2 reviews found

I'm not sure if it's a positive or negative that I read Too Like the Lightning so soon after reading Ilium. That is, Ada Palmer’s writing here reminds me a lot of Dan Simmons’ writing: science fiction heavily saturated with literary and philosophical references. In this case, Palmer grounds her story in the duelling philosophies of the Enlightenment—humanists vs rationalists, individualists vs collectivists—while simultaneously springboarding us into a vision of a future for humanity…

For some reason I thought this book seemed way shorter than the first one, but I’m realizing now it’s just that I read Too Like the Lightning in hardcover, so it seemed thicker and more imposing. That being said, Seven Surrenders was less exhausting and easier to digest than the first book. At first I thought that was because I was just used to Ada Palmer’s writing, but now I think it’s also because this…