Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota #1)

Author(s): Ada Palmer

Science Fiction

From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality


Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.


The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.


And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...


Terra Ignota
1. Too Like the Lightning
2. Seven Surrenders
3. The Will to Battle


Product Information

Short-listed for Hugo Awards Best Novel 2017.

'More intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall' Cory Doctorow. 'The kind of science fiction that makes me excited all over again about what science fiction can do' Jo Walton. 'Thought-provoking, disturbing, occasionally perverted, and always entertaining. Worldbuilding at its richest' Kirkus.

Ada Palmer is an author, historian and composer. She did her Ph.D. at Harvard, teaches History at the University of Chicago, blogs at ExUrbe.com, composes close harmony folk music and performs with the a cappella group Sassafrass.

General Fields

  • : 9781786699497
  • : Head of Zeus
  • : Head of Zeus
  • : 0.504
  • : May 2017
  • : 228mm X 145mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : September 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Ada Palmer
  • : Paperback
  • : UK Airports ed
  • : English
  • : 813/.6
  • : 448