Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

[Guest xhado123]

So full disclosure - Ada Palmer is a friend and supporter of my tea company on Patreon. That said, she didn't ask me to endorse or otherwise convince folks to read her book.

I'm about twenty pages in and it's fantastic. I think I want to sort of self-book club it here.


There -will- be spoilers.

The book begins with a few interesting pieces of world building unique to this setting. The first is a full list of all the global organisations that permitted it to be published, followed by a series of trigger warnings. These include rape and violence, as we might expect, but also warns readers of potential religious influences and a certification of "non-prosyletory" (I'm going to go home and grab the book to spellcheck that later) by a censorship board concerning itself with religious materials.

The second is an introduction by the fictional author, Mycroft Canner. He describes, in his introduction, that the book is written in the past, covering the events in the year 2454. He chose to write in the style of the enlightenment era, and begs forgiveness from his readers much as a writer of the period of the 18th century did. In his list of pre-apologies, he apologises for Gendered pronouns (As a society that seems to have moved beyond gendered normativity) and then for sometimes even getting those wrong.

At a certain moment during the next scene, the author reveals a minor detail that I felt reminiscent of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: That his name is a terribly common name. I'm not sure right now where the parallels lie, and I'll be interested to see where this comparison ends between Mycroft and Montag.

And there's the end of my lunch break and all I have time for today.