So complicated, and I mean that as praise. The world Palmer builds is a radically altered future that refuses to be either dystopia or utopia in the easy genre-shorthand way, and I spent the first hundred pages just orienting myself to how the household and hive systems actually function before the plot’s political stakes clicked into place. Worth the disorientation. Once it clicks, this is one of the smartest pieces of far-future political fiction I’ve read in years.
Ada Palmer is an intricate writer with a genuinely large vocabulary, and that attention to detail is a double-edged thing, the prose is gorgeous and it also drags the pacing in stretches where a leaner book would’ve moved faster. I found myself rereading paragraphs not because I was lost, exactly, but because the sentence had done more work than I’d caught the first time through.
Here’s my one real complaint and it’s the same one I’ve seen from other readers: this is only the first half of a story. There’s no ending here, just an elaborate, gorgeous setup for the sequel, and I understand why that frustrates people who want a book to close on its own terms. I’m reading the sequel anyway. The world and the mystery underneath it earned enough trust from me in four hundred pages that I’m willing to follow it into a second volume without a resolution yet in hand.
If you need clarity as you go, this isn’t for you, it asks you to trust that the pieces will eventually cohere and mostly they do. If you’re willing to go along for that ride, there’s nothing else quite like it on my shelf.