I had some strong candidates to my “Best of 2022” lists. “Worst of…” lists aren’t as full. I was cautious in my selection, and most of the things I did not particularly like where kind of good, just not my thing.

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Favourite media of 2022

We did summarize our 2022 blogging, now it’s time for books, shows and movies… we’ll see how long it gets, but we’ll try to cover it all in one post. It’s been a busy year, but a lot was consumed nonetheless, just maybe a bit different stuff than usual 🙂

Piotrek: Lets start with books, the crown achievement of human culture and our blog’s main topic. According to GoodReads I read 107 titles in 2022 and that added up to 39,400 pages. One of my better years on record. Average book length was 368 pages and that is the record, I believe. I did some re-reads, I read some books that were waiting a long time on my shelf, and I read a lot on the most important topic of the year – Ukraine and its struggle against Russian colonialism and imperialism, and not only on the battlefields, but in the minds of people all around the world.

I’ll start with re-reads. There’s been more of that than usual, and I want to mention two. Shōgun disappointed Bookstooge during his recent re-read, but he made me wanna revisit the book myself. And it was just as good! I don’t mind profanity, or even blasphemy, and it’s such an epic adventure it makes me want to also replay the excellent Total War: Shogun 2 computer strategy. But I also had my disappointment and it sadly was The Legend of Drizzt. I like R.A. Salvatore, whenever I listen to an interview on some fantasy podcast he comes out as a nice human being. But reading his books just isn’t as fun as it used to be. This one wasn’t, and neither were short stories I loved in the 90-ties… there’s always a risk in revisiting childhood favourites, sometimes it pays out sometimes it doesn’t.

Now my favourite genre fiction. This year it constituted (fantasy and sf combined) about 1/3 of my reading, probably the lowest since… early elementary school? But these were mostly solid works. And I’ve chosen three that I liked the most (in no particular order).

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K. Eason, Nightwatch Over Windscar (2022)

Author: K. Eason

Title: Nightwatch Over Windscar

Format: e-book

Pages: 480

Series: The Weep #2

Hello everyone! I’m nearing the end of my course, and with the programming bootcamp safely behind me I decided to go back to some of my blogging and reviewing duties. I’m hoping to be fully back on WP within a week or two, and to have some collaborative summary of the year prepared with Piotrek before the end of said year ;).

Alas, I wish I had a better book to mark my blogging comeback. You’ll have to endure this withering onslaught just like I endured the book in question – bravely and with resolve. One thing that needs to be said upfront is that the name of the series should by rights be changed to The Bitter Weep. That’s how I felt throughout the reading experience, and while the tears had dried somewhat by now, the bitterness remained.

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