Too Like the Lightning: Initial Thoughts

Writers I respect have given Ada Palmer's 2016 Too Like the Lightning rave reviews, and I enjoy & admire her blog; but I delayed reading the book for over a year because I knew it would be a deep, dark rabbit hole —

but now I've started it —

and it's made me so mad.

Utopia?!

Four hundred years from now the boundaries of the world have been erased by cheap, autonomous, super-speed flying cars, and people work only 20 hours a week and anti-aging drugs keep them biologically 20 until they're 65, and there hasn't been a war for three centuries.

And yet this world is awful.

Everyone there wears a "tracker," always. It's a Google Glass, basically, with a single carrier and infinite range and it appears to be attuned to thoughts, or something, so people never have to dial or type or scroll: you can only tell they're no longer present by the far-off look in their eyes. The data the tracker collects is instantly shareable; a person can log into another another's tracker and, despite being miles apart, they can experience the sunset together. A wife can whisper in her husband's ear. But the wife's enemies can whisper in his ear, too. So can — and does — the ever-present news. So can the police. So can 9-1-1, which gets alerted when a person's heart rate elevates. And if one's tracker is off for five days, by law search & rescue begins.

And the cars! The cars combined with a governmental system that separates citizenship from geography has created unimaginable mobility. Live in Seattle, work in Valparaiso, take an evening class in Shaolin; hey friend let's meet for lunch at this new place I found in Jakarta! but —

In the book this has either made every place exactly the same as everywhere else or it's ruined people's ability to see differences. Nobody seems to notice where they are, except as a statement of allegiance — the French love Paris because they're French and the French love Paris — but they don't care if they're surrounded by ponderosas or olive trees; they don't care if that's a robin's call or a nightingale's; they don't even notice humidity nor rain nor heat nor wind nor the difference between summer sunlight and winter sunlight.

In the same way that the trackers would disrupt your ability to think consecutive thoughts — to daydream or meditate — this world-hopping would destroy your ability to form a relationship with a landscape because you'd never see it move through time: not only winter-spring-summer-fall but also dawn-noon-twilight-dusk.

That's awful.

I got mad because in all the reviews I've read, in all the Reddit discussions over whether this society is a utopia or not, no one has commented on this.

Are people even today indifferent to ponderosas?

*

The only book I would classify as utopia is Ursula LeGuin's Always Coming Home, which begins like this:

"Stone Telling is my name. It has come to me of my own choosing, because I have a story to tell of where I went when I was young; but now I go nowhere, sitting like a stone in this place, in this ground, in this Valley. I have come where I was going.

"My House is the Blue Clay, my household the High Porch of Sinshan.

..."In Sinshan babies' names often come from birds, since they are messengers. In the month before my mother bore me, an owl came every night to the oak trees called Gairga outside the windows of High Porch House, on the north side, and sang the owl's song there; so my first name was North Owl."

Sigh. Now I feel better.