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.

Thank you to netgalley The publisher and the author for allowing me to read an eARC of this book.

Apologies for the late review

I don’t think this book was for me not only was it very long but also it had war and Many other aspects that I really enjoy inbox the writing so I didn’t wanna mess with me but overall I thought it was a good book just not for my personal tastes

The reason why I have enjoyed the Terra Ignota series primarily is because it is difficult. Its a book of politics, set four hundred years in the future and while it isn't deliberately obtuse in filling in the gaps of history, it also doesn't do that much hand-holding. Discovery through the text is one of the many joys of the series, which has more than its share of idiosyncrasies. Perhaps The Stars comes out after a bit of a gap from its three predecessors, and I was wary of the problem I had with the Baru Cormorant series that I would have forgotten what had happened previously. The earlier books were magnificently dense, taking place over just a few days of crisis. Perhaps The Stars is quite a very different book in comparison. It has (on the whole) a different narrator. It takes place over a year and is a war diary, the war that was precipitated by the previous novels. It both unfolds the canvas tot he whole world, and restricts the knowledge to our lead. And has to deal with the consequences of the previous books where the main narrator died, the most intriguing character Bridger also sort of died, other characters transformed and, well suffice it to say that Palmer just about digs herself out of all the holes she has dug herself into.

Nevertheless this is the book where Palmer's day job as a historian is most felt. The throughline of Masonic influence has always been part of the books (MASON writ large being a major leadership figure), but here there is a playful rerun of the Odyssey which conforms to rule one of decent surprises in books - let the reader work it out four pages before the book does. The shift from behind the scene machinations to big picture war is difficult, and despite a timeline and dramatis personae she tries to keep things as simple as possible whilst still maintaining the sense of wonder the previous books had (needless to say for a future war scenario she gets her moment in the gundam sun).

I'm going to re-read the whole series next year to see how it all hangs together as a piece. I certainly wasn't disappointed with this ending, though perhaps a little surprised about how hopeful it was. There is a nice point where she dismantles the fear of the Utopians in the novel as fear of the unknown, but also that they are the secret heroes of the piece, that had previously been such an inwardly focused tale of politics. It is good that it ends with a bigger picture view of what this business of humanity is all about. The wonders of the previous novel never really get explained, but the wonders of the future come out of hope. Its a nice ending to a fascinating bit of work. Highly recommended.

I requested this ARC by mistake as I confused an author with an other. That said it was a blessed confusion because I'm speechless and it's hard to review this book.
I know that it's wrong to start a series with the last book but I can say I loved this one and loved every moment.
Great world building and character development, a plot that flows and keeps you turning pages. The author is a master storyteller and I will go back and read the rest of the series and will surely love this book even more than I did.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Whenever I see an Ada Palmer scifi novel, I click request and make a mental note to bring my brain for the occasion because she does not write soft, easy space opera. I’ve really enjoyed this series and this was a great instalment. Recommend starting with To Like the Lightning and working through at a leisurely pace.

Absolutely fantastic conclusion to a masterful series which blends sci fi, politics and more. The depth of character development is brilliant and the direction the story goes in is surprising with many twists and turns.

A very satisfying conclusion, with a remarkable trust in the general capacity of good by (future) people. A rollercoaster of a book, full of twist and turns and many concepts to ponder on
We are the instruments that carve the path from cave walls to the stars

...before I've sweated out my term as oarsman on Apollo's flagship, I must lead Utopia to some new world untouched by Distance, where the very oars and sails we use to battle grim Poseidon are undreamed. [loc. 12074]

The long-awaited (and long) finale of the Terra Ignota series. (Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle.) I will not attempt to summarise the tetralogy here, except to note that it's set in a 25th century that thinks it's small-u utopian but has elements of dystopia. There are gods (some more Present than others) and monsters (oh, Mycroft), a World War and an ideological war conducted simultaneously, a villain in an underground lair (hmm, more than one of those), reversals and twists, blurred identities, mythic resonances, metamorphoses and miracles, space elevators, and -- regrettably -- spreadsheets, which have not yet gone extinct.

The war subtracts two of the key technologies that society relies on: the car system, which had made it possible for individuals to live and work anywhere in the world with at most a two-hour commute, and the tracker system, which connected (and monitored) everybody. Chaos, in the form of riot and prejudice, ensues, and old alignments and alliances shift and change: the calming influences aren't necessarily those one might expect. The twin toxicities of gender and religion are further explored, and some of the limitations of the various approaches to both acknowledged. The existence and treatment of Servicers is also addressed, and by the end of the novel there are credible expectations of a better world. Or worlds.

Not all endings are happy, but happiness is not necessarily the point.

There were some conclusions that weren't wholly satisfying (Madame, reminiscent of Lady Macbeth; Thisbe; Ráðsviðr), and some developments -- those relating to the narrative voices, and the various Readers who interrupt and interrogate the primary narrative -- which felt slightly rushed: but the latter might simply be because I raced through the novel and missed foreshadowing. Conversely, it was cheering to spot a resonance or reference before it was made explicit. There's a lot of the Iliad here, as well as its in-universe sci-fi reimagining by Apollo Mojave (which was read and reimagined, in turn, by an impressionable adolescent). Apollo never, thankfully, got as far as the Odyssey, which is mirrored in Mycroft's tale. I cheered when Helen was revealed, and teared up at Odysseus' dog.

...Perhaps the Stars is a densely-written, complex, philosophical novel which I suspect I'll be assimilating for some time. It doesn't answer all the questions I hoped it would: it doesn't neatly tie off all the threads. But it is profound and provocative, tragic and triumphant and, literally, marvellous.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest and unbiased review which I'm posting out of sequence for publication day!

I have loved Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series so much, I am quite sad to see it end. So much more intricate world building and such an amazing story

Staggering, ambitious, ridiculous, heartfelt, opaque; the most emotionally exhausting read I can remember. It's hard talking about a book concluding a series comprising the most impressive novels of the past decade, when not nearly enough people have read the damn things. Palmer's prose, for instance, and the reversals in the narration, are as big a part of her achievement here as the astonishing world-building – but if I were to comment on any differences there may or may not be between the narration here and that perverse 18th century voice in earlier volumes, it would be a terrible spoiler both for those who have been reading the series, and for those lucky ones who have the whole thing still to come. Or even to explain the structure of the series, in which Too Like The Lightning gave us a seductive 25th century near-utopia; Seven Surrenders exposed its secrets and flaws; and The Will To Battle set it toppling...I've just given away some of the secrets of the best books of the past 15 years, but without doing so, how to say any more of this one than 'This is a science fiction book which is very good'? Not that I intend to give away too many of its secrets, you understand, and even if I did it would be a struggle; the series has always been a bugger to explain, sometimes even to follow, though it's important to note that this is the confusion of a real and solid and populous world, rather than any failing on the part of its maker and teller. Besides, the last time I tried to explain exactly what had me so animated in terms of the immediate plot, I got as far as 'so there's a toy soldier who's been brought to life, and an invisible lion, and a character who may be God', and realised I sounded like I was describing a particularly fevered dream. That even with all three of those character summaries being painfully incomplete... Little wonder if half the people on whom I've pressed Too Like The Lightning bounced off, and others couldn't get on with the series' subsequent wanderings. Even here, I suspect some will feel the series has finally gone too far. Palmer always knew that 'Show, don't tell' is advice for amateurs, but there are sections here which are barely even telling so much as notes of things we probably should be told. And the very ending looks at a number of widely mocked endings, then goes one louder. Yet for me at least, these were entirely fitting, the only way this could or should be told.

So yes: Perhaps The Stars is indeed the story of the ensuing war – at once the return of something which seemed finally to have been banished from the world, and a horribly new phenomenon. Because nation states are vestigial in Palmer's future, most people instead pledging allegiance to various Hives according to preference and temperament – meaning that against the broad geographical axis of historical conflicts, this is something more like world civil war. As ever, Palmer's background as a historian means she can get the little details of a future era just right – the way a symbol which began as a way to signal neutrality can itself become a sign of alignment as the context changes; the resurfacing of old hatreds when people's backs are against the wall, paired with humanity's horrible gift for finding whole new bigotries. Factions and alliances become progressively more tangled, leaving almost everyone standing with those they can't abide, and the apparently noble casus belli – whether to preserve the greatest civilisation humanity has ever known, or remake it as something hopefully even better – ends up down in the mud, because war is war, and humans are humans. Yet not entirely in the mud; enough of the players have been shaped by nobler motives and better worlds that whatever compromises may be forced, whatever dreadful prices paid, Perhaps The Stars feels like it operates on a much larger scale than our own grubby age. Whenever I turned from this account to the news, reality seemed a very thin and unconvincing sort of thing in comparison. And for all that describing a book as unputdownable is a standard term of praise, I did turn away, even beyond the pauses obliged by things like work and life and sleep. For all that I've been impatient for this much-delayed book since, what, 2018?, there were multiple times when, looking at the book I've been most anticipating for so long, I couldn't quite bear to read on, so invested am I in the whole shebang and so terrified of what was about to happen. Although it could have been worse; I'm really glad it didn't arrive last year. The flying cars (such a key signifier of the future we were meant to have, and so a crucial fixture of the setting) are grounded, you see; "I have never been in a place before. None of us has, not really, not like this. We could always fly anywhere we wished in an instant or an hour. Now I am in Romanova. I will be in Romanova tomorrow and the next day. I will walk these streets and only these streets, sleep on this sofa, eat from this shop". There's even something which seems very reminiscent of that life-sapping combination of long COVID and lockdown. All of this in a book written pre-Event. I can suspect the odd line like "faces all around me show much vigor this vampire year has drained from all of us" as reaction, added during revisions, though even there I could be wrong. But dear heavens, it would have been a bit close to home in 2020, wouldn't it? "I will not hope again. Hope is the most dangerous thing. Hope opens the armor inside us." True, things are a little better now – though not so much so that I dare hope for a future like Terra Ignota, where yes, in this book all that is best about humanity stands under threat of destruction, but where at least we reached a point where we will have that much to lose. In the end – and I suppose this could be construed as a spoiler, but like the gleanings of any mystical experience, the summary won't make the requisite impact unless and until you've shared the experience – the series reveals itself as addressing that biggest and oldest of problems, the intolerability of death and separation, and what it does to humanity that we must tolerate them nonetheless, and how remarkable it is that despite this we can still somehow bring ourselves to love.

(Netgalley ARC)