2016 Hugo-nominated science fiction, first book of Terra Ignota.
Even in a techno-utopia, there are people who are unhappy with the
rules.
That's assuming you can hack your way through the writing style
to get to the story. It's a conscious imitation of eighteenth-century
novels (as the world is an imitation of the culture of the
Enlightenment), with additional massive dumps of made-up words and no
explanation; I don't mind bring thrown into the middle of things and
expected to work out what's going on, indeed as an SF reader that's an
experience I actively look for, but in this case before we even start
to learn anything about the world we're being told about a child who
can quite literally do anything he can imagine… and apparently
nobody finds this terrifying. And then it's back into the thickets
until the next thing happens.
It's not that the book is slow-paced; indeed, you can miss something
important by skimming a paragraph. It's that there's never any
narrative momentum, because the moment things begin to happen there's
an authorial aside. Much of the point of the book, which certainly
isn't the plot or the characters, is a heavy-handed parody of current
trends in inclusive language and trigger warnings: Palmer has
interesting things to say here (particularly as to how a "good enough"
solution can be much worse in the long term than continuing to
struggle for perfection, which I suppose justifies the way all the
powerful characters turn out to be male when their gender is finally
signalled reliably), but she says them at much less length in various
interviews.
There are
sample chapters on tor.com.
Read them. If you actually like them, you might get on with the book.
I found it excessively self-satisfied and deliberately over-complex,
like The Name of the Rose right down to the title that has no
apparent relevance to the story, only here there is an actual story
struggling to get out, set in a world interestingly different from our
own. I'd have liked to have read it.
Followed by Seven Surrenders. This work was nominated for the 2017
Hugo Awards.
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