Too Like the Lightning

Ada Palmer

  • Sci-Fi; Fantasy

  • July 2017

    • UK: Head of Zeus

    • US: Tor Books

Terra Ignota Book I

The year is 2454. 

Humanity has engineered a hard-won golden age, forged in the aftermath of a bitter conflict that wiped both religion and nation state from the planet. Now seven factions or 'hives' co-govern the world, their rule fuelled by benign censorship, oracular statistical analytics and technological abundance. But this is a fragile Utopia – and someone is intent on pushing it to breaking point. 
Convicted for his crimes, celebrated for his talents, Mycroft Canner is the indentured instrument – and confidant – of some of the world's most powerful figures. When he is asked to investigate a bizarre theft, he finds himself on the trail of a conspiracy that could shatter the tranquil world order the Hives have maintained for three centuries. 

But Mycroft has his own secrets. He is concealing a much greater threat to the seven Hives, a wild car no degree of statistical analysis could have prophesised. This threat takes the unlikely form of a thirteen-year-old called Bridger. For how will a world that has banished God deal with a child who can perform miracles?

  • WINNER OF THE JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD AT THE HUGO AWARDS 2016

  • WINNER OF THE COMPTON CROOK AWARD 2017

Selected Praise

Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent
— Ken Liu, author of The Wall of Storms
Incredibly ambitious and groundbreaking... Palmer writes gloriously lush prose stuffed with asides, allusions and nods to the reader
— The Guardian
The kind of science fiction that makes me excited all over again about what science fiction can do
— Jo Walton, author of Tooth and Claw

Other books by Ada Palmer