Hugo Award nominee 2017.
The first book of Terra Ignota, a four-book political SF epic set in a human future of extraordinary originality
Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer - a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.
The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.
And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...
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John W. Campbell and Compton Crook award-winning author Ada Palmer presents a political science fiction epic of extraordinary audacity in the Terra Ignota series.
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In a utopian future, the leaders of the great Hives, nations without fixed locations, have kept the world stable, at the cost of just a little blood. A few secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction can ever dominate, and the balance holds. Mycroft Canner and Carlyle Foster are aware of this conspiracy - as well as the secret that could end it: Bridger, the child who can bring inanimate objects to life.
“Palmer proves that the boundaries of science fiction can be pushed and the history and the future can be married together.” - Publishers Weekly (on Seven Surrenders)
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