Craved Anathem's philosophy-powered world-building where made ideas dangerous? Too Like the Lightning awaits.
Buy on AmazonWhy It's Your Next Read
- Enlightenment philosophy weaponized in political warfare
- Unreliable narrator hiding world-shaking secrets
- Gender fluidity reshapes power & intimacy
- Dense ideas that reward re-reads forever
Ada Palmer engineers a 25th-century utopia where Enlightenment thinkers replace nation-states and Hobbes, Diderot, and Voltaire aren't dead philosophers—they're constitutional frameworks. Like Stephenson's avout unpacking quantum consciousness across parallel worlds, Palmer's narrator Mycroft Canner wields Enlightenment ideals as weapons in a shadow war where every philosophical stance conceals lethal political consequences. The world-building demands you decode seven competing ideologies while an unreliable polymath confession unfolds, refusing to hold your hand.
Gender becomes grammatically radical here: a society that abandoned gendered pronouns entirely, forcing Mycroft to impose his own biased translations. It's intellectual estrangement as narrative strategy—philosophy reshaping intimacy, power, and truth itself.
If Anathem earned your devotion, Palmer's philosophically armed future will feel like coming home to a more dangerous library.
What Readers Are Saying
"…It's wilding entertaining and strange and very intelligent, and beyond that, it shakes me nearly to the core." — Bradley, Goodreads
"I found it mesmerizing, as I delighted in parsing its oddities, and I fell in love with its ambitious approach to thinking about humanity's interconnectedness. I remain astonished at how confidently Ada Palmer brought to life her madcap vision, and inspired by the depths of human ethics, philosophy, morality, and religious belief laid bare by her magnificent creation." — Anthony, Goodreads
"science fiction that has a solid and fascinating world, great characters, and also that make you think about all kinds of things... These books show a future, a world, possibilities, that are different from ours -- and they do that while being up close and warm." — Jo Walton, Goodreads
Supermassive Book Hole is your personal media universe — books, movies, games, and albums on one beautiful shelf, with notes, and a feed of what your friends are into.
SHELVE THIS BOOK
