Seeking to distinguish J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythopoeia from the “serious” sprawling fantasias of Nabokov, Pynchon, and DeLillo (solidly “literature” to Tolkien’s “genre fiction”), Jenny Turner wrote:
Here is a list of some of the things you learn about when you read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: LA punk, Jacobean revenge tragedy, early computers, radical politics of the 1960s, the Pony Express. Out your mind darts, searching the world for information. In it comes again, digging back with its goodies into the text. Here are some of the things you learn about while reading The Lord of the Rings: hobbit-lore, the two branches of Elvish, the annals of the Númenórean kings. Spot the difference? That’s right: the second lot is entirely fictional, and doesn’t involve even the shortest trip from your chair. The lore is self-referential, centripetal, an occult system. As astrology is to physics or conspiracy theory to history, so Middle Earth is to literature and learning. It’s a closed space, finite and self-supporting, fixated on its own nostalgia, quietly running down.
Another characteristic shared by [Nabokov, Pynchon, and DeLillo] is that their novels, with their silly names, their silly self-contained systems, their silly self-regarding theories, hover on the edge of kitsch. Poor Tolkien wouldn’t know how to hover if you told him. He simply sits there, stoic to the end, in the middle of his very own snowdome, surrounded by the dwindling elf-dust.
Ada Palmer sets out (quite appropriately, as her novels dwell among many other things on the gender confusions which coined the now-ubiquitous phrase) to queer Turner’s binary — to send us shooting out, centrifugally, without leaving the dour snowdome of imaginary politics and imaginary war (there is little kitsch in evidence here — an entirely too twentieth-century concept for Palmer’s weeping Enlightenment future). Palmer is a professor of history at the University of Chicago, specializing in the intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance — her work on 15th century annotators of Lucretius is widely cited by the debunkers of Stephen Greenblatt’s poppy “Swerve” thesis that De rerum natura was the primary impetus for the Age of Enlightenment.
I strongly recommend the series, which (especially in the first and last volumes) is as unrelentingly disorienting and experimental as the strangest of the postmodern masters. What follows are some disconnected thoughts on the major ideas in the series, on the occasion of finishing the final volume.
The Trunk War - or, the question of the Utopians
The final volume of the series is titled Perhaps the Stars, which (modulo punctuation) is the title of the chapter in Too Like the Lightning in which the Utopians are introduced. In a fictional world filled with organizations that take some manner of inspiration from medieval monasticism, the Utopians are introduced in such a way as to emphasize their almost semi-divine nun- or angel-like purity, as Mycroft rescues a pair from an attempted sexual assault by ruffians — motivated, he speculates, by the common knowledge of the Utopians’ position spiritually above the rest of us, their semi-perfection.
The ultimate conflict between the Utopians and Gordian is, appropriately, a reflection of a number of powerful dichotomies. As nostalgebraist has pointed out, the Brillists are in some ways an autistic person’s caricature of neurotypicals (their uncanny reading of facial expressions! Their single-minded obsession with human matters!), while the Utopians are something of a flattering self-image of autistic SFF nerds and engineers. The Gordians also, however, represent a strain within (small-u) utopian, autistic, transhumanist circles, of a laserlike focus on mortality and the preservation of the human mind. Different people come down on different sides of this question even within the communities that would most easily recognize themselves in the Utopians. And Palmer ultimately ties that conflict symbolically to the explore-exploit dichotomy, a conflict that’s as old as Whigs and Democrats, Vikings and farmers, builders and navigators. Indeed, that tradeoff is fundamental to any optimization problem — look for new things, or invest in what you have?
If you feel about death the way that both Utopians and Gordians say they do, then it’s hard to argue that the Gordian path isn’t more desirable — the shortest path to immortality is extremely unlikely to run through the seas of Titan. In a way, the Utopians are also fighting for Romanticism here — worthy successors to the likes of Thomas Cole, who were invigorated by the bombast of the New World’s natural landscapes, entirely apart from the piddling pragmatic question of what was to be done with them, or at what price they were acquired.
Palmer carefully avoids making that comparison, however. Indeed, although the subject of settling on celestial bodies is a central question throughout the series, as far as I can tell she never once makes use of the very conventional English phrase “space colonization”. The analogy to Whiggish intensive development vs the American frontier is fairly obvious, and is in some sense probably at the cladistic root of Palmer’s own conception of this conflict — the shadow of Frederick Jackson Turner clearly looms over the rhapsodic descriptions by or for Utopians in Terra Ignota of the virtues of their new frontier (another term that Palmer pointedly avoids) — the Moon, Mars, and the vast frontiers of space beyond1.
Washing the stink of settler colonialism off of the concept of cities on the Moon is as futile (and pointless) as trying to wipe the blood of the Inquisition off the Cross — but in the year 2021, it's a cultural exercise that is necessary for anyone who seeks elite funding and political support for such projects. In 2454, Wounded Knee will actually be as distant in time as the Inquisition is to us secular, distracted moderns — but Terra Ignota was not, after all, written in the 25th century.
An Unknown Country
That brings us to another point. One of the signal pleasures of Too Like the Lightning was that it insisted on presenting the reader with a disconcertingly alien future — a future in which not only has the political geography of the Earth been rearranged (and the very concept of “political geography” called radically into question), but the social, political, and ethical assumptions of contemporary Western society are routinely violated — not by mere negation (in the manner of e.g. de Sade to his own time2), but by totally orthogonal development.
For example, in the world established in Too Like the Lightning, certain things are meant to subtly shock us — the total lack of personal privacy or freedom of speech (although the effects of these are muted on the primary characters since they are mostly global celebrities and/or world leaders) — while others are meant to be overtly shocking: for example, Sniper is supposed to be an international sex symbol of indeterminate sex, who is constantly described as physically child-like and makes a fortune from the sale of hyper-realistic, anatomically complete companion dolls in their likeness. Sniper themself is depicted as fine with this arrangement, and even pleased with it. This is neither unparalleled as an arrangement of human society nor anywhere near the range of outcomes considered acceptable by common decency in our own time. Too Like the Lightning is filled with such details. The society depicted there has an understanding of gender and sexuality a million miles from our modern conceptions of such things, rooted in biology but fundamentally strange in disparate directions — both silent on the subject and, as the other side of the same coin, lasciviously obsessed with it. Modern notions of transgender identity or sexual orientation don’t even apply.
But in Perhaps the Stars especially, Palmer backs down from many of these alien details. As others have noted, the reforms instituted at the very close of the series essentially seek to make their world more similar to ours, eroding their strange taboos on gender and religion, robbing the papier-mache Masons of their talismanic authority, and so on.
Perhaps the best illustration of this is some of the clunky, adolescent dialogue that gets attributed to Sniper towards the end of Perhaps the Stars — they enter unprompted (in a totally inappropriate context) onto a long monologue about their gender identity and pronoun preferences which could have been lifted from someone’s tumblr circa 2021. At one point they put into writing, in seeming earnest in a letter to their ba’sib Cato, “thank you for supporting my asexuality” — which, at least to this reader, sounds as bizarre on their tongue as it would to hear Elon Musk denouncing the scourge of Arianism. Those words belong in another time; I know your world too well for them to ring true coming from Sniper.
It all feels as if Palmer is apologizing, or anxiously backing away from the sheer alienness of Too Like the Lightning, trying to find ways to bring the world of Terra Ignota back into alignment with the mores of the 21st century United States. It’s a wasted opportunity, especially for an author who was so daring in setting up the parameters of their world. Much as we may hope it didn’t, the cultural fever of the US under the Donald Trump administration may have choked off the full realization of some of these ideas. Or perhaps there’s simply no way of trying to be hopeful, or “hopepunk”3, and be perceived as such by the bulk of one’s audience, without to some extent returning to some respect for their mores by the end of the story.
Bridger
A number of elements in Terra Ignota are reported to us, the readers, as essentially supernatural. The more difficult of these, as a reader, is the question of J.E.D.D. Mason, whose allegedly supernatural properties are essentially theological or metaphysical in nature, so it is not even clear if what he claims to be is inconsistent with our world as we understand it.
Less ambiguous in this respect is the figure of Bridger, whose fate is in many ways the central matter of the first three books. If Bridger’s powers aren’t legitimately supernatural (or meaningfully an outside-context event a la extraterrestrials) then the Utopians’ technology is both much more sophisticated than they let on, and developed in strange directions — why would anyone bother to actually build a giant mech suit? Giant mech suits are cool, and they feature frequently in media, but those aren’t good enough reasons to actually target that design for a world-altering superweapon. They are good enough reasons for an author to include such a device in her fictional world.
That’s the brilliance (or, looked at another way, cheapness) of the Bridger concept; once we have introduced the notion that he might be altering the whole world, or anything he’s ever had contact with, in overt or subtle ways based on any media he’s been exposed to, he functions as an in-universe excuse or explanation for the leakage of story logic into a supposedly otherwise rational universe. Why are there so many Homeric parallels in Perhaps the Stars? Why do the Hive leaders act dramatically and Romantically like they were characters in a bad soap opera, or an actual opera?
Frustratingly, there is already an “out” for these kinds of questions, because the whole series is purportedly a document in the world of the story, written by a character who is to some extent hallucinating and otherwise insane. Even the personal historical chronicles of the sane and well-informed are full of exaggeration, muddled recollection, mythmaking, tactful omission, and self-interested deception. Practically anything could be papered over by Mycroft’s unreliability! But that runs into the metaphysical questions around the true narrator of Perhaps the Stars, and in any case the metafictional aspect of Bridger, who is a divine “author” of the world of Terra Ignota — literalizing the metaphysical notion of the hermeneutical creation of the world4— seems to be a theme of independent interest to Palmer; Bridger’s influence is repeatedly offered up as a diegetic explanation for Terra Ignota’s literary influences, narrative structure, and even minor quirks presumably of authorial origin like the similarity of two narrators, or the oddness of Mycroft’s character profile given his alleged crimes. These “explanations” are not exactly “necessary” (all other fictional stories in the secular age have done without them!), but they add another strange metaphysical layer to the world of the story.
J.E.D.D. Mason
On the subject of the supernatural in Terra Ignota: What’s the deal with J.E.D.D. Mason? Well, what’s the deal with airplane food?
J.E.D.D. Mason is a very unusual person who claims to be a God (capital G, because he’s an omnipotent monotheistic God in his own universe) — one in exile from his own timeless, distanceless Universe, and now inhabiting a finite, mortal form in another God’s Universe. So the sense in which he’s a God, if he is one, is very metaphysical. Mycroft Canner or the 9th Anonymous5 reports to their readers that Huxley Mojave told them that J.E.D.D. Mason has some unusual neural patterns or something that the Utopians are studying. The Gordians seem to think J.E.D.D. is very unusual and worthy of study, or at least Felix Faust claims so to J.E.D.D. Mason’s face. He has some true-believer followers and some followers who are not really true believers.
But is he what he says he is? If you only work from the information we have, that’s at least as hard to answer as it was for the last guy, and maybe a lot harder. Indeed, one might reasonably ask (if one was inclined in the general direction of positivist philosophy) whether there is any “actual question”, that is, a disagreement about observations, underlying this seeming dispute. Certainly, the question of J.E.D.D. Mason’s “actual nature” is a subject of heated dispute among fans in the real world.
If you asked Wittgenstein or Yudkowsky, they would ask you what material facts, what concrete observations are in dispute when we consider J.E.D.D. Mason’s metaphysical status. He has performed no miracles, after all, nor does he claim he could. Would the outcome of the Utopians’ neurological observations really answer the question either way?
The only interesting questions left, from this perspective, are for J.E.D.D. Mason Himself. As Judas Iscariot sang to his own beloved master, at least if Andrew Lloyd Webber is to be believed:
Jesus Christ, Superstar
Do you think you're what they say you are?
He seems to think He is What He says He is, and that’s enough to earn Him that capital letter for at least some inhabitants of the world of Terra Ignota. Whether it’s enough for us is a personal matter, and Palmer, I think, wisely leaves it as one.
(Palmer herself has rhapsodized directly on the subject; I was going to point up here that in the scene of Cato’s rescue in The Will to Battle there are conscious echos of “Somebody Will”, a popular ode to space colonization — but on looking it up I discovered that the author of those lyrics was none other than Palmer herself. The influence is circular.)
Who enjoyed writing “novels” in which characters would routinely e.g. publicly masturbate while denying Christ and torturing a child — the only relation between these activities being that they were about equally disapproved of by King Louis XVI.
This is not my favorite term.
Bridger, recall, nursed himself from his own thumb, a very apt symbol.
The question of identity between these two is way too convoluted to figure out here — and it’s not really essential to the point which of them it is, since the 9th Anonymous is immature and Mycroft is crazy.