The Will to Battle (Palmer)
May. 3rd, 2024 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnSo I read The Will to Battle, the third Terra Ignota book, on the way to and from IL on this last trip. I continue to be more and more impressed with these books as they go on -- I think they may be an acquired taste to a certain extent, and also it was hard to appreciate what Palmer is trying to do in the depth of, say, only one book (which is really itself only half a book). That being said, there was a part in the middle where I had the thought that I really wanted to read this and knew I would like it, but at the same time I also rather wished I had already read it and was looking back at all the things I'd found out. (I don't remember ever thinking this about a book before.) By the time I was at the end, I had forgotten all those thoughts -- there was certainly a lot of action at the end.
Interestingly, I don't think I liked many characters in this book, but I didn't even think about that until the end -- I think Mycroft has grown on me a lot (as I was told might happen!) which helped a lot, but more importantly this is the kind of book where the worldbuilding (which I did like a lot!) is basically the most important character.
Various random and spoilery thoughts:
-I loved Martin's chapter. Martin is a rather interesting character to me (I did like them a lot!), and also I appreciated how different their thought processes are than Mycroft's when narrating.
-A couple of people mentioned to me in my post on the first book that Mycroft's assertion that everyone was marinated in Voltaire may have been due to Mycroft being an unreliable narrator, and now I see that's clearly true! I mean, we get way more evidence in this book that Mycroft is unreliable (see next point) but also: it took Mycroft this long to figure out that Martin was named after Martin the Manichee?? Not that I figured it out either, but a) I didn't realize or forgot that this was something to figure out, and b) I'm not claiming my society is marinated in Voltaire :PP
-Kind of funny in a meta way: it took me a very long time to figure out that Mycroft was deteriorating mentally, because by this time I was so used to e.g. Mycroft having random dialogues with the imaginary future reader that when they started adding Hobbes to the discourses I was all, "sure, why not? doesn't everyone like to craft mental dialogues with dead philosophers?" and it wasn't until Apollo started actually showing up not just in the dialogues but in what were clearly hallucinations that I was like, "...wait a second here..."
-maybe I knew who 9A was in the previous book but if so I had entirely forgotten, so it was nice to at least sort of understand who this person was who kept editing Mycroft's work!
-it was odd to me that the attitude towards Achilles seemed to be "wow, Achilles is so great! We know this based on having read the Iliad!" because, uh, this was totally not my impression of Achilles from the Iliad... I like TI!Achilles, but he also does not seem to me to be the same as Illiad!Achilles who pitched a super tantrum and sulked for ages because he didn't get what he wanted?? Maybe this is also Mycroft being an unreliable narrator??
-Huh, seems like Madame doesn't think her kid is a God even though everyone else seems pretty up with this at this point? She's still trash as a human being and I'm kind of weirded out that Thisbe gets a "yeah, no one cares about you, you suck, bye" and on the other hand Madame gets a "congrats, you get to be queen of Spain, the only catch is that you can't do this polyamory conspiracy thing anymore" even though the chief difference between them seems to be that Madame gets other people to do murders for fun instead of doing them herself like Thisbe. I mean, it may come to the same thing in the end, as Madame seems incapable of not doing polyamory or conspiracies, but ehhhhh.
-Gender: This book continues the previous books in Mycroft assigning gender more-or-less randomly (e.g., the chief of police "Papa" is biologically female, which honestly was a pretty cool move as I hadn't really Papa imagined as varying in sex, even though we knew this was the case for some people that Mycroft gendered). Again I imagine this was much more explosive in 2018 than it is now -- it's really interesting how much the societal norms around this have changed in just a few years. It was rather a relief, though, when we had chapters with different narrators who used they/them as the pronoun for everyone. (And that's changed a lot too -- back in 2018, I and my prescriptivism were still bitter about using "they" as a singular pronoun. Funny how quickly things changed!) I also wonder at this point, which I hadn't before, whether Mycroft is biologically female. Not that it should really matter at all, which is the point.
-All that being said, I had to go back and change a LOT of pronouns in this writeup. UGH my inborn biases :P
-Okay, I was kind of in an emotional state, but I did tear up a bit at Cato's now-grown-science-kids coming to rescue Cato to Utopia. That was my favorite part of the book.
-Oh boy that last-chapter fakeout of Mycroft's death! I was glad that we were "spoiled" that they were still alive, because that would be a heck of a thing to take into the last book thinking they were dead when they were actually alive (and would have been really annoying to be surprised by, too).
More random thinking about Hives: Gordian continues to be the Hive I feel I have the most natural affinity for, by far (it was also the one I ended up with when I took the Hive quiz after reading book 2). Faust was my fave in this book (the bit where they tell Carlyle to look at 48 pictures of subjects eating bananas made me laugh out loud), and I think I'd get along better with them than with most people in this book (while other people I know, like my sister, would find them entirely irritating). Utopia continues to be the Hive I'm most intrigued by (and, like, I sort of wish I were the kind of person that could sacrifice complacency, but I'm definitely not) and I still want to know what their deal is! (I'll be reading the fourth book soon...) It also occurred to me that if I had to sort my actual real-life self, I would probably be in the Cousins Hive, not least (though not wholly) because my church is... in very many ways basically a big ol' Cousins Hive, and it's the biggest RL source of community and (voluntary non-work) responsibility that I have.
I've got the fourth book on hold from the library and probably will dive right into it as soon as it gets here!
Interestingly, I don't think I liked many characters in this book, but I didn't even think about that until the end -- I think Mycroft has grown on me a lot (as I was told might happen!) which helped a lot, but more importantly this is the kind of book where the worldbuilding (which I did like a lot!) is basically the most important character.
Various random and spoilery thoughts:
-I loved Martin's chapter. Martin is a rather interesting character to me (I did like them a lot!), and also I appreciated how different their thought processes are than Mycroft's when narrating.
-A couple of people mentioned to me in my post on the first book that Mycroft's assertion that everyone was marinated in Voltaire may have been due to Mycroft being an unreliable narrator, and now I see that's clearly true! I mean, we get way more evidence in this book that Mycroft is unreliable (see next point) but also: it took Mycroft this long to figure out that Martin was named after Martin the Manichee?? Not that I figured it out either, but a) I didn't realize or forgot that this was something to figure out, and b) I'm not claiming my society is marinated in Voltaire :PP
-Kind of funny in a meta way: it took me a very long time to figure out that Mycroft was deteriorating mentally, because by this time I was so used to e.g. Mycroft having random dialogues with the imaginary future reader that when they started adding Hobbes to the discourses I was all, "sure, why not? doesn't everyone like to craft mental dialogues with dead philosophers?" and it wasn't until Apollo started actually showing up not just in the dialogues but in what were clearly hallucinations that I was like, "...wait a second here..."
-maybe I knew who 9A was in the previous book but if so I had entirely forgotten, so it was nice to at least sort of understand who this person was who kept editing Mycroft's work!
-it was odd to me that the attitude towards Achilles seemed to be "wow, Achilles is so great! We know this based on having read the Iliad!" because, uh, this was totally not my impression of Achilles from the Iliad... I like TI!Achilles, but he also does not seem to me to be the same as Illiad!Achilles who pitched a super tantrum and sulked for ages because he didn't get what he wanted?? Maybe this is also Mycroft being an unreliable narrator??
-Huh, seems like Madame doesn't think her kid is a God even though everyone else seems pretty up with this at this point? She's still trash as a human being and I'm kind of weirded out that Thisbe gets a "yeah, no one cares about you, you suck, bye" and on the other hand Madame gets a "congrats, you get to be queen of Spain, the only catch is that you can't do this polyamory conspiracy thing anymore" even though the chief difference between them seems to be that Madame gets other people to do murders for fun instead of doing them herself like Thisbe. I mean, it may come to the same thing in the end, as Madame seems incapable of not doing polyamory or conspiracies, but ehhhhh.
-Gender: This book continues the previous books in Mycroft assigning gender more-or-less randomly (e.g., the chief of police "Papa" is biologically female, which honestly was a pretty cool move as I hadn't really Papa imagined as varying in sex, even though we knew this was the case for some people that Mycroft gendered). Again I imagine this was much more explosive in 2018 than it is now -- it's really interesting how much the societal norms around this have changed in just a few years. It was rather a relief, though, when we had chapters with different narrators who used they/them as the pronoun for everyone. (And that's changed a lot too -- back in 2018, I and my prescriptivism were still bitter about using "they" as a singular pronoun. Funny how quickly things changed!) I also wonder at this point, which I hadn't before, whether Mycroft is biologically female. Not that it should really matter at all, which is the point.
-All that being said, I had to go back and change a LOT of pronouns in this writeup. UGH my inborn biases :P
-Okay, I was kind of in an emotional state, but I did tear up a bit at Cato's now-grown-science-kids coming to rescue Cato to Utopia. That was my favorite part of the book.
-Oh boy that last-chapter fakeout of Mycroft's death! I was glad that we were "spoiled" that they were still alive, because that would be a heck of a thing to take into the last book thinking they were dead when they were actually alive (and would have been really annoying to be surprised by, too).
More random thinking about Hives: Gordian continues to be the Hive I feel I have the most natural affinity for, by far (it was also the one I ended up with when I took the Hive quiz after reading book 2). Faust was my fave in this book (the bit where they tell Carlyle to look at 48 pictures of subjects eating bananas made me laugh out loud), and I think I'd get along better with them than with most people in this book (while other people I know, like my sister, would find them entirely irritating). Utopia continues to be the Hive I'm most intrigued by (and, like, I sort of wish I were the kind of person that could sacrifice complacency, but I'm definitely not) and I still want to know what their deal is! (I'll be reading the fourth book soon...) It also occurred to me that if I had to sort my actual real-life self, I would probably be in the Cousins Hive, not least (though not wholly) because my church is... in very many ways basically a big ol' Cousins Hive, and it's the biggest RL source of community and (voluntary non-work) responsibility that I have.
I've got the fourth book on hold from the library and probably will dive right into it as soon as it gets here!
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Date: 2024-05-04 03:58 am (UTC)