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    Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota
    Unavailable
    Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota
    Unavailable
    Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota
    Ebook553 pages9 hours

    Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota

    By Ada Palmer

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    *2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL CATEGORY*

    From 2017 John W. Campbell Award winner, Ada Palmer, the second book of Terra Ignota, a political SF epic of extraordinary audacity

    “A cornucopia of dazzling, sharp ideas set in rich, wry prose that rewards rumination with layers of delight. Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent.” —Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings

    In a future of near-instantaneous global travel, of abundant provision for the needs of all, a future in which no one living can remember an actual war…a long era of stability threatens to come to an abrupt end.

    For known only to a few, the leaders of the great Hives, nations without fixed locations, have long conspired to keep the world stable, at the cost of just a little blood. A few secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction can ever dominate, and the balance holds. And yet the balance is beginning to give way.

    Mycroft Canner, convict, sentenced to wander the globe in service to all, knows more about this conspiracy the than he can ever admit. Carlyle Foster, counselor, sensayer, has secrets as well, and they burden Carlyle beyond description. And both Mycroft and Carlyle are privy to the greatest secret of all: Bridger, the child who can bring inanimate objects to life.

    Shot through with astonishing invention, Ada Palmer's Seven Surrenders is the next movement in one of the great SF epics of our time.

    “Seven Surrenders veers expertly between love, murder, mayhem, parenthood, theology, and high politics. I haven't had this much fun with a book in a long time.” —Max Gladstone, author of Three Parts Dead

    Terra Ignota
    1. Too Like the Lightning
    2. Seven Surrenders
    3. The Will to Battle

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 7, 2017
    ISBN9781466858756
    Unavailable
    Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota
    Author

    Ada Palmer

    Ada Palmer is an author, historian and composer. She did her PhD at Harvard, teaches History at the University of Chicago, blogs at ExUrbe.com, composes close harmony folk music and performs with the a capella group Sassafrass.

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    Reviews for Seven Surrenders

    4/5

    167 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I'm treating them as one book since they're the first two of a four volume series. In a world where every destination is no more than an hour away, nations are now determined by affinity rather than borders. Religion and gender are no more, with everyone referred to as "they". Though as the story moves on, both of these tenets are revealed to be false. It's very weird and confusing - I was taking notes - and most of the plot is about political intrigue among world leaders. The future world is interesting and I was interested in what was going to happen to most of the characters. The second book was more of the same, and things got weirder and weirder, with some big helpings of Rand-like political holding forth, and I quit. I went on Wikipedia and read the summaries of the rest of the book and the following one (4th isn't out yet) and am at peace with quitting, though it was fun for a while.One big problem is that I like stories of the fantastic or the future best when they have rules that the characters have to work with and against. In this, there are characters who can literally raise the dead and seem to have no limitations, which makes the whole thing less interesting.
    • 4/5
      Another venture into the world of Bash and Hive and obscured gender. It gets really messy. Twists work better when they are based on confounding expectations, but in such a wildly different social system expectations grow only the shallowest roots.
    • 3/5
      I continue to enjoy this series and will read the third book. But. With this second book the style really began to wear on me. The faux-seventeenth century style --the page-long paragraphs of description of motives and emotion, all constantly fraught and fragile, the world-falling-apart-while-everything-of-consequence-takes-place-in-breathless-exchanges-in-a-boudoir, taking the Enlightenment idea of ideas mattering more than anything...-- this all begins to wear.

      Holes in the ideas presented begin to grow massive (the whole world really banished gender? religion? and only a building of people in Paris are subverting this? Even after the 'Church Wars' this seems impossible to believe. That and 20 murders a year, worldwide, brings the entire system to its knees? Even in this future utopia that seems a stretch. And where are e.g. South America and Africa in this? And, for that matter and despite the nod to them, Asia and South Asia?)

      But, complaints aside, in this are a lot of interesting ideas and questions, propositions even, continuing the first book. Weaknesses and warts, I still like this.
    • 5/5
      Knowing the world established in part one made part two all the more enjoyable. An exciting, canny, and often humorous view of the future.
    • 4/5
      Pros: brilliantly plotted, amazing world-building, excellent pacing, thought provokingCons: fundamentally disagreed with some of the philosophy, ending left me disappointedPicking up immediately where Too Like the Lightning left off, Seven Surrenders details more of the actions of the heads of the seven hives, reveals the thief behind the seven-ten list, deals with the fall-out of the revelations that ended the first book, and paves the way for potential war.I loved all of the politics, manipulation, and unclear morality of this book. This book has a LOT of political maneuvering and backroom dealings. It made me think about a lot of issues, even if my conclusions were different from those the book came to.Mycroft remains an unreliable narrator at times, not always telling the truth and keeping certain things hidden until later. this helps with the pacing of the book, which I thought was great. The revelations come fast and hard, but enough is saved for the end to keep the reader guessing and turning pages quickly.If the mix of sensual language and politics from the first book disturbed you, there are a few uncomfortable scenes in this book as well, mostly at the beginning.One character is gendered as ‘it’, which may upset readers. We are told the character chose that pronoun, but in addition to being a gender neutral term, it’s also a term that reduces the person’s humanity. Given the nature of the character, both of those may have been intentional repercussions of that choice.There’s a speech towards the end of the novel about gender that kind of irritated me. While I agreed with the ultimate point (or, at least understood where the character was going with the discussion), I’d understood this future to have done away with gendered pronouns as well as gendered clothing and expectations. And yet, this speech implied that children were still raised with the ideas that boys were more aggressive and girls more caring, etc, something I didn’t get from the books themselves. But what annoyed me was the assertion that some traits code ‘female’ and others ‘male’ and if you get rid of those terms, it just makes everyone more ‘masculine’ as if men aren’t inherently capable of being kind or considerate despite the book’s clear proof to the contrary (Carlyle, Bridger, etc. are men who obviously care about humanity, notwithstanding their being male).The ending left me feeling unsatisfied. Yes, there are more books in the series which may overturn this, but with so many revelations I was expecting more resolution.
    • 5/5
      How on earth can I give a book five stars and at the same time say I didn't enjoy reading it? Well, here goes. I am just not interested in philosophy or theology, and that's what this book is about and spends pages and pages and chapters and chapters talking about.

      And yet I was completely hooked by the society which had achieved 300 years of peace by renouncing nationality, gendered language and expression, and religion (sort of). The story takes place at the moment when the whole system is coming unraveled as people discover that their happy life was based on a complex mix of deception, murder, and politics. The large cast of characters shifted continually in their identities and relationships, not to mention horrible crimes and apparent supernatural powers. It did keep me reading, but I'm fairly certain I can't do two more books.
    • 5/5
      The sequel in the Terra Ignota series continues were the first book left off. This book is much more storyline and plot. The storyline is much more contained with the characters really shining. The plot is very interesting with its very own thought experiments. There is a lot of action, emotion, philosophy, and mystery. It ends in a satisfying way that also sets up what book 3 will likely follow. If you enjoyed the first book, then you will likely enjoy this one even more.
    • 4/5
      2021 book #69. 2017. 500 or so years from now the world has been at peace for over 250 years. The peace is starting to unravel as people begin to understand what lengths their leaders have gone to to keep that peace. 2nd of a great series.
    • 2/5
      In the end, there is a lot to like in this series - fascinating worldbuilding, some great characters, and intriguing philosophical questions. But it's not for me. I don't like secret societies, I don't like books without sympathetic characters, and something about the actual plot of the first two novels feels too much like a building horror show to me to give me any pleasure. (It perhaps doesn't help that that building horror show sometimes too closely mirrors the actual politic climate of the moment.)
    • 4/5
      Book 2 is better written than Book 1. but i'm gonna stop now. although the characterization of all these concepts is... interesting, the novels that result from her presentation in the Terra Ignota series so far are pretty didactic and preachy. and to tell the truth, i'm not on board. she seems to favour in her debates a stagnant and/or repressive world, authoritarian by intention and design, and that bias makes me uneasy about where she's going with all this.
    • 4/5
      Too Like the Lightning: Terra Ignota, Book 1 (2016) and Seven Surrenders (2017) by Ada Palmer. Reading these was occasioned by the CrookedTimber book event on them. One of the participants there describe them as weird. I agree. The novels are set in the year 2454, but refer mainly to ideas and writers from the (18th century) Enlightenment, and are also written in an archaic style. The plot contains implausibilities such as a tiny group of strange and sophisticated leaders largely controlling the world and religious elements. Perhaps these are just part of getting various ideas across, which seems like the goal of the novels, but readers like me are somewhat put off. The books are getting rave reviews, e.g. in the aforementioned book event, but do noe appeal strongly to me. Probably recommended for some, but I do not know who.