Terra Ignota And Making Novels Explicable

[nemorathwald]

This series changed me.

 

It's customary to begin by indicating whether there will be spoilers. In one sense, no. This blog post will reveal no specific details about anything in  the Terra Ignota series of novels by Ada Palmer. On the other hand, I'm creating a generic spoiler about the way plot-twists condition our minds when we read most fiction. I recently met someone who had not read this series because everyone who raved about it would not say why, because they didn't want to give spoilers. That's too bad. I think it would be better to get one gigantic over-arching meta-spoiler and therefore decide to read it.

 

There are different ways that different genres of fiction invite you to read them. I have never cared for fantasy very much, and I enjoy hard science fiction the most; the convention within the genre is that the author will give you more and more clues about how the world of the future works, and the readers pieces it together like a mystery. Terra Ignota starts out similarly, in the process of figuring out a knowable world. But starting on page two of chapter one, there's magic. Ada Palmer introduces this immediately so it won't be spoiler to tell you about it. This is shortly after telling you the narrator is an insane hallucinating murderer who cannot be trusted. I was trying to figure out how all the miracles had been illusions all along, created by holograms, lifelike androids, smelltracks, and so on.

 

Just so you understand something about how I read fiction: Fifteen years ago I couldn't make sense of Cory Doctorow's fantasy novel "Someone Goes To Town, Someone Leaves Town", so I wrote several additional chapters which could explain what happened in that novel. It's the only novel by Doctorow that was not intended for someone who reads like I do. But I was committed to making it explicable, and if I had to do so through fan fiction, so be it.

 

There gradually comes a point for each reader of the Terra Ignota series where they stop treating it like that, and start to treat its world as one in which inexplicable miracles have genuinely injected themselves into the science fiction setting. For those who enjoy fantasy, that moment probably happens a couple of pages into the first chapter. I was far more resistant, because the drive to understand makes it rewarding to see through deception.

 

For me, the moment finally came late in the fourth and final novel. There was a murder, and a seemingly-obvious suspect who was known to have already committed countless other murders. I immediately suspected a different character. The text never tells you the answer one way or another, and indeed it never explicitly directed suspicion at him to begin with, but it becomes clear when one thinks about means, motive, opportunity, previously-established precedent for this suspect... As I pondered the long list of clues for and against, I came to the conclusion that the character was as dutiful, loyal, and obedient as he seemed.

 

After that, I gave up expecting the Scooby-Doo unmasking moments to arrive in the final few chapters. Not only does the novel have real magic and real theology in it, but occasionally an obviously-unreliable narrator turns out to be reliable after all about some things, and characters in the novels who seem to be honest and upright sometimes actually are honest and upright.

 

There comes a point for each reader to set aside the concept of an unreliable narrator as no longer fruitful. To set aside looking for clues that all is not as it seems. To stop looking for clues that perhaps everyone is, after all, "as dirty as the rest of us." This setting aside of suspicion is all the more interesting an experience, when the unreliability of the narrator, and an overwhelming list of reasons to throw suspicion in so many directions, has been laid in so hard by previous books in this series.

 

Terra Ignota met me where I was, and then took my hand, and taught me broader forms of appreciation. Even after reading the series five times, and taking a lot of notes, and writing scripts with regular expressions that search through the text to look for clues, from which I write lengthy analyses in the Terra Ignota subreddit, I still can't make sense of the theological and mythopoeic aspects. But that's OK! I like make books explicable; and, I might still do that again. But I'm more complicated now. The world has so many potentially relevant considerations going into every situation, that the considerations are unenumerable. The world's more full of fractally-unenumerable factors than I can understand.

 

Comments

[atropis]

So the way in which it changed you was to imprint on your awareness/understanding what Shakespeare meant by "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy"?

[nemorathwald]

That depends. That quote has un-enumerable potentially-relevant considerations going into every situation it could be applied to.

[atropis]

Here is a piece of the scene itself for context.

https://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/there-more-things-heaven-earth-horatio