Not a review, this time. Nothing especially coherent, nothing with any particular point. But I talked extensively about the last two books in the Terra Ignota series, so…it seems meet to keep on talking.
As before, I am not taking any measures to avoid spoilers, so…read on only if you’ve read The Will to Battle already or if you don’t care.
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Say what you want about Terra Ignota, it always makes me super-happy to be reading these books.
A large part of it, I think, is the way that they display the entire world through a thick and tinted lens of nerd-sentimentality. “Utopian fiction” can mean many different things, and Terra Ignota covers a lot of those bases in a very sophisticated way, but it is also “utopian” in the most artless and personal way of all: it is filled with impulses and decisions and social structures that make sense, that resonate, far more than the real world ever could. You read the story and you say, “yes, this is how things would go — if people were the beautiful creatures that my secret heart insists that they must be, rather than the aliens with alien priorities that they so often display themselves to be.” Or, at least, that’s what I say. Perhaps it is only because I have a lot in common, spiritually, with the author. But I doubt I am the only reader of Terra Ignota to feel that way.
I mean, this is a world where…
- Everyone consciously chooses his “national” affiliation, and the most common choice by far — practically the default choice — is a self-constructed, ritual-shrouded, portentously-Ancient Empire whose members speak in Latin and spend an initiatory year in philosophical debates about the meaning of power
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- All public displays of religion or religious affiliation are severely taboo, to the extent that even family members don’t know anything about each others’ religious leanings…but religion continues to be an immensely powerful force in the world, and private clerical counselors continue to be influential figures in almost everyone’s lives, because the truths of theology and the Big Questions are just that important to people
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- The Olympics are the domain of awesome generalists who are also politicians and philosophers and suchlike, because of course a fervent devotion to human excellence in the abstract trumps any kind of mind-caging hyperspecialization (and God! how sweet it is to think of the Olympics as belonging even a little to People Like Me, rather than as being the rites of a hostile alien tribe)
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- The disaffected individualist rabble of the world, the people who genuinely don’t want to be on anyone’s team and who demand to be free from any Order, nonetheless have enough innate civilization in them to do things like “build an unofficial Rebel Scum capital named after Thomas Hobbes” and “be idealistically passionate in defending the Meta-Order that rules the world and allows them their freedom”
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- On the eve of a globe-spanning war, the presumptive leader of one side comes out and says “this conflict should be meaningful, here’s what it all stands for abstractly, you should support me if you believe X, you should support my chief rival if you believe Y” — and that chief rival essentially responds with “I agree in all particulars, I’m glad we’ve settled on the framing, now this can be a conflict of supernal principles”
I don’t live in that world, or a world that looks anything like it. But, boy, I would sure like it if I did. That’s the real fantasy being sold here, way more than anything about future-tech or Hives or divine Providence.
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Nothing in this book has caused me to change my feelings about Utopia.
They’ve been cemented, in fact. Noble Utopia has jeopardized its own glorious space dream, apparently, because its members just care that much about the (ungrateful unworthy) rest of humanity that they can’t bring themselves to hide away on the brink of war. Noble Utopia has become, in addition to everything else, a nation of compassionate martyrs.
…and it’s a little weird, admittedly, because the Peacebonding Strike could so easily have been spun differently, and made much more morally-complex. Not all that much would have had to be changed. This is a series where “we countenance a tiny number of assassinations for the sake of global stability” has been presented as a deeply morally-compromised position; someone could have seriously made the case for “Utopia is imprisoning people against their will, Utopia is foisting its ideology on others by force, and that’s a problem no matter how glorious an ideal supposedly lies behind the decision.” But no one actually says that, or even really hints at it. It’s all “they’re saving us from the prospect of annihilation, and now they’re going to suffer for it because the wretched mob doesn’t understand, Utopia is all the good things in the world even when they conflict with each other.”
Griffincloth coats are still super-cool, though, and so are U-beasts.
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The most legitimately interesting social/philosophical problem put forth by the series, thus far, is the set-set thing (and the associated “weird structured upbringing” thing). Issues surrounding children tend to make a hash of otherwise-coherent-and-stable moral philosophies, because children really can’t be treated as autonomous or independent moral agents, and people are often unable to think rationally about such issues because they’re so wound up in thoughts and feelings about their own childhoods. “Is it acceptable to raise a child in a strange constrained way, or do you have to allow the normal spectrum of freedoms available to a child?” is a very difficult question to pose to society, largely because the emotions involved vary so widely depending on what kind of “strangeness” you’re imagining and on how you feel about the “normal” default option, and this is something on which I imagine the books’ target audience would have very strong and very conflicting opinions.
It is therefore kind of remarkable that basically everyone admirable in the series is firmly on the pro-set-set side, with the anti- side being reserved for (a) cardboard contemptible villains and (b) creepy great-uncle Headmaster Faust, who is great, but who is hard to take seriously when it comes to ethics.
I have not yet determined what this fact says about the setting, or the author, or the narrator, or anything. But it definitely says something about something.
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I forget who originally pointed this out, but…yes, Seven-Ten Lists are in fact the hottest of takes.
The Baliocene Doctrine 