Perhaps The Stars, by Ada Palmer
Gah, how to talk about this book?
There's almost no major topic that isn't somewhere tied into this work, which makes it impossible to find a foothold on it, and I think, in the end, I would've rather read 10 shorter books that were each a little more tightly woven? I realise that the human mind is a massive sprawling megawork where everything is connected to everything, but.... I'm not sure I actually learn from reading something this unmanageable? I don't know, maybe I do, maybe this is what learning feels like.
Alright, so here's one arbitrary thread. Ada's written elsewhere -- in an essay that I think is a kind of key to her novels -- that "In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon invented progress." To explain....
Ancient Greek philosophies certainly had the idea of change, but did not have:
(A) intentionality behind this change,
(B) a positive arc to this change,
(C) an infinite or unlimited arc to this change, or–perhaps most critically–(D) the expectation that any more change will occur in the future.
Quantitatively things might be different — Rome’s empire might grow or shrink, or fall entirely to be replaced by another — but fundamentally cities will be cities, plows will be plows, empires will be empires, and in a thousand years bread will still be bread.
Medieval Europe had "one Cause for all effects;" the cause is God, specifically God communicating moral lessons to humanity. So e.g. Dante thought God "wanted His Son to be lawfully executed by all humanity, so the sin and guilt and salvation would be universal, so He created the Roman Empire." There's no point asking "why did X when battle Y" because the only reason for anything is "God needed it for a chain of events that would eventually teach humanity an important lesson." There's no progress, there's just stuff God makes happen because it suits the lessons he wants to teach us.
The Renaissance didn't have progress either, but it got closer to it, via the idea of a classical Golden Age followed by the bad bad Dark Ages and then the desire to get back to the glory of antiquity. But that's not really progress, that's clambering back to some goodness that already existed in the past.
Then, in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon invented progress:
If we work together — said he — if we observe the world around us, study, share our findings, collaborate, uncover as a human team the secret causes of things hidden in nature, we can base new inventions on our new knowledge which will, in small ways, little by little, make human life just a little easier... We can make every generation’s experience on this Earth a little better than our own. Let us found a new method — the Scientific Method — and with it dedicate ourselves to the advancement of knowledge of the secret causes of things, and the expansion of the bounds of human empire to the achievement of all things possible.
The next bit is slightly wild -- why should anyone believe "science works when you have no examples of science working yet?"
Bacon’s answer — the answer which made kingdom and crown stream passionate support and birthed the Academy of Sciences–may surprise the 21st-century reader, accustomed as we are to hearing science and religion framed as enemies. We know science will work–Bacon replied–because of God. There are a hundred thousand things in this world which cause us pain and suffering, but God is Good. He gave the cheetah speed, the lion claws. He would not have sent humanity out into this wilderness without some way to meet our needs. He would not have given us the desire for a better world without the means to make it so. He gave us Reason. So, from His Goodness, we know that Reason must be able to achieve all He has us desire.
Ok, while I'm just mass-quoting Ada's essay, a few other good bits:
Francis Bacon died from pneumonia contracted while experimenting with using snow to preserve chickens, attempting to give us refrigeration, by which food could be stored and spread across a hungry world.
It really took two hundred years for Bacon’s academy to develop anything useful. There was a lot of dissecting animals, and exploding metal spheres, and refracting light, and describing gravity, and it was very, very exciting, and a lot of it was correct, but–as the eloquent James Hankins put it–it was actually the nineteenth century that finally paid Francis Bacon’s I.O.U., his promise that, if you channel an unfathomable research budget, and feed the smartest youths of your society into science, someday we’ll be able to do things we can’t do now, like refrigerate chickens, or cure rabies, or anesthetize. There were a few useful advances (better navigational instruments, Franklin’s lightning rod) but for two hundred years most of science’s fruits were devices with no function beyond demonstrating scientific principles. Two hundred years is a long time for a vastly-complex society-wide project to keep getting support and enthusiasm, fed by nothing but pure confidence that these discoveries streaming out of the Royal Society papers will eventually someday actually do something. I just think… I just think that keeping it up for two hundred years before it paid off, that’s… that’s really cool.
As Bacon’s followers reexamined science from the ground up, throwing out old theories and developing new correct ones which would eventually enable effective advances, it didn’t take long for his followers to apply his principle (that we should attack everything with Reason’s razor and keep only what stands) to social questions: legal systems, laws, judicial practices, customs, social mores, social classes, religion, government… treason, heresy… hello, Thomas Hobbes. In fact the scientific method that Bacon pitched, the idea of progress, proved effective in causing social change a lot faster than genuinely useful technology. Effectively the call was: “Hey, science will improve our technology! It’s… it’s not doing anything yet, so… let’s try it out on society? Yeah, that’s doing… something… and — Oh! — now the technology’s doing stuff too!” Except that sentence took three hundred years.
Ok so... in short, my theory of Perhaps the Stars and the whole Terra Ignota quartet is that it's an extended grapple with Bacon. I think Ada broadly agrees with Bacon? I think she's trying to further the Baconian project? The title Terra Ignota, by the way, "is an alternate form of the archaic topographical term terra incognita (Latin for "unknown land"), once used to denote regions that had not been mapped or documented. Ada Palmer repurposes the term as a new type of international law pleading" -- basically, characters can be charged with high crimes and say "this wasn't a crime because I was treading on terra ignota, everything is new here, we should be flexible and forgiving about this because I was walking in this strange new world, and I did the best I could." (This is followed by the characters developing new laws for "next time," but forgiving the pioneers for their mistakes).
I think Ada is trying to prepare us for this unknown world that we're already entering into? I assume there's some model for this in seventeenth or eighteenth century letters, I don't know who but I'm sure Ada does. And I think this is a mainstream understanding, now, of speculative fiction, that it helps us take seriously other radically different possible futures? Octavia Butler wrote (in a different context, obviously):
"What good is science fiction to Black people? What good is any form of literature to Black people? What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future and the past? What good is its tendency to warn, or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organisation and political direction? Science fiction gets both reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what everyone is saying, doing, thinking, whoever everyone happens to be this year. And what good is all this to Black people???"I'm fairly sure Fredric Jameson said something similar in The Desire Called Utopia, a book I was assigned in college and now remember almost-nothing of, except the claim that SF is the only truly utopian genre of writing because it kind-of-tricks us into accepting and then genuinely thinking through other possible worlds. (I looked up the essay to see if I was remembering this right but found I now can't read academese, genuinely feels like a second language I knew once and now can barely comprehend). And this seems true to me, and one of the few things that reassures me when I fear that I'm wasting my life in fictional worlds, and that this is pure consumption and not actually valuable. (To be clear there's nothing wrong with doing some things just for the fun of it, but the amount that I read fiction is disproportionate to the amount I want to be doing things just-for-fun). So... maybe? But I keep coming back to the thought that this only feels "valid" to me if the fictional worlds presented are actually "plausible", in the sense that a world under those rules would behave in that way, and often in fact the authors are just wrong about how the world they present would work. And maybe that's sneaking false ideas into our heads about how other-worlds could possibly work, but since it's under the guise of fiction our brains are less on-guard, being able to say "of course this isn't real" while also shaping the way we think about what is real?
A whole bunch of unrelated notes:
- Ada's world feels like it was structured by someone who's played a lot of D&D. I'm cheating here somewhat because once I asked her about the eclectic range of things she does and she replied with something about the allocation of her experience-points and that's definitely someone who's played a lot of D&D. But for the novels, it's more about how different groups have different strengths and vocations, and each group (and trait) is presented as really wonderful and admirable, and part of the experience of the book is feeling "I want to be one of those people!", and then "I want to be one of those!", and so on for each of the character-types.
- Also cheating but the book is so obviously entangled with Jo Walton's A Just City that I think, even if I didn't already know that, I would have guessed
- I can't decide whether there's something misleading about a book where the conclusions follow from the premise that gods are real, if you think we live in a world where gods aren't real -- basically, isn't that so fundamental that if you change that one thing then what everyone should do is different? But then, if you write a book where that one big thing is true and it's otherwise gripping and makes you want to be like the characters, you're "misleading" people about what people should be and do?
- I finished this book having truly no idea what Palmer's actual beliefs or philosophies are; part of me thinks she must be religious, that the book doesn't make sense otherwise, part of me thinks she isn't, that the god-like elements in the book are stand ins for... what, AI? Progress? Abstract ideals? I don't know.
- various parts of the book have that kinda professional-class faith-in-rules-and-bureaucracies feel, the kind of impulse that creates the UN or whatever, which is interesting because Ada immediately has the characters acknowledge "the incentives will be hard to manage, these things always spiral" or something, and yet still seems to believe these things will work?
- I can't decide if the novels are undercut by occasional lapses in (what I think is) realism in the deployment of power, where characters do things that seem antithetical to me to what would happen in real life.
- similarly, can't decide whether occasional (what I think are) plot loopholes kinda ruin the book, because so much else of the book is so carefully figured out -- it's almost harder to accept the kind of "WELL this worked" bits when other bits have been hashed out in extreme detail.
- overall: I can't honestly say that this book "worked" for me. But I admire that she took on something this wild and convoluted: the meme about "most ambitious crossover event in history" comes up. Is it bad that I want to be like this, that admire this? I guess we come back to a question about whether writers actually have any influence over the world, whether the answer is "very" (by influencing people who actually do stuff) or "none at all" (reasons seem obvious to me)
- Is it possible there are books that you should basically study in depth, slowly, with other people, and a commentary, or not read them at all? (I've heard this said of Joyce, who I haven't read). I... wouldn't actually want to spend the time studying this book in depth, I don't think that would be "worth it" to me, but maybe without that you're not really getting the value of a book like this, you're only getting the superficial surface? I don't know.
- I basically inhaled this book over the course of a week, reading a couple of hours when I woke up each day and then sprinkles of the rest throughout the day. (I did not really want to be spending my time this way, and it was one of those "I think I just need to accept that I'm going to be addicted to this till I finish it so I might as well finish it fast" feelings). I... don't actually know if I liked it? I've said before that I think compulsiveness in books is completely orthogonal to quality, that there are great books that are hard to get through and terrible books that you can't put down, and this wasa .... a possibly-great, possibly fundamentally-flawed book that I couldn't put down?