Review of "Perhaps the Stars" by Ada Palmer

I received an ARC of this book from Tor in exchange for an honest review. My review will include spoilers for the previous books in the Terra Ignota series, but I’ll note which parts also include spoilers for this book.

Terra Ignota is a monumental undertaking that grapples with huge questions—what does it mean to do evil? is creating a utopia possible, and can it be sustained? does human nature ever change? and perhaps most critically, why does the universe exists? All of this comes on top of a tremendously detailed world with its own byzantine legal system, tangled web of power brokers, and rapidly developing technology, including several intentional and occasionally very literal deus ex machinas. The previous books have presented some answers to those questions by revealing Mycroft Canner’s crimes and motivations, probing the ways in which Madame subverted or failed to subvert the Hive system, and offering up a variety of possible causes of war as the society of the 2450s moved towards collapse. However, Palmer pointedly refused to give an answer to the last question, leaving Jehovah Mason increasingly concerned about what terrible purpose the Author of This Universe might have for His creations. Rest assured that Perhaps the Stars offers us an answer. It’s a lot to ask even of a book this massive and complex—not for nothing is the “question of why” one of the driving forces of centuries of theology—but Palmer does not shy away from giving us an explicit, moving, and well-reasoned answer. She also wraps up the various conflicts that finally boil over (the phrase “fractal war” is coined to describe the interconnected tangle of fault lines the world is broken along, and it works spectacularly well as a description) and gives us a bold resolution that may not satisfy everyone, but certainly leaves a lot to ponder in terms of who faces consequences for their actions and how those consequences are structured. Perhaps the Stars is a long book, and that gives it time to be a war epic, several re-told Greek myths, a discussion of the politics of reconciliation, and an intensely personal drama. At the start, it feels a little more burdened by the necessities of plot than Too Like the Lightning or even the intermediate books of the series (which benefits greatly from a re-read to keep everything straight) but there are enough philosophical asides and carefully-handled wartime issues to keep the reader going until the intense theological high points of the final quarter. After taking a detour from the issues I found most interesting in The Will to Battle, Perhaps the Stars is a return to form for the series, and a conclusion that brings together all the big questions and shocking developments readers have come to expect.

Four and a half stars out of five.

Spoilers for Perhaps the Stars below!
The presence and absence of Mycroft throughout this final book, after his untimely maybe-death at the end of The Will to Battle, is one of the strongest aspects of the book. The shadow Apollo’s Iliad casts over the structure of the war looms large as the characters come to realize how Bridger’s influence hangs over the major events of the day, and nowhere is this made more personal than with Mycroft. After toning down the magic and miracles in The Will to Battle, the reader is unprepared for Bridger to play such a major role in Mycroft’s perennial survival. The hints are there, and cleverly placed—Sadcat, the Odyssey retelling, and the reappearance of Cato/Helen—but it is still devastating to watch the Ninth Anonymous surrender himself to the narrative, and to know that Saladin finally found a part of the world that was worth giving up his freedom.

Also well-done, but perhaps less personally satisfying, is the fall-out of the war. It is a bold move to impose peacetime justice on the crimes of war, and even bolder to have the presence or absence of crimes be self-imposed, but both are in keeping with the world and characters Palmer created. For a Being like Jehovah Mason, nothing could be stronger than the individual’s promise, and no legalistic tricks can elide the fact that while times change, actions still have consequences. Despite the promise of more pointed justice for those who committed the greatest crimes—Madame, Felix Faust—and the unfortunate ends met by some of the story’s main villains (looking at you, Perry-Kraye), I still found myself wondering whether such a result would be enough. Maybe Palmer truly believes that, in a better world, that would be enough. Maybe the other, invisible reforms—to the Hive system, to the state of technology, to people’s attitudes towards religion and gender—are doing the heavy lifting. Whatever the reason, I cannot bring myself to forgive and move on as easily as the gentler residents of Palmer’s imagined future. Even more challenging to stomach is the fate of Utopia—to be ceaselessly driven forward, unable to pause or look back. In Utopia, Jehovah Mason seems to find a worldview that is as implacable as his own—Apollo’s willingness to sacrifice this world to build a better one—and yet unacceptable, because despite being full of foreign concepts like pain and struggle, this world cannot be sacrificed. It makes sense, then, for him to doom them to permanent exile, but (perhaps having absorbed some of Cato’s hero-worship) it pains me to see the only Hive focused on the future left unable to live in the present. Maybe this is just the natural consequence of Utopia’s oath, which Jehovah Mason cannot but interpret literally. Still, it is harsh to see society’s dreamers confined to their dreams.

Perhaps the Stars leaves room for many more discussions, including of course the central theological question. The presentation of that answer, in parallel with the re-wired Dominic, is a masterful scene, and one that I will think about for many months to come. It is a joy to pick out all the little details in how the war is conducted, the Chekov’s guns that inevitably come off the mantel just in time (even when they were placed there several hundred pages ago). While the Terra Ignota series is not for the faint of heart, it certainly rewards close reading, careful thinking, and the careful investment of time to return to information-dense scenes time and time again. Perhaps the Stars is a worthy conclusion to one of the most ambitious and philosophical science fiction series in recent memory.