Seven Surrenders (Palmer)

[cahn]

I have read Seven Surrenders!

I am glad that hamsterwoman mentioned in her Terra Ignota post that SS was really meant as the second half of Too Like the Lightning, because it really was. It's like TLtL carefully set up a lot of dominos, and SS... knocks them all down. It's pretty amazing to watch (well, read) and I'm glad I read it even though I suffered a lot from not reading the first one carefully enough (though I think if I'd read it as carefully as I needed to in order to catch everything, I'd never have finished, so it's just as well). Very curious as to what I'll think on a reread; this seems like the kind of series that well rewards rereads.

I don't have much really to say about it as a whole except "whoa, that ALL HAPPENED" but I have a few random thoughts:
-I feel like the prose is smoother and less, idk, irritating than I found the first book. Some of the mannerisms that annoyed me in the first book are toned down a lot in this one, like, Mycroft spends significantly less time explaining random Enlightenment stuff and praising Voltaire, and there are fewer times where he feels that, for example, he needs to have a literal conversation with the reader from his future. (Also, Émilie du Châtelet is namechecked in the acknowledgements, nice!)

-There was one point where Cornel MASON is speaking where I said to myself, "Palmer has read John M. Ford!" Now, I know she's friends with Jo Walton, and Walton has read JMF, so I'm not saying this in a vacuum either... but... yeah, I'd be shocked if she hadn't.

-After this book Utopia has now become my favorite problematic Hive, in the sense that I don't want to be a Utopian at all (it sounds completely exhausting!) but I am so intrigued by everything they do: their particular mode of surrender when confronted with the events of SS, their planning 150 years in the future (like... seriously?? modeling is clearly MUCH better in the future, lol!), their constant visor tagging of "how things could be better"... I would super like to know what's up with them. (The title of the fourth book makes me believe that we will find out more...)

Spoilers:

-BRIDGER! Gosh, poor kid. (I think I cared about him more than anyone else, as the only character who a) wasn't complicit in about five different plots at once and b) wasn't literally a god, even if he had godlike powers.) He even kind of says that he's fulfilled his element of the plot and now he's gonna off himself :(
(Mycroft, Bridger is not the protagonist as you said in TLtL, much as you would have liked him to be. He is the plot device :P Unless there's more about him later I don't know about :PP I mean, I guess we've had one resurrection already, why not two?)

There were two spoilery places where I was like, really?

-First: when Heloise talks about how they are super missing something in their society by not recognizing the old cultural constructions of gender, like the part where women are nurturing and men are manly, and they need to have a conversation about that. She says "Back when half the race identified as feminine it meant that half the race was devoted in some way to nurturing, peace, and charity, and we never developed a substitute for that."

I've read this bit about ten times now, trying to articulate what I disagree with, and after about my tenth read I guess... I don't disagree with most of what Heloise says. (For what it's worth, it seems pretty clear to me that Palmer meant to present this in an intentionally shocking way that would inspire disagreement -- because I also think it's the process of having the argument that Palmer is interested in.) I can see a lot of her points: maybe in a genderless world you don't have a world where half of everyone is devoted to nurturing, peace, and charity (and I do get her point that culturally that's sort of the effect of gender, and I can definitely see that if you got rid of gender all at once that the default might tend to be sort of a leaning-masculine sort of persona and not a leaning-feminine one), and maybe that's a problem, and maybe you DO need something to bolster that.

I think my point of remaining disagreement is that Heloise says things like "...the words are taboo so no one dares admit [the Cousins are "feminine"], and it feels like the Hive is weak and teetering. Of course it's teetering! The Masons would teeter if we banned the word 'Empire' and Gordian if we banned the word 'psyche'." I... don't really think this is how people and language work? People would come up with new words for the same concept. :P

Also, I feel like this ties into my wondering about the educational system and raising kids. Idk, I think either you have enough people who are "nurturing" that you are able to raise and educate the next generation, and then they also have role models who (one hopes??) teach them to be nurturing... or you don't? how does this society propagate itself at all if no one is nurturing enough to actually raise kids??

Heloise says, "Think of the Set-Set riots. How many fewer people might have died if the Cousins had felt free to say overtly why they were really upset? That their motherly feelings judged it inhumane to do such things to children. Without that vocabulary, the real cause of the conflict couldn't even be discussed!" I... do not agree with this AT ALL. First, any parent might think it inhumane to do Thing X to children. Also, there's another issue in there about "sanctity" of humanity and what we might think is humane vs inhumane that I think overlaps with this but which should be disentangled a bit, and which I think belongs more on the axis of conservative-liberal, if anything, than male-female.

Anyway, kudos to Palmer for making me so annoyed that I had to reread Heloise's speech several times to articulate the things I actually did disagree with, versus the things I thought Heloise was saying but that she actually isn't (for example, she never said that she thinks gender is necessary or that she thinks there aren't other ways of structuring society without it, but my first draft of this post assumed she did).

-Second: Madame being all "so, I did the amazing educational thing of raising a child with all philosophies/languages/beliefs at once and it produced Enlightened Man, which turned out to be a god." (Paraphrased, of course.) It's really unclear whether the narrative a) expects you to take this at face value b) expects you to believe that Madame's education made it possible for the god to appear in J.E.D.D. Mason, or c) is just something Madame is saying that is her belief but is actually not even kind of relevant to the god appearing and that we're not supposed to take at all seriously. I think (b). (I would prefer to think (c) but in that case I don't see any Doylistic reason why she's saying it to begin with.) In any case, this is the kind of thing where I honestly think Madame is deluded.

Because a) everything you teach is a choice. I don't care if you are being so very careful about giving all philosophies equal time or whatever, by teaching anything you are making choices about what you present and how you present it, that is just the way of things b) anyone, anywhere, who has ever been around kids KNOWS that kids literally have minds of their own and no matter how you construct their education, they are gonna come out with things that you didn't intend and that you didn't want to teach them (*) -- Madame thinks she's teaching disregard for social values by showing Jehovah "the people our world respects most, emperors and kings... fucking like animals," but honestly a kid is just as likely to get out of it something super unintended and possibly untrue, like "fucking is sacred" or, idk, "maybe only kings fuck, peasants reproduce via parthogenesis." Kids can come up with super weird things!
c) kids learn A LOT from other kids, and Madame said she could only do this once, so basically in order to run her experiment J.E.D.D. must have been isolated from any other children while he was growing up for this to work (because those children would have wrecked the experiment by being not steeped in this "all-philosophies" education). In fact, he must have been isolated from any other people who were not part of Madame's educational program. Which is NOT OKAY. Even Ferdinand of Parma was able to run away and have lower-class friends! Maybe the god was attracted to this poor kid because he was the loneliest kid in the world!

(*) All this makes me think of Ferdinand of Parma, or at least did once mildred_of_midgard reminded me what his name was, lol. To be fair childhood education has advanced a lot since then! Probably Madame did not beat her child! But... this is the kind of thing that can happen in real life in the Enlightenment Madame is so proud of, Diderot and all, when the kid doesn't end up thinking about things the way you want them to.

Anyway, I was satisfied by this one, and the question now is whether I will have to dive in to the next book (because I want to know what happens next!) or whether I will have to take a break first (because these books are also hard going!)

Comments

[landingtree]

My main comment is no comment, but this is super interesting and I look forward to reading any reports you feel like writing on the second two books!

[cahn]

My main comment is no comment

Hahahaha, I seem to be getting a lot of that :D This is all steadying my resolve to go forward on the third book... :)

[landofnowhere]

Thanks for the link to Ferdinand of Parma, I am intrigued!

You generally make good points, which I agree with but don't have much to say to right now.

[landofnowhere]

one quick point: I think that some of the issues about who's doing the work of raising kids are partly handwaved away by "lifespans are longer and population growth is stable, so a smaller fraction of people's lives is spent on raising kids". But I don't know that the math actually works there.

[cahn]

*nods* I'm willing to go along with that to some extent. And I absolutely think that the bash' can be a better environment for raising kids than the nuclear family, what with more adults around and also kids. I would love for my kids to grow up in a bash' with bashmate kids!

I just kind of feel that if everyone accepts that they're going to be raising kids for even a reasonably short fraction of their life, that this would also mean that all those people have to have some sort of nurturing traits... right?

[landofnowhere]

Yes, but also I think I'm imagining that the burden falls unequally -- some people do more of the nuturing work for multiple kids in their bash', while others have a more limited role. (I'm also curious how the Utopian oath fits in with the responsibilities of raising children!)

[cahn]

*nods* Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think I'm continually blinkered by my twenty-first-century-nuclear-family-blinders, where part of my brain keeps saying "but equality, in the context of a cishet monogamous nuclear-family-of-my-particular-socioeconomic-stratum mindset!" and I keep having to be reminded that no, this is actually different and engineered to be different.

I wondered about how Utopians raise kids too. I guess either at least one of them in a bash' must go full-on voker with the kid-raising part (which I think would be consistent with their oath) or they maybe get someone (a Cousin?) to basically act as a nanny?

[cahn]

You are welcome, I also find that whole story quite interesting!

Hahahaha, I am definitely getting a lot of No Comment Yet on this book, I... am not sure whether I should be excited or worried about what's coming up, or both :D (Okay, I'm excited. But also amused that I clearly have No Idea.)

(spoilers)

[hamsterwoman]

Yay for continuing to enjoy and think thinky thoughts about Terra Ignota! :)

even though I suffered a lot from not reading the first one carefully enough (though I think if I'd read it as carefully as I needed to in order to catch everything, I'd never have finished, so it's just as well). Very curious as to what I'll think on a reread; this seems like the kind of series that well rewards rereads.

I have not actually reread it yet but I had the experience of having several friends read it after me and basically liveblog it at me, and so I got some of that effect of them mentioning things that I had a lot more context for now, and there are definitely some very interesting things going on!

But I also think it's impossible to read TLTL carefully enough to be able to pick up on everything on the first read -- there's too much! So I think yours is the expected experience! (I certainly had the same feeling when I finished SS)

-There was one point where Cornel MASON is speaking where I said to myself, "Palmer has read John M. Ford!"

Oh, which was that bit?

in the sense that I don't want to be a Utopian at all (it sounds completely exhausting!)

It's still Humanists for me, but the Utopians are definitely interesting! (and 100% with you on not wanting to be one because it's exhausting)

(Mycroft, Bridger is not the protagonist as you said in TLtL, much as you would have liked him to be. He is the plot device :P

Alas :( (Bridger's fate in this book COMPLETELY blindsided me, even though it is signposted from the epigraph and the title of the first book).

The only thing I will say about Heloise's gender argument are: 1) I remember that passage, and I remember it being one of several throughout these books to which I had a visceral NO! reaction followed by trying to step along the logic to see where it broke down for me, similar to what you describe. I think this is something Palmer is very good at, setting up these kind of... logical traps, almost? But not with the intent to persuade, rather with the intent to highlight questions. I love that a lot. 2) I was unsure about what this series was doing with gender in general and how I felt about it until book 4 (at which point I felt satisfied with the effect).

And the only thing I will say about JEDD Mason is that even after 4 books I'm not entirely sure what I think the deal with him is, except on one point: I do feel strongly that the way Madame (et al) raised him is child abuse. (And I think in a series where a lot of time is spent discussing whether other "weird" ways of raising children, like set-sets, is OK or child abuse, I do think you are meant to have that thought, whether you end there, as I kind of do, or go on to conclude some other things about whether Madame is right or deluded or whatever else.)

Re: (spoilers)

[cahn]

Ooooh I don't have my copy with me at this moment but I'll try to look it up later.

(Bridger's fate in this book COMPLETELY blindsided me, even though it is signposted from the epigraph and the title of the first book).

It also completely blindsided me!! Especially because of Mycroft's protagonist comment, silly unreliable narrator :PP

I think this is something Palmer is very good at, setting up these kind of... logical traps, almost? But not with the intent to persuade, rather with the intent to highlight questions. I love that a lot.

Yes! I really thought that was well done.

2) I was unsure about what this series was doing with gender in general and how I felt about it until book 4 (at which point I felt satisfied with the effect).

Hahahaha, I will look forward to that!

(And I think in a series where a lot of time is spent discussing whether other "weird" ways of raising children, like set-sets, is OK or child abuse, I do think you are meant to have that thought, whether you end there, as I kind of do, or go on to conclude some other things about whether Madame is right or deluded or whatever else.)

Ah, okay, good. I wasn't sure at this point whether I was supposed to have the thought that it is child abuse (it is definitely child abuse), but I like your comparison to the set-sets. I also just don't think that on a practical level it would work the way she thought it would, though! I mean, unless you postulate that gods from an alternate universe are attracted by this kind of thing. Or something.

[lightgetsin]

Ah, halfway through the series. I kind of want to pat your cheek and call you sweet summer child and tell you that you have not even begun to know the heights (depths?) of batshittery ahead of you.

[cahn]

LOLOLOLOL I am definitely getting this impression from the amount of things people are carefully saying they're not saying! Well, we'll see what happens ;)

[mildred_of_midgard]

-First: when Heloise talks about how they are super missing something in their society by not recognizing the old cultural constructions of gender, like the part where women are nurturing and men are manly, and they need to have a conversation about that. She says "Back when half the race identified as feminine it meant that half the race was devoted in some way to nurturing, peace, and charity, and we never developed a substitute for that."

This part pinged my memories of the bio I read about the Chevalier d'Eon. It talks a lot about 18th century gender theory, how there was a school of thought that said gender roles were disappearing as women became more masculine and men (especially aristocratic) became more feminine*, and some people were pushing back on that in fear of losing the moral superiority of women (or women at their best, at least, i.e. not-whores like Pompadour). Rousseau was one of the big proponents of separate spheres.

D'Eon's biographer argues that d'Eon decided to live life as a woman not out of gender dysphoria, but out of a belief that women were morally superior. This tied in with her becoming a born-again Christian, and some thoughts about gendered theology.

I'm being extremely vague because I skimmed this part, but if you're interested, I would recommend reading those sections of the bio! The author has a very easy reading style, and it's not dry at all. It's actually probably a very good intro to 18th century gender theory (which is not to say that you would still have a high opinion after doing a deeper dive, but you know my theory that you have to start somewhere, and an easy-to-read, toe-in-the-water type book is better than something more ambitious that you never actually finish).

If you want a copy, I'm happy to send one! (Plus there are Chevalier shenanigans and French diplomacy shenanigans that never cease to entertain.)

* Not that this isn't a recurring theme even in our own time.

[cahn]

It talks a lot about 18th century gender theory, how there was a school of thought that said gender roles were disappearing as women became more masculine and men (especially aristocratic) became more feminine*, and some people were pushing back on that in fear of losing the moral superiority of women (or women at their best, at least, i.e. not-whores like Pompadour). Rousseau was one of the big proponents of separate spheres.

Ohhhhh this is really interesting! I 100% believe that Palmer was incorporating 18th century gender theory, now that you have told me this :D

There is no way I'd be able to read this right now, but I am definitely interested, maybe after I finish Massie?? Maybe this will happen someday??

[landofnowhere]

Ohh, this is super fascinating, thank you for explaining!

[mildred_of_midgard]

If you want to know more, the book is Monsieur d'Eon Is a Woman, by Gary Kates, and I summarized the Chevalier's life story (i.e., not including the gender theory-related parts) in this post.

[hidden_variable]

Not looking at the spoilers yet, because I just started Seven Surrenders.. But I just wanted to say that I am also very intrigued by the Utopians, and, as of the end of book 1, I kind of, a little bit, want to be one. (Mostly because of the U-beasts, I think. I want a unicorn and a Techupine!)

[cahn]

The U-beasts are awesome! :D Honestly, if I weren't so lazy I would want to be a Utopian, I think :D