As the last book in the series, it definitely has a lot to live up to and I'm not sure it does :(
I expected more, but I didn't love the pacing, and the book just felt so dense sometimes- which I should have expected but I've struggled with the whole series. This just isn't for a casual audience and that's alright! I'm glad I finished the series and I'm always up for a utopia with an underbelly, but this is not a subgenre I'll revisit.
Thanks to netgalley for the arc!

Ada Palmer's "Perhaps the Stars" is an mind-blowing journey into a future full of mind-benders and reality hacks. Palmer's world-building skills are wicked, crafting a vivid universe packed with cutting-edge tech and mind-bending societal dynamics. The characters are next-level, with their deep psyche and intense connections. The narrative dives deep into philosophical quagmires, exploring the nature of consciousness and identity like a total thought-dive. Palmer's prose is mind-blowing, keeping you hooked with every page-flip. "Perhaps the Stars" is a must-read for any sci-fi geek craving a brain-melting experience.

#FutureFantastic #MindBending #DeepCharacters #PhilosophicalExploration #Unputdownable

This book was not for me. Oh how I tried. I met the author at a Brooklyn bookstore when she was on tour with the first novel in the series and I found her delightful. The book was interesting but a bit of a slog - a little more highbrow than my usual fare. But I tried to read the entire series to see where it went. The bottom line - this is a great book for the right audience, which ain’t me.

I have loved this series up to this point, which is why I'm so gutted that I really didn't enjoy this concluding installment. The series has been so original and thought provoking and while those elements are still present here, this is the first time when I felt like the author was trying to hard. Consequently the narrative felt too dense and impenetrable and the aspects that I had enjoyed so much in books 1-3 were barriers to enjoyment for this one. I would recommend the series overall, but it's such a shame that this final book was such a let down for me.
I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for a fair and honest review.

An absolutely incredible conclusion to the Terra Ignota series. A must read for anyone who enjoys SF for its ability to explore novel modes of social organization.

Ada Palmer returns with the final addition to the Terra Ignota series, Perhaps the Stars. Just like each story before it, this story is unique from other science fiction in it's perseverance, hope, positivity, and humanity. This series is one of the best of our generation and Perhaps the Stars concludes it in dazzling beauty.

It is a vast duty placed before me, dear reader, to convey the substance of Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels, these vessels of prose encompassing both the fantastic and the mundane, in a way which captures and reflects the essence with which their tenancious authors, with Muses' blessing and Sisyphus' patience, infused their creations. How shall your humble reviewer, fallible and distractible, presume encapsulate texts which, in their own turn, must be but a finite representation of the vast possibilities of the human imagination? This task becomes particularly acute when faced with a text of such length and densitude as Ada Palmer's "Perhaps the Stars", one which demands attention to every small detail and fleeting name which crosses its pages, and which synthesises its cogitations upon the future of our species with elements of both classical history and divine musing, creating a novel whose complexity would make even demiurgic Homer squint upon their poet's throne and go "u wot, mate?"
Or, something like that. Perhaps the Stars is the culmination of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, a four book "record" of events set 450 years in earth's future. The world of Terra Ignota is one where flying cars make it possible to get halfway across the world in a couple of hours; where geographic nations are mostly obsolete and humans have instead organised themselves into "hives" which regulate and shape their members in vastly different ways. Events in our near future and this Earth's comparatively-distant past have led to public displays of both gender and religion taboo: religious needs are dealt with quietly, through a system of counsellors and "reservations", and they/them pronouns are enforced in polite society. This being the fourth book in what is, at its core, a political epic, things have gone disastrously wrong by this point: so wrong, in fact, that humanity has been plunged into its first war in centuries. There's not much point in me going into the factors that led to that war, because if you haven't read the first three books, Perhaps the Stars might as well be written in a lost ancient script for all the sense you're likely to get out of it. What is important to know about this series is that that conflict, and all of its subsequent effects, involve two broad sets of forces. The first is the mish-mash of political, social and ethical questions created by this particular future, with all of its technologies and factions. Almost all of Palmer's characters struggle with the concept of "the greater good", particularly in the context of a war that their recent history has rendered practically unthinkable, and it's this dilemma, and the way that some characters' answers to it are beyond the pale for others (and vice versa) that really drives the events of Perhaps the Stars forward.
The second element is about what happens when humans interact with divinity. Terra Ignota has two on-page divine characters: Bridger, the child of the Saneer-Weeksboth bash' (think big extended chosen family unit), who is able to conduct miracles that bring inanimate objects to life and bend reality to their will, and Jehovah/J.E.D.D Mason, the adopted or actual child of basically all the current world leaders (long story, one of the weirdest aspects of the series) and who is by this point confirmed as a divine visitor being hosted by the Creator of our own universe. These two characters shift the story in particular, unexpected ways (Earth can have little a divine intervention, as a treat), and they also shape and are shaped by the series' primary chronicler: Mycroft Canner, a repentant mass murderer still inexplicably plugged in to global leadership and reverent upholder of the Greco-Roman Classics (and some early modern Europeans). Mycroft's constant invocations to Greek Gods, comparisons to Caesar, in-text dialogues with the ghost of Thomas Hobbes and other narrative quirks take the new Gods in Palmer's universe and weave mythology around them, putting them into the canon in a way that is deliberately archaic but... makes sense. Sort of. If you're up for this sort of thing. The divine influence on the story itself is equal parts maddening and intriguing, turning some problems from intractable to trivial with the snap of a finger (or the use of a magical resurrection potion that a kid drew on paper a few years ago), but also exposing cracks in the logic of human characters and their morality which ultimately helps drive things forward in unexpected, intriguing ways.
Keen eyed readers will note that one of those two factors is a science fiction staple: knotty, far-reaching political problems in future worlds? Sign me up! And one of them is, in 2021, extremely fucking niche. The Terra Ignota series is extremely upfront about that niche-ness - the acknowledgements and authors note of Too Like the Lightning explicitly state that this is a book seeking to join the Great Conversation, positioning itself in a canon with classical and early modern political philosophy - and on a technical level, that absolutely succeeds. There's some weird notes here and there, and the biases Mycroft himself brings into the text take some getting used to (side note: people who noped out of Too Like the Lightning because of its handling of the in-universe Gender Bullshit and are considering retrying it will find that while the series as a whole moves on, there's still a moment where Mycroft's co-chronicler documenting the genitalia (known and presumed) of everyone in high political office in order to prove that people with vaginas can pilot warships too! A moment of pure 25th century #girlboss energy that just... wasn't needed.) but Terra Ignota knows what it's trying to do, and by Zeus it does it. Perhaps the Stars is very long - the UK edition is nearly 600 pages to previous book The Will To Battle's 350, and the text is smaller - but its ups and downs, and the way the chronicle varies depending on who is narrating and what circumstances they find themselves in (for example, there's a deliberately unfinished chapter halfway through which lends a lot of power to the one that follows it), feels really well thought through. The first moves of this future war include individuals cutting off the instantaneous communication and transportation that characters take for granted, deliberately hampering the technologies with which the war is fought, and the story really sells that mildly contrived set of circumstances. An anachronistic narrative meshes with an anachronistic war, and it all just kind of works. Even the writing style, which gets very florid especially in chapter openings, is actually 99% interesting and readable once you're into it.
The question, then, is whether this very technically accomplished and very strange book is going to work for you, dear Reader. To answer that, I need to answer the question "was this technically accomplished and very strange book good for me?" and I have absolutely no idea. Reading this book was a lot of work, an effort that put significant amounts of other reading on hold as I struggled to focus through what it was trying to tell me. The political payoff, and the philosophical questions behind them, were well worth that investment: questions around the value of human life, and sacrifice, and at what cost a "short war" would come, and the trade-off between happiness and ambition, all were presented in a way that I think I'm going to be thinking about for a long time. Did I need that packaged in a classical-early-modern-mishmash with literal Gods and random greek hero reincarnations running around? Probably not, and what really holds me back from loving Perhaps The Stars is the fact that those Gods and classical allegories seem to pull the focus away from developing characters and just letting them breathe. Many characters from earlier in the series, especially the Saneer Weeksbooth bash' members, have vanishingly little screentime in what is, I remind you, a really very long book, and while I understand that part of this was their becoming less relevant to a war that focused on other actors, there's an awful lot of time spent building up the stakes for other characters based on their mythological roles more than any hard-won connection. Divine intervention, and Mycroft's own status as a creature favoured by Gods, also leads to tragedy which I can't forgive Palmer for, taking away a particular character at a moment when I felt they deserved self-actualisation. Mycroft is an interesting character, but I can't think of a more infuriating choice for "the one who gets divine plot armour at everyone else's expense" - and somehow the presence of actual gods here makes that feel even more unfair.
So, as the curtain closes on the War of 2454, I find myself facing another battle: do I recommend this book, and this series? Ultimately, I have to leave the choice to you, dear Reader: do you embark on a journey that takes far future political speculation and mashes it up with European history and philosophy in an unusual, intriguing and very particular way? Does the payoff of a philosophically dense science fiction series sound fun? Because if it does, and you have some time on your hands, and you accept that sometimes the character lists will be convoluted, and the main narrator will be kind of a dick, and untranslated Latin will occasionally appear on the page as if it belongs in a 21st century English novel, then this series is absolutely one to experience. If early modern and Enlightenment thinking intrigue you, and you want to see science fiction take that mode of thinking on, then oh boy do I have the book series for you. Perhaps the Stars is a culmination of a series that, more than most, needs a particular kind of reader: if this is you, you're going to like how this goes.

This is book 4 in the Terra Ignota series, so I’m not going to include a summary or a lot of details in this review so as to avoid spoilers. When I requested this book I did not realize that it was book 4 in the series, so I just binge read all of the books. Calling the series “sci-fi“ is a bit misleading in my opinion. The series takes place in the future, so there is advanced technology. But mixed in with the 25th century is a large chunk of 18th century Enlightenment philosophy, as well as a hearty sprinkling of Roman mythology. This is a very politics heavy series, so know that going in. There is an immense cast of characters throughout the series to keep track of; to further complicate it some of these people are known by multiple names depending on who is addressing them. This makes for an incredibly complex world. I know there are many devoted fans of this series who will disagree with me, but I think the world is overly complex, especially the language used. As an example, one of the main characters is J.E.D.D. Mason, who is a rather “different“ being, and has their own odd speech pattern (picture Yoda mixed with an adult learning English). This book features multiple big speeches from them, and the book places a lot of importance on those speeches, but because of the very odd manner in which they speak I really didn’t understand what they were saying or what the point was. I feel like there were quite a few plot points in this series that were unnecessarily complicated just for the sake of being complicated.

Thank you to NetGalley & Macmillan-Tor/Forge for this advanced reader copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

First, I would like to thank NetGalley and Macmillan/Tor-Forge for an eARC of this amazing book. I had not read the first three books in the series, so the past few days have been a reading marathon for me to complete the entire series. And I cannot believe that I had never heard of this one!

The series is absolutely amazing! The complexity, the social interpretations, the political intrigues presented are mind-blowing. This is a unique series, in the sense that, there is so much of philosophical, theological and political references in the series, which is quite uncommon in a science fiction story. The buildup of each book in the series is great. The twists and turns kept me riveted. I could not put it down once I had started reading!

The final book in the series, Perhaps The Stars, presents a worthy end to this beautiful piece of fiction. I was so happy to find the phrase 'Perhaps the Stars' mentioned right in the first book! Time seemed to fly as I read this tome of a book. The entire story, of mankind's return to war from a state of Utopia, and the description of that war, were amazing. The different revelations coming as the story progressed kept me turning burning the midnight oil. I did miss Mycroft at the beginning, but the story took off so well, that I forgot all about Mycroft soon enough. There are so many amazing quotes throughout the book - almost every page seems to give the reader food for thought and reflection. The writing style has a philosophical taste to it, which I loved. And the end, oh I loved it so much! It seems to be the perfect end this series could have.

This book has gone up to my list of favorites, and deserves a number of rereads to get every small intrigue in it. I am so in love with Ada Palmer's writing now, that I will wait with bated breath for her next books.

Perhaps the Stars is the final book in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. As such, it's almost impossible to talk about the plot and characters without spoiling the previous books. Instead I will say that if you have read the previous books, this is a satisfying conclusion. If you haven't read the series, now is the perfect time to start. The series is complete, and it's some of the most challenging and rewarding science fiction being published by a contemporary author.

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on October 19, 2021 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Perhaps the Stars is the fourth and final book in Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" quartet, which began with 2016's Too Like the Lightning, which won Palmer the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. That book, along with its sequels Seven Surrenders and The Will to Battle (reviewed here), was a fascinating example of philosophical scifi, imagining a 25th century world whose major political groups lived according to the ideals and philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers (Voltaire and Hobbes for example), where openly discussing religion is verboten and most of the world belongs to one of various "Hives", which have no specific geographic tie, but only a shared concept of ideals of humanity. For this reviewer, the books' interest in exploring how these philosophies play out often came into conflict with the effort of telling a story, with the first two books essentially feeling like a single story oddly cut in half, and the third book also feeling incomplete as a result. And then the 3rd book was published in 2017, and this fourth book kept getting pushed back and back......

And now, in 2021 the fourth book is finally out, in Perhaps the Stars. Now part of my review here is definitely colored by the fact I did not reread the first three books coming into this novel, relying instead on my recollection of what happened within - I did not have the time for a reread, nor do I expect many others will make time for such. But even had I done a reread, I suspect my impressions would still be the same: Perhaps the Stars is overly long (basically twice the size of any of the other books), an utter mess, and its few efforts to correct for what were clearly correct complaints about the story just seem a bit jarring. It also features further adherence to the works of Homer than before, in what doesn't really seem to add much. On the other hand it's still a fascinating at times exploration oh philosophies, especially in its latter half, so if you really liked the first three books - and especially if you've an interest in enlightenment philosophy - you'll like Perhaps the Stars.

Spoilers for the first three books are inevitable, to the limited extent they matter.


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
War has begun, between those who support Sniper, OS, and the rights of the old Hive Order - the "Hiveguard" - and those who support JEDD Mason's quest to remake the world - the "Remakers". Mycroft Canner is seemingly lost or dead, and the chronicle of what comes next can only be taken over by their successor, the Ninth Anonymous (9A). But for a world which hasn't known war in centuries, the very prospect is subject to mass confusion - what is acceptable in such a state? How should one act towards one's enemy? Towards one's friend? Towards one whose allegiance is uncertain?

But perhaps bigger problems threaten the world, because someone is taking advantage of the war to enact their own agenda, to fight their own war at the cost of various hives and the futures they present to the world. And when they enact as the first step of their scheme a plot that cuts the world off from communication, from quick transportation, everything will fall into chaos. Can forces on either side - or the ostensibly neutral forces of the alliance and 9A manage to keep the order?

Or is Thomas Carlyle's Hive system fated to lead to a conflict so infamous it will make the Church War look tame, and will devastate the futures once dreamed of by both humankind and those other beings that make up the Earth?
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Books 1-2 of Terra Ignota explored the Hive system, a system based upon enlightenment thinking (Voltaire, Thomas Carlyle) in which people in much of the world chose various political nation-type "Hives" based upon their various philosophies - Empire, Invention and building towards space and the future, psychology of the mind, doing good for others, etc. The story, told by the unreliable narrator Mycroft Canner, told how the systems were setup....and how they may have been founded based upon lies, with a group of individuals secretly assassinating others to ensure the peace, with the leaders of the Hives all being in a close relationship with a sinister old-time loving Madame, and with a child of seemingly inhumanity having grips on the reins of all the hives in secret. And so a world seemingly beyond religion, beyond gender, and beyond war finds itself once more on the verge of war - a war whose beginnings were explored in book 3, The Will to Battle. Under Mycroft's narration, the books were rife with philosophy and would very frequently change narration style in ways that were fascinating if not always logical.

Perhaps the Stars tells of that war, waged between peoples without communication who were used to it, between peoples who have little understanding of the rules of war, of what waging war means and who have different conceptions of what they are all fighting for - even if they're on the same side. For the First part of the book, our narrator isn't the confident, unreliable Mycroft Canner, but the well meaning younger servicer 9A, who simply wants desperately for a short war that is as bloodless as possible, even as he also does believe in the Remaker cause. This is perhaps a bit of a misstep, as 9A isn't really as committed to philosophies or of unique styles of explaining the story, which kind of makes the story a whole lot less interesting. Mycroft does return (and this is not a spoiler as the last book revealed he would in a footnote) and when he does, the narration style of being all over the place, the dialogue with both the reader and randomly Thomas Hobbes, and much of the quirks of the prior novels returns, for the better.

Unfortunately, even when Mycroft returns, and especially beforehand, the book is an utter mess, even more so than previously. The book is nearly twice as long as any of the prior novels, and the extra length doesn't always make sense - for example, there's one chapter that's devoted to the last few moments to a doomed AI on a suicide mission that I guess is meant to deal with philosophy, but really could've excised with no impact whatsoever. The secret secondary war that goes on features one side in it which is basically the series' least explored group, so I never really understood their motives or why they'd be doing something or that they'd be capable of it, and various important characters from prior books just meet random ends just seemingly to get them out of the picture. And the book, which mainly focused on enlightenment philosophy previously, dives even deeper into the stories of Homer (The Iliad and the Odyssey) to the extent that such stories provide guidelines for characters to act out this future....with little reason whatsoever (sure there's a character magically created in the form of Achilles, but does he really need to have a Hector? A Paris? What does this add?) The book also seemingly attempts to address criticisms of how Eurocentric this portrayed society is, with African nations, and people with religious ideals basically pushed to the outside, and Empires treated like ideals, but this feels almost too little too late after everything that's come before.

Perhaps the Stars took seemingly the longest of any of these books to write, and it feels like Palmer couldn't decide what ideas to fit in, and just gave up and threw them all in. What results is a book that carries some of the interesting ideas of its predecessors, and ends in an interesting way, but is frustrating as hell in the process of getting there. If like me you're committed to this series after three books you may power through anyway, but if you aren't, this book won't change your mind and will probably make you angrier.

thank you so much for PERHAPS THE STARS! I requested it to share with my teacher colleague who's obsessed with the series. I swear to goodness I haven't seen her beside the mandatory social interaction since she started reading because PERHAPS THE STARS is all-consuming. she reported that she wanted to "get this book in my body." thus, fans of the series will be thrilled and satisfied with this latest novel!

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<p>Review copy provided by the publisher.</p>
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<p>In some ways it's hard to review a book like this, where I know not only the author but also many of the people closest to her. In other ways it can become a fun game, smiling along to see--oh yes, there's another of her favorites, and oh, I think I know who she was talking to there. </p>
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<p>One of my favorite things about later books in a series is that you go in knowing what you've agreed to. The parameters are set. If you have issues with the worldbuilding, you know what those are, you've decided that you're up for them at the moment, or else you don't go in at all. This is the culmination of everything you've liked or disliked about the worldbuilding of the Terra Ignota series. This is the moment when the factions plunge into a worldwide war of non-nations, when we see what it is for bashes instead of families to be torn apart or reunited. There are aspects of it that are thrilling, touching, funny, and moving. My particular favorite was when humanity was excoriated about learning to get better at First Contact with truly alien intelligences--indeed, we do need to learn that, and fast, not just in case of little green men but in the smaller ways that more mildly alien intelligences all around us require it of us.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, I am fundamentally in axiom lock with this book. There is a fundamental principle that both major sides of this war agree on: that making Earth a nicer place to live will make it psychologically harder for humans to choose to pursue space travel, to reach out for the stars and other potential intelligences who live there. They are simply in disagreement on whether they should or should not make this choice--in enough disagreement, in fact, to go to war over it. No one in the entire book seems to say, "Wait--do we have solid reason to think that's how humans work?" And in fact I don't think it is. I certainly don't think it's substantiated enough that everybody should just say, oh yeah, obviously, now let's pick a team. There's a point about three-quarters of the way through where a character well known to the reader from a previous volumes who has not been interacting with the others in this volume shows up and has this presented to them. And instead of examining evidence of this--instead of asking questions about, for example, whether people who do science in very extreme conditions (deep sea! Antarctica! space but not just space!) now tend to come from comfortably-off families and countries (I think they do) and whether most people who pursue extreme sports tend to come from comfortable circumstances (again, I think they do)--whether in fact having a safer nest to launch from allows people to fly farther--instead, this character, upon having this axiom presented, basically nods and says, oh yeah, I get it, and picks a side.</p>
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<p>This particularly frustrated me for two reasons. One, because I have personal examples in my life of people who come from more, not less, comfort being the ones who want to take risks for what they view as something greater than themselves. (We all miss you, Maxi.) And two, because it was not actually necessary for the plot to work. It would be a major spoiler to say which faction(s) is/are aligned against the pursuit of space travel as primary and why, but there is a specific other goal the major group is pursuing that would be entirely convincing on its own without this axiom coming up over and over again unchallenged.</p>
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<p>I think this is one of the hard parts about trying something really ambitious. If a book isn't aiming for something world-spanning, it's easier to shrug when you run into something like this: okay, perhaps <em>these five people</em> all have this axiom. But the very overarching nature of the scope of this series means that when nobody seems to be thinking of something, it's <em>really nobody</em>--or at least nobody who, in the context of this world, gets a chance to matter. I was left at the end of the book hoping that the places where there was compromise and contact with alien minds would allow for this particular piece to open later, or at least for readers to open a door that the book's context left firmly closed. Which I think, from what I know of the author, is exactly the sort of thing she would like to have happen.</p>
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A satisfying conclusion to the stunning quartet, <i>Perhaps the Stars</i> continues Terra Ignota's interrogation of human nature, reality and God. If you've made it this far in the series, you'll like this one too.

My only qualm is that it took me about 25% of the book to get my head back into this world, and I still feel like I missed a lot. The dramatis personae at the beginning is entirely insufficient and the Wikipedia articles unhelpful. If you want to do this series right, reread the other books beforehand. I look forward to doing that and appreciating even more.

Avec son cycle Terra Ignota, commencé dans Trop semblable à l’éclair, Ada Palmer invitait son lecteur dans un récit épique de politique-fiction futuriste mêlant philosophie des Lumières et transhumanisme. En octobre 2021, le voyage s’achève pour les lecteurs anglophones avec la sortie du quatrième tome, Perhaps the Stars (à partir en deux parties l’an prochain chez Le Bélial’ tellement le livre est copieux !)
Les deux premiers tomes nous racontaient l’effondrement d’une civilisation à partir d’une simple liste de noms parus dans le journal. Le troisième convoquant Thomas Hobbes au passage narrait La Volonté de se battre et les prémisses d’un nouveau conflit planétaire. Le quatrième va nous chroniquer ce conflit et ouvrir sur la façon dont l’Humanité et ses Dieux vont voir leurs conceptions de l’univers changer. Pour l’occasion, Ada Palmer bouscule les habitudes de son lectorat. Si Hobbes est bien présent en dialoguistes et commentateurs des péripéties, ce ne plus les œuvres des Philosophes du XVIIIe siècle qui constituent le filigrane de son récit, mais les chants d’un certain aède grec aveugle bien bien plus ancien. Et son narrateur initial, Mycroft Canner, cède sa place à une plume plus jeune, plus naïve, mais pas toujours plus fiable, à moins que…
Certes commencer par Perhaps the Stars pour découvrir Terra Ignota serait une très mauvaise idée. Mais si vous avez lu ne serait-ce que le premier, ou si vous souhaitez savoir avant de vous lancer à l’assaut de cette montagne de pages, si cela vaut le coup, sachez-le : malgré le « coup de mou » à mon goût dans Sept redditions, le deuxième volume, la série se conclut parfaitement bien. Sans intrigue non résolue ni solution bâclée pour tenir dans les dernières pages. Tous les lecteurs ne seront pas satisfaits. Certaines pertes, certains renoncements pourront sembler des choix durs et difficiles à lire pour qui s’est attaché aux personnages et aux concepts de cette Terre du XXVe siècle. Mais ces décisions sont logiques et amènent vers un épilogue plus que satisfaisant. Et petit bonus personnel, les deux personnages au phrasé si exaspérant dans les précédents volumes ont des rôles actifs, mais de second plan et muets, donc ils sont bien moins pénibles à lire. Perhaps the Stars est un final en beauté qui donne envie de repartir du début.

Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There is no easy way to review this or the other three books in this cycle without first distinguishing the whole lot from all other SF.

It is important to note that this one is smarter, denser, more deeply thoughtful, and planned out than most heavily world-built stories. If you took your extensive knowledge of history of Romantic periods: from Humanists, Utopians, divine rights of kings, gender explorers, anarcho-libertarians, and more, mix them all up with futuristic tech and then set them all up to tear their shared utopias apart over the span of the first three books, then you'll get Perhaps the Stars.

War. The third great World War, full of idealists that want to limit the damage as they fight for their ideals, the totally predictable slide into atrocities, plots within plots within plots, massive death tolls, and a huge cast of characters all following their values to their inevitable dooms.

From the first book, Too Like the Lightning, where the future world is rocked with massive betrayals to its utopia core -- to Seven Surrenders which seemed to have an ultimate winner in the wonderfully intricate values battle -- to Will to Battle, which proves that politics never really ends until all parties are safely dead -- to Perhaps the Stars, where we live the horrors of war and their aftermath, including setting one's hopes ever higher -- I have to say this series is one of the most intricately interesting pieces of fiction I've ever read.

The last book is a true capstone to the others.

One fair warning, however: because of the amount of love that had gone into these four books, I don't expect anyone to absorb all the goodies in these pages. It is rich, dense, and deserves multiple readings. It took me much longer to finish this simply because I had to absorb so much, and I'm generally a fairly fast reader.

Fortunately, it is ALL very much worth it. In a genre that generally attracts intellectuals and scientists and those who truly appreciate the imagination, this one rises to the very top of the intellectual chart.

In a world of SF that seems interchangeable with itself, the Terra Ignota series aims for the stars.

Review will be posted on Goodreads on October 5th and shared on Amazon after release.

I received an early copy in exchange for an honest review. Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Forge.

It isn't until chapter 11 that we get to find out what happened to Mycroft after we confirm near the end of book 3 that he is still alive. Everyone presumes him to be dead because they haven't had contact with him in months. But is he really alive?

Up to that point we explore a number of different ways that the war disrupts various technologies that the characters have learned to rely on for decades. Palmer instills negotiations between world leaders the same feeling of weight and urgency of a typical battle thanks to the fully realized characters built over the last three books.

There are multiple chilling clashes, some with weapons, others clashes of egos, others battles of wits and wills. Through all that, Palmer manages to masterfully weave in themes from earlier books in a way that rivals Erikson's meticulously crafted Malazan series. This is one series that I expect I will return to in years to come. It benefits greatly from multiple reads.

Perhaps the Stars stands out with how it deals with the consequences of the war for the hives involved. Few books explore the aftermath of war and the ways society chooses to punish those involved. Some of the punishments were surprising in their brilliance. I was kept guessing until the end how key tensions would resolve. You will not want to miss this thrilling conclusion.

I received an ARC of this book from Tor in exchange for an honest review. My review will include spoilers for the previous books in the Terra Ignota series, but I’ll note which parts also include spoilers for this book.

Terra Ignota is a monumental undertaking that grapples with huge questions—what does it mean to do evil? is creating a utopia possible, and can it be sustained? does human nature ever change? and perhaps most critically, why does the universe exists? All of this comes on top of a tremendously detailed world with its own byzantine legal system, tangled web of power brokers, and rapidly developing technology, including several intentional and occasionally very literal deus ex machinas. The previous books have presented some answers to those questions by revealing Mycroft Canner’s crimes and motivations, probing the ways in which Madame subverted or failed to subvert the Hive system, and offering up a variety of possible causes of war as the society of the 2450s moved towards collapse. However, Palmer pointedly refused to give an answer to the last question, leaving Jehovah Mason increasingly concerned about what terrible purpose the Author of This Universe might have for His creations. Rest assured that Perhaps the Stars offers us an answer. It’s a lot to ask even of a book this massive and complex—not for nothing is the “question of why” one of the driving forces of centuries of theology—but Palmer does not shy away from giving us an explicit, moving, and well-reasoned answer. She also wraps up the various conflicts that finally boil over (the phrase “fractal war” is coined to describe the interconnected tangle of fault lines the world is broken along, and it works spectacularly well as a description) and gives us a bold resolution that may not satisfy everyone, but certainly leaves a lot to ponder in terms of who faces consequences for their actions and how those consequences are structured. Perhaps the Stars is a long book, and that gives it time to be a war epic, several re-told Greek myths, a discussion of the politics of reconciliation, and an intensely personal drama. At the start, it feels a little more burdened by the necessities of plot than Too Like the Lightning or even the intermediate books of the series (which benefits greatly from a re-read to keep everything straight) but there are enough philosophical asides and carefully-handled wartime issues to keep the reader going until the intense theological high points of the final quarter. After taking a detour from the issues I found most interesting in The Will to Battle, Perhaps the Stars is a return to form for the series, and a conclusion that brings together all the big questions and shocking developments readers have come to expect.

Four and a half stars out of five.


Spoilers for Perhaps the Stars below!
The presence and absence of Mycroft throughout this final book, after his untimely maybe-death at the end of The Will to Battle, is one of the strongest aspects of the book. The shadow Apollo’s Iliad casts over the structure of the war looms large as the characters come to realize how Bridger’s influence hangs over the major events of the day, and nowhere is this made more personal than with Mycroft. After toning down the magic and miracles in The Will to Battle, the reader is unprepared for Bridger to play such a major role in Mycroft’s perennial survival. The hints are there, and cleverly placed—Sadcat, the Odyssey retelling, and the reappearance of Cato/Helen—but it is still devastating to watch the Ninth Anonymous surrender himself to the narrative, and to know that Saladin finally found a part of the world that was worth giving up his freedom.

Also well-done, but perhaps less personally satisfying, is the fall-out of the war. It is a bold move to impose peacetime justice on the crimes of war, and even bolder to have the presence or absence of crimes be self-imposed, but both are in keeping with the world and characters Palmer created. For a Being like Jehovah Mason, nothing could be stronger than the individual’s promise, and no legalistic tricks can elide the fact that while times change, actions still have consequences. Despite the promise of more pointed justice for those who committed the greatest crimes—Madame, Felix Faust—and the unfortunate ends met by some of the story’s main villains (looking at you, Perry-Kraye), I still found myself wondering whether such a result would be enough. Maybe Palmer truly believes that, in a better world, that would be enough. Maybe the other, invisible reforms—to the Hive system, to the state of technology, to people’s attitudes towards religion and gender—are doing the heavy lifting. Whatever the reason, I cannot bring myself to forgive and move on as easily as the gentler residents of Palmer’s imagined future. Even more challenging to stomach is the fate of Utopia—to be ceaselessly driven forward, unable to pause or look back. In Utopia, Jehovah Mason seems to find a worldview that is as implacable as his own—Apollo’s willingness to sacrifice this world to build a better one—and yet unacceptable, because despite being full of foreign concepts like pain and struggle, this world cannot be sacrificed. It makes sense, then, for him to doom them to permanent exile, but (perhaps having absorbed some of Cato’s hero-worship) it pains me to see the only Hive focused on the future left unable to live in the present. Maybe this is just the natural consequence of Utopia’s oath, which Jehovah Mason cannot but interpret literally. Still, it is harsh to see society’s dreamers confined to their dreams.

Perhaps the Stars leaves room for many more discussions, including of course the central theological question. The presentation of that answer, in parallel with the re-wired Dominic, is a masterful scene, and one that I will think about for many months to come. It is a joy to pick out all the little details in how the war is conducted, the Chekov’s guns that inevitably come off the mantel just in time (even when they were placed there several hundred pages ago). While the Terra Ignota series is not for the faint of heart, it certainly rewards close reading, careful thinking, and the careful investment of time to return to information-dense scenes time and time again. Perhaps the Stars is a worthy conclusion to one of the most ambitious and philosophical science fiction series in recent memory.

WHAT WOULD A UTOPIA LOOK LIKE?


<< When the overcast retreated on the fourth night, I looked up at the returning stars and found them, for the first time in my life, not beautiful. How near it is, Apollo. How near that black and airless ocean where no sailor can tread water, nor stranded vessel hope to catch a fatty fish or thirst-easing drizzle. >>


Terra Ignota book quartet was finalized with ‘Perhaps the Stars’ where we finally see how World War III would unfold. Mind you, this is a very specific circumstances-driven World War, which is not really a reflection of what might happen to us, but an idealization of sorts, a “I wish us humans were on that level of rationality and pacifism”-type of war narrative that is happening in far future with actors we cannot imagine being present to help us in our Present – i.e. an actual God from another dimension, resurrection potions, etc., etc.


<< 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 loved the first book of the series, ‘Too like the Lightning’ from the first chapter years ago when I read it first. I loved it the second time around a month back when I re-read it. I loved the endless senate discussions of books two and three, and I loved the tame war with insane plot twists in book four. Terra Ignota is not one of the best science fiction series I read, it is THE best and I feel it’s grossly underestimated.


<< After that, time lost its line a while. Patches of painful light and strange voices alternate in my memory with dreams of wandering salty shores, or shadowed woods, or searching in a tiny boat, alone in that vague but absolute despair that dissolves the illusion that time can be measured. >>


BUT THE BEST ASPECT OF THE BOOK(S)?

It’s Mycroft Canner. I said it when I read ‘Too like the Lightning’ years ago, and I’ll say it again: Mycroft Canner is one of my favourite characters in fiction! He’s a monster and a killer (I know the book tried to give him Reasons for being Good, but in my eyes, he is neither Good nor Evil, he’s Insane. Anyway, the eye of the beholder and all that…) that takes us through the complex narrative of first three books and now finally the last book which deals with the actual war we’ve been getting to for years now.


<< But perhaps you are angry with me? Expecting a thousand apologies for my long absence? No. What would such apologies mean, reader, between we two who know each other now so well? >>


This time around we see the narrative from both Mycroft’s and his Successor’s perspective, which was a genius idea because we finally saw Mycroft’s sometimes muddled point of view and then got the “objective” account of what really happened from his Successor. We got to see Mycroft observing the Outside, which gave us extra depth to Mycroft’s character. I will admit, though, his name – Mycroft – always gave me ideas about him being behind it all; behind the Seven-Ten list theft, behind the deaths and the War. I wanted him to be the final Villain, the one that only pretended to be good, that lied, that cheated, that worked a plan which was in place ever since his two-week killing spree years ago. I wanted Mycroft to be the ultimate Mega-mind behind every little thing, holding the reigns, pushing and pulling actors… He did do all that in a way, but not as a Villain because he ended up being the Hero. Which is fine. Just fine. Totally OK. Mycroft, our Odysseus finally come home.


<< Time and distance make us ghosts to one another even when we’re still alive and here, but while it makes us ghosts it doesn’t make us nothing. >>


<< Humans are so amazing that we can love somebody far away, or in the past, or future, somebody whose name we may not ever know, but love is no less real or powerful because you’re not together breathing the same oxygen. >>


But yes, the Illiad and Odyssey references. The Greek mythology. The whole package was very satisfying. I loved how old-fashioned World War III in ‘Perhaps the Stars’ ended up being, how hard and clumsy and real. There were so many sides and developments and complications, I am awed at the work that must have gone into it to accomplish that level of complexity. We got to see everything: from new forms of communication when the wires and telephones failed, to the use of bicycles when all the flying cars broke down. We saw endless confusions of allegiances and battles and Hives and heroes and villains.


<< I will not be moved from where I stand except by victory, which will be mine in death as much as life! For if I live, I live to keep my Almagest, and if die, the pyre my friends and Empire erect for me will burn on in incessant fires of war, in grind of wheels, in drums, in every instrument of vengeance, until my will is worked as absolutely in my death as if I held the chisel in my hand to carve my law into humanity! >>


The discussions about using lethal weapons were really interesting. This is where I wish the Human Species got to in the future. A war fought with teaser-guns, a war fought under laws that forbid killing, violence, theft, etc. A Peaceful War.


<< I’d rather have the chance to give my life to fix the thing than have no way to fix a thing that so needs to be fixed that I’d give my life for it. >>


The Philosophy, though, is the best part of the quartet! Hobbes with his Leviathans and that one scene in the previous book where Spinoza’s work is used as a torture device. Divine! I mean, I am no philosopher. I read philosophy only as a hobby and most of it is from Instagram accounts about the Stoics. I never read Spinoza or Hobbes or de Sade, but the books were written so expertly that you don’t have to read them. There are numerous depths if you are familiar with these philosophers, but in general, the books can be enjoyed without that extra knowledge. But once you finish them, you’ll wish to know what Spinoza said that was so horrible to serve as a weapon. I know I do.


<< These aren’t suicidal thoughts. They’re meta-suicidal thoughts, fear that I might become suicidal, pre-horror that this long grind will break me, make me betray so much. The me that I am now is horrified at the very thought of suicide, or dying at all really, but I can tell that me is changing, like I’m dough being extruded through a tube, and who knows what weird shape will spew out the other side. Every time the nausea peaks and I beg inside for the sedation to take hold, my welcome off-switch, the fear hits me: what if the self that spews out of this a month from now would beg like this for the off-switch that never ends? >>


In short, I love smart books and this is It. Will recommend to everyone I meet if our conversations ever steer to books (which I’ll make sure they do.)


<< The depths and death, and then perhaps the stars. >>

Perhaps the Stars perfectly concludes the Terra Ignota series. There are long stretches of the book dedicated to philosophizing rather than delving deeper into the plot and characters, but if you've made it this far in the series you already know what you're signing up for in this book. Fans of the previous books won't be disappointed with how this book ties up loose ends and finishes on a satisfying, positive note for a series that explores much of the dark nature of humanity and society.