#perhaps the stars

[disparition]

Only What Minimum of Leisure is Necessary

I think Ada Palmer realized the Utopian Oath as revealed in Book 3 scared some people so she included a scene in Book 4 of a Utopian character doing their "mandatory gaming hours"

#terra ignota #ada palmer #the will to battle #perhaps the stars #its time for my mandatory gaming hours

[atiglain]

Huxley be upon ye

#terra ignota #my art #Huxley mojave #too like the lightning #artists on tumblr #perhaps the stars #illustration #art commisions

[andmaybegayer]

9A: how was your Odyssey was it fun your Odyssey looked fun.

#terra ignota #perhaps the stars #books

[glowingskull]

I didn't post this to Tumblr when I made it last year, I don't think?

This is the jacket of a Blacksleeve Servicer from Perhaps the Stars, the fourth book of Dr. Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. (Don't worry about the "Blacksleeve" portion if you haven't gotten there yet.)

The armband is made from a pair of Romanovan flags that Dr. Palmer was handing out at Worldcon in Chicago in 2022: I sewed them into an armband on the spot. This is why you bring your sewing kit to cons, kids.

I've been told by a lefty American friend that it looks quite fashy (laughing in spoilers), which is why I tend to pair it with either the matching camo bottoms and brown hiking boots (more military at a glance), or with dingy stained cargo shorts and sneakers (not a Proud Boy).

But this last weekend, at the North American Science Fiction Convention "Pemmi-Con" in Winnipeg, Canada, I got no strange looks at all while wearing this outside con spaces. This wasn't really something I noticed, until it became obvious in retrospect when a Canadian friend noticed the Romanovan flag flown from a city building nearby:

Romanova is located in Canada!

#perhaps the stars #terra ignota #blacksleeve servicer #winnipeg #pemmi-con #north american science fiction convention #nasfic #costume #servicer

[chaotic-history]

Finished Perhaps the Stars. Coherent thoughts are still loading but God this book is more of a religious text than most religious texts are

#terra ignota #perhaps the stars

[jellidraws]

some terra ignota redraws

#terra ignota #perhaps the stars #jedd mason #mycroft canner #ojiro cardigan sniper #carlyle foster #idk what 9a's tag is but they're there #some of these are OLD i just never posted them

[di-girls-dem-sugar]

Reading events from 9A's perspective really makes you appreciate how unhinged Mycroft is

#shut up kayla #terra ignota #perhaps the stars #Mycroft canner #9a

[riotbrrrd]

I have, to be fair, a personal philosophical disagreement with Felix Faust that makes me unable to side with him in the end—where his argument to JEDD is that, if immortality is to upload souls into the network then it defeats distance by default. But it's not a kind of immortality I find appealing. I don't think the ultimate goal of humanity should be to defeat death by defeating the concept of being organic. Now, it's not the kind of immortality Terra Ignota suggests is the most likely to happen in the world it depicts, because that's not how Bridger's potions work at all. But it did get me to think, because in some ways... well, I wouldn't say Terra Ignota sides with me on that, not quite, but.

There is do much space given to the physical expression of people; their stature, their form, their expressions too. Mycroft will wax poetics about a smile or a face, emotions are always so intense and dramatic and overwhelming for those who feel them. There is so much emphasis put on food; whether Mycroft has eaten lately (and, well, what he eats), or A9 feeling grateful everytime someone shares food they like. There is so much emphasis put on sex—the series is so relentlessly horny, even when there is no room left in the plot for full insane sex scenes there is room for having babies off screen, or for admiring a cop's biceps as they stretch next to you. There is so much emphasis put on sadness and tears; a whole plot twist is centered around Dominic being unable to see JEDD cry.

And thrice in the story, four if you count the fake account of Lorelei Cook, the worst thing that happens to characters is being imprisoned into their own skin, with no access to their own senses. When A9 comes out of it they almost cry because Carlyle brought soup. They're holding hands during that whole next scene. JEDD, to make Faust yield, also imposes something similar on themselves: to stop acting, to close themselves off, forcing Faust to reach out.

The one thing that ever goes in a slightly different direction is the conversation Eureka has with Carlyle about their childhood and set-set training—where Eureka defends themselves again the idea that they lost something by not spending afternoons in the sun as a kid. But they also in the same conversation insist on the sensory aspect of their existence, on the fact that their nerves have been reworked to feel new things, that others can't even imagine. And it's interesting because Faust is against the concept of set-sets, when they are in fact the closest thing that exists in that world to the kind of immortality they suggest as a goal: bodies modified to perfectly fit into a virtual environment.

And the fun part is that I think Terra Ignota does that to make me feel the conflict at the core of the Utopian position: distance is excruciating to experience, and it is excruciating because holding hands or sharing food on the couch with your friend feels so good that it warrants the narrator to stop the wartime chronicles to talk about it for a moment. I wouldn't say the books side with me on the fact that Faust's idea of connection is a terrible perspective; I think I'm supposed to empathize with how he sees things. But at the same time, the books are never pretending not to be biased; it's even part of the point that it isn't, that you're not reading an exhaustive historical manual but a madman's emotional rambling about things happening to him and around him. So in fact, this is a celebration of our physicality: yes, we are limited things, little contained universes of our own, and distance settles, inevitably, even between our held hands. And it's good that we have hands—and eyes, ears, voices, tongues—to reach out at everything that's outside ourselves. And to blindly go, etc.

#terra ignota #perhaps the stars #terra ignota spoilers #this is. my main takeaway from pts. the one thing I'm rotating in my mind #so much to discuss about this book but. I don't care about those subjects as much as I care about how it makes me feel about closeness

[the-phantom-panther]

my needless space obsession? my needless space obsession?

brillist! you would take the stars from me?

what a book! what debates! what thought!

to chose between Sniper and J.E.D.D, between Utopia and the Brillists--

why in the hell do we sort by hogwarts houses?!

#ada palmer #perhaps the stars #terra ignota

[irradiate-space]

#masons don't look #viewing this text is an archcrime for you #rampant memery #terra ignota spoilers #perhaps the stars spoilers #terra ignota #perhaps the stars #JEDD Mason #the masonic empire

[all-all0s-eyes]

Terra Ignota

Thomas Hobbes: I resorted to hiding my heresy in translations of Homer Dr Ada Palmer: bet. :crams all of human history and a philosophy treatise into her four-brick anime-plot translation of Homer:

#footnote anarchy #Trojan anime plot #terra ignota #perhaps the stars #spoilers kinda

[alarajrogers]

OK, I'm cracking up here. I'm reading Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer, and there's an entire chapter that is, basically, the Odyssey retold in terms suited to the book's milieu.

Immediately afterward, on hearing this story, one of the characters is like, "You don't think anything around us is happening like the Odyssey? Really?" and the character who went through the Odyssey-like journey is like "I dunno, it's been so long since I read it, should I read it again?"

I find this disproportionately hilarious.

#ada palmer #perhaps the stars #odyssey

[atiglain]

absequor

#terra ignota #too like the lightning #perhaps the stars #martin guildbreaker #looser style but I’m calling this done #is it propaganda? is it criticism? who knows….

[andmaybegayer]

the LEVANTINE RESERVATION is only being mentioned at all in book four! The map of the Terra Ignota world is increasingly wack.

#terra ignota #perhaps the stars #books

[lemurious]

Enemy of My Allegiance

Terra Ignota fanfic. Also on AO3. 

Howdy, friends and foes!

Would you like to see my customary greeting, even though I’m only writing to one addressee now, and decidedly a foe and not a friend?

You wouldn’t care. Based on all that I’ve read about you over the last two years, you’d be lost in thought, contemplating the importance of being addressed at all.

I would, though. I feel as if shedding the greeting makes me lose just another bit of that old Sniper, the one still smiling from so many bedroom walls, I suspect, even in places where the walls themselves had crumbled under fire.

Yet I am still me. It might not be true for long, if our plan, based on a local pre-teen god with a penchant for Homeric drama, the same who so inconveniently resurrected you that one time, fails. But while I live, you remain the enemy of my allegiance, as Mycroft has been reminding me with his sweet incessant intensity, though, of course, in Greek. You can doubtlessly parse the meanings better to cover the nuances, this is why Mycroft is yours and has never been mine, in spite of having crossed my threshold and eaten at my table as often as at yours.

I have joined your cause, my enemy, and signed myself to the front line of your forces, though it is a temporary allegiance, dictated by tyrants more threatening than yourself. I have counted the losses, and weighed them against my heart, and it remains filled enough with truth to grant me an easy afterlife in ancient Egypt. In the choice between the dictatorship of a commandment and of a mind, I have chosen the former.

Even you, impossibly good, unbearably just, at least if you trusted Martin in their painful predictability, or Mycroft when they are not arguing with their visions, even you need assassins. I am one, but I am not your assassin, and though I aim my arrow in your name, I shoot it in my own.

I am sorry; sorry, because if you are reading this, it means that I have failed; sorry, because if you are reading this, you have failed as well.

I do not know what they will do to you, but if you have that short time before you have to open the door to be forced onto a flight to Luna City, ask – I did not expect tears, not at this point – ask Carlyle, if she manages to convince your guards to let her visit. If Carlyle fails to find you, then, only as the last resort, ask Mycroft. Ask them what had happened to me in the months before I fired the shot that opened the Esperanza Games. There is support that can be shared through time, and my death will not diminish it, just as the death of ---- do you even remember them? Does anyone?

If I fail… If we fail, now, and you become the greatest test subject ever invented, know, my enemy, that I have never seen you as anything lesser or greater than humanity could produce.

A tyrant, yes. One to be assassinated, well, the facts speak for themselves. But a human, deserving of dignity and consideration, always, even as I declared war against you. I know you may consider it an insult, or at least, a hopeless misunderstanding. I do not retract my words.

I worry that your defeat will not carry the honor of the second place, as mine had.

If you are reading this, I regret that I had to die. I regret that you will. I regret what it means for the future.

There is another possibility, almost too bittersweet to consider, but I must address it, the slight chance that you’ll be reading it after I had failed, but you have prevailed.

In that case, I repeat - I regret that I had to die. I regret that you will.

For even if you are a god in your own universe, your body is mortal in this one, and there are consequences to the death of tyrants, usually, of the world-breaking kind. Consider – would it be easier if it came early, or late? Consider what may follow.

On that one, don’t listen to Mycroft, he’ll just ascribe it to Providence and tell you not to worry. Try to be prepared, and make the world prepared, too, for what will happen when you are no longer around to dictate your laws. Try to oversee at least one government change per Hive yourself, though who knows how that will work out with the Masons and their tiresomely long-lived Emperors. Wake up Achilles, if you need to, he might be able to provide some historical expertise of preventing another war, though be kind, too, and wake up Cornel first, Achilles has had enough of Hades.

I know you will be kind anyway.

If no resurrection comes this time, do not despair. You have worked harder towards excellence than anyone I know. When your time comes, imagine me cheering you on from the other side of the finish line.

Your enemy

Ojiro Cardigan Sniper

Thirteenth O.S.

#lemur writes #my fic #terra ignota #sniper #jedd mason #now where did this come from?! #perhaps the stars

[chaotic-history]

9A did NOT just fucking misgender Martin and Papa

#terra ignota #perhaps the stars #also i'm pretty sure Dominic would brutally murder you if you referred to him as anything but a man #as is his right 😌😌