Terra Ignota 1-4 (Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, Perhaps the Stars) - Ada Palmer

Written by Ada Palmer
Read by Jefferson Mays, T. Ryder Smith
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 90h 07m

A political SF epic of extraordinary audacity.

Book 1 ● Too Like the Lightning ● Jefferson Mays ● 20:17

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 labeling 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 competition 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 destabilize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life…

Book 2 ● Seven Surrenders ● T. Ryder Smith ● 17:30

The year is 2454. The sun is setting on a hard-won golden age. For three centuries, humanity has enjoyed peace and prosperity fueled by technological abundance, oracular data analytics, careful censorship… and just a little blood. In a world dominated by seven factions, or ‘Hives’, the price of peace has been a few secret murders, mathematically planned to ensure political and economic balance. But now the secret is out, the balance is slipping and war beckons. Convict Mycroft Canner knew this war was coming – he committed his terrible crimes to forestall it. Now, he has just one card left, a wild card no degree of statistical genius could have predicted: a 13-year-old child with the power to work miracles. Turning thought into matter, matter in life, this child has the power to save the world, or to doom it.

Book 3 ● The Will to Battle ● T. Ryder Smith ● 17:08

The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end. Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location. The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world’s stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held. The Hives’ facade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past. But as the great secret becomes more and more widely known, that facade is slipping away. Just days earlier, the world was a pinnacle of human civilization. Now everyone — Hives and hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and the downtrodden, warriors and saints — scrambles to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war.

Book 4 ● Perhaps the Stars ● T. Ryder Smith ● 35:10

World Peace turns into global civil war. In the future, the leaders of Hive nations — nations without fixed location — clandestinely committed nefarious deeds in order to maintain an outward semblance of utopian stability. But the facade could only last so long. The comforts of effortless global travel and worldwide abundance may have tempered humanity’s darkest inclinations, but conflict remains deeply rooted in the human psyche. All it needed was a catalyst, in form of special little boy to ignite half a millennium of repressed chaos. Now, war spreads throughout the globe, splintering old alliances and awakening sleeping enmities. All transportation systems are in ruins, causing the tyranny of distance to fracture a long-united Earth and threaten to obliterate everything the Hive system built. With the arch-criminal Mycroft nowhere to be found, his successor, Ninth Anonymous, must not only chronicle the discord of war, but attempt to restore order in a world spiraling closer to irreparable ruin. The fate of a broken society hangs in the balance. Is the key to salvation to remain Earth-bound or, perhaps, to start anew throughout the far reaches of the stars?

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Terra Ignota 1 - Too Like the Lightning (2016)
Terra Ignota 2 - Seven Surrenders (2017)
Terra Ignota 3 - The Will to Battle (2017)
Terra Ignota 4 - Perhaps the Stars (2021)