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Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota (Terra Ignota, 2) Paperback – November 28, 2017

by Ada Palmer (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,140 ratings
Goodreads Choice Award nominee
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*2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL CATEGORY*

From 2017 John W. Campbell Award winner, Ada Palmer, the second book of Terra Ignota, a political science fiction epic of extraordinary audacity

“A cornucopia of dazzling, sharp ideas set in rich, wry prose that rewards rumination with layers of delight. Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent.” ―Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings

In a future of near-instantaneous global travel, of abundant provision for the needs of all, a future in which no one living can remember an actual war…a long era of stability threatens to come to an abrupt end.

For known only to a few, the leaders of the great Hives, nations without fixed locations, have long conspired to keep 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. And yet the balance is beginning to give way.

Mycroft Canner, convict, sentenced to wander the globe in service to all, knows more about this conspiracy than he can ever admit. Carlyle Foster, counselor, sensayer, has secrets as well, and they burden Carlyle beyond description. And both Mycroft and Carlyle are privy to the greatest secret of all: Bridger, the child who can bring inanimate objects to life.

Shot through with astonishing invention, Ada Palmer's Seven Surrenders is the next movement in one of the great science fiction epics of our time.

“Seven Surrenders veers expertly between love, murder, mayhem, parenthood, theology, and high politics. I haven't had this much fun with a book in a long time.” ―Max Gladstone, author of Three Parts Dead

Terra Ignota
1. Too Like the Lightning
2. Seven Surrenders
3. The Will to Battle
4. Perhaps the Stars

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  1. Book 2 of 4
    Terra Ignota
  2. Print length
    384 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publication date
    November 28, 2017
  5. Dimensions
    6.2 x 1.3 x 9.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0765378035
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0765378033
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Book 2 of Terra Ignota, Seven Surrenders

“A breathless and devious intellectual page-turner, Seven Surrenders veers expertly between love, murder, mayhem, parenthood, theology, and high politics. I haven't had this much fun with a book in a long time.” ―Max Gladstone

"Wonderful 18th-century style narrative voice....a richly and highly sophisticated novel that calls for repeated re-readings." ―SFRevu

"The eloquence of palmer's reflections on social issues cannot be denied." ―Library Journal, starred review

"Palmer crafts one of the most compelling narrative voices around in describing this impossible, fascinating and plausibly contradictory world." ―RT Book Reviews, 4-1/2 stars

Praise for Book 3 of Terra Ignota, The Will to Battle

"It is increasingly clear that we are in the hands of a new master of the genre....There's a resonance and richness to the Terra Ignota series that is like almost nothing else being written today." ―RT Book Reviews, 5 stars

"Innovative, mesmerizing and full of fun. Ada Palmer lets her imagination weave a truly great political science story in an imagined world – full of lessons from real-world history." ―Washington Book Review

"One appreciates the wry humor and the ingenious depth of her worldbuilding. The interplay between reader and narrator is especially enjoyable." ―Publishers Weekly

"Any reader who has ever thrilled to the intricate machinations of the Dune books, or the Instrumentality tales of Cordwainer Smith, or the sensual, tactile, lived-in futures of Delany or M. John Harrison... will enjoy the mental and emotional workout offered by Palmer’s challenging Terra Ignota cycle." ―Locus

"This series is one the best things that has happened to science fiction in the 21st Century and I can’t hardly wait to see where Ada Palmer is going to take us with Perhaps the Stars." ―SffWorld

Praise for Book 1 of Terra Ignota, Too Like the Lightning

“Bold, furiously inventive, and mesmerizing…It’s the best science fiction novel I've read in a long while.” ―Robert Charles Wilson

“More intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall…If you read a debut novel this year, make it Too Like the Lightning.” ―Cory Doctorow

“Astonishingly dense, accomplished and well-realized, with a future that feels real in both its strangeness and its familiarity.”―RT Book Reviews (Top Pick)

"The Terra Ignota books are is the kind of science fiction that makes me excited all over again about what science fiction can do.” ―Jo Walton

“Excellent.” ―Craig Newmark

“Devastatingly accomplished…An arch and playful narrative that combines the conscious irreverence of the best of 18th-century philosophy with the high-octane heat of an epic science fiction thriller.” ―Liz Bourke

“Palmer proves that the boundaries of science fiction can be pushed and the history and the future can be married together.” ―Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Ada Palmer (she/her) is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a cappella vocal music on historical themes, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. She writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com. Too Like the Lightning was her debut fiction book.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books; Reprint edition (November 28, 2017)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0765378035
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0765378033
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.2 x 1.3 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,140 ratings

About the author

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Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer

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Ada Palmer is an author of science fiction and fantasy, a historian, and a composer. Her first science fiction series "Terra Ignota" (published by Tor Books) mixes Enlightenment-era philosophy with traditional science fiction speculation to bring to life the year 2454, not a perfect future, but a utopian one, threatened by cultural upheaval. Ada Palmer studies the long-term evolution of ideas and the history of religious radicalism, science, and freethought, especially in the Italian Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Classical Greece and Rome. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago, and did her Ph.D. at Harvard University. She composes close harmony folk music with mythological, science fiction and fantasy themes, and performs with the a cappella group Sassafrass. She also studies the history of manga anime, especially the "God of Manga" Osamu Tezuka, blogs for Tor.com and writes the history/philosophy blog ExUrbe.com.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
1,140 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Sarah
5.0 out of 5 stars If you finished Too Like the Lightning, you need to read Seven Surrenders too!
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2017
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This was a group read with a few of my SFF book club buddies as a follow up to Too Like the Lightning. I think I was able to glean a lot more from it as a group read and it was interesting to see everyone's different perspectives and take aways on it. If you're considering this book, and have the opportunity to buddy read it- I highly recommend reading it that way!

I know the first book was very polarizing in that readers either enjoyed it or DNF'd or just didn't like it at all. I think if you made it through the end of the first book, you owe it to yourself to finish with Seven Surrenders. I really think they should have been sold as one huge Sci-Fi epic. I get why the publishers did it, but I think a lot of readers will miss out on at least the plot related answers we were asking after in book one. Too Like the Lightning does not feel complete without Seven Surrenders. This is part of a four book series overall, but I can tell you that Seven Surrenders does not end on the huge cliff hanger type ending we were given in Book 1.

I don't have any words to say that could do this book justice. There are too many topics covered. Religion. Individuality. Gender equality. Gender's purpose in society: whether it is completely learned or innate. Utopia. How society achieves Utopia: what it looks like for humanity as a whole. Morality. Whether a people's desire for justice and truth, a right to know, to not hide behind closed doors and propaganda, should be first before the safety of the rest of humanity. The greater good and the nature of goodness. Stagnancy vs. Progress. The nature of man. The nature of (G)od.

I don't mean to say that the author is offering answers to all of these questions, more like, she is imposing these questions to the reader. There are so many complex shades of gray in this story. They are important questions to be asked, and I have to wonder, if as Mycroft would say, Providence hasn't meant for these books to be released at this time. "Why now?" When Trump rules the USA, firing everyone who doesn't agree with him. Using his twitter accounts as his own personal form of propaganda. Calling any news channel who dares question him #FakeNews.

This is not an easy novel to digest and I think it will require multiple readings. It will be one of those books that you pick up something different from every time you read it. It is complex and intricate and we often aren't given the whole picture. People's motives are unclear and sometimes don't always make much sense in the context we receive them.

Aside from all the serious things happening, the world building was excellent. There are so many complexities to this society and I still have questions about it. I'm not sure what the difference is between blacklaws and graylaws etc. I don't understand the nature or purpose of all the Hives. Or precisely how bashes are formed. I'm not sure why The Anonymous is so important and what precisely their contributions are to society.

But most of what I love about these books is the characters. I'm still strangely attached to Mycroft. I'm attached to Sniper. I'm attached to Mother Kosala and Papadelias and Ganymede and am fascinated by all their strange interpersonal relationships. The plot is twisting and turning and once again, whenever you think you have something pegged, another bomb is dropped, another layer peeled away and everything shifts. It's like trying to solve a rubiks cube. For every shift of one square into place, another face of the cube has changed.

Overall- a fascinating and thought provoking read.
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Matt
4.0 out of 5 stars Picks up around the halfway mark
Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2017
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Palmer's Terra Ignota is one of the most well-designed, intellectually exhilarating worlds I've encountered in a very long time, and the fact that she was able to pull off the narrative delivery mechanism at all - an unreliable 25th-century narrator writing in what he imagines to be a 18th-century style for a 25th-century audience behind multiple layers of censorship - and immerse us in such a richly imagined, coherent, deeply alien culture overwhelmed any criticisms one could make of "Too Like The Lightning."

Some of the criticisms (or at least deviations from my own personal preference) are a bit foregrounded in this book. Many of the characters are neither very likable nor very different from one another, and a lot of words are spent on the minutiae of the sexual histories and high-political maneuverings. EARTH! SHATTERING! REVELATIONS! happen at what seems every chapter or so, only a few with much effect. The second half of this suffers much less than the first; my personal recommendation would be to skip over any conversation where Perry is present - you'll miss a few of the most egregiously offending scenes and nothing important.

But really reviews are irrelevant; everyone should read "Too Like the Lightning," and everyone who reads 2LtL will want to read this, so everyone should want to read this.
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Naomi Rivkis
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best novels of ideas I've ever had the privilege of reading
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2017
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Ada Palmer has managed to come up with a set of books (this is the second half of the story in _Too Like the Lightning_; don't even try to read it standalone) which has high-stakes action, glorious language, and characters who are a beautifully human mess of being purely selfish and purely Noble. But all of that pales when you're actually reading it, compared to her ability to produce true philosophic fiction -- the kind where it matters deeply which philosophies and philosophers are followed by each character, and you can understand motivations by having it revealed at long last which school of ethics a given character supports. Palmer is a historian of ideas, a professor in the field at one of the world's great universities, and she knows her ground well enough to incorporate the philosophy lesson seamlessly into the novels, giving us the background that non-philosophers will need without lecturing or slowing up the action to do it. She's probably one heck of a teacher.

These books are not without faults. Because she's writing a novel of ideas, the characterization can be inconsistent. I had a hard time buying into the simultaneous extreme corruption of some of her characters, and those same characters' extreme nobility when events demanded nobility in order to rescue their world from the disasters brought on by their own corruption. And there are so many different competing characters, groups, philosophies and plotlines going at the same time that it's usually difficult to tell the players without a scorecard. (Of course our helpful history-professor author gives us one -- literally! -- early in the first book, helping the reader to track the seven different major viewpoints, and which leader and Hive follows each. I recommend bookmarking it... I did, and went back dozens of times before I was done). She also betrays her own philosophical loyalties a little too obviously on occasion. Although there is greatness in each of the seven different nations which, in Palmer's world, are built not around land masses but around competing philosophical perspectives, the only one which is consistently described as being without either moral stain or major weakness is that which descends from the modern science fiction fans and futurists.

But those literary flaws pale when compared with the glory of Palmer's achievement: creating a viable-feeling world and an eminently readable, action-packed storyline while taking her place in the Great Conversation which binds philosopher to philosopher through every well-argued question and tentative answer throughout the ages. It's not easy to write good philosophy. To write it while simultaneously managing a cracking good science fiction story and inventing a society which, despite the fault lines threatening to treat it apart, is consistently better than our own, is one of the most impressive literary accomplishments I've seen in decades. Brava, Dr. Palmer. These books can stand fairly with the worthies of both science fiction AND philosophic literature. I can give them no higher praise.

[I have incorporated into this review both _Too Like the Lightning_ and _Seven Surrenders_, which are basically one book in two volumes for all practical purposes. Neither works as a standalone, and as far as I can tell, they weren't intended to. Read them as one story, because they are.]
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Picks up where Too Like the Lightning left off, and ramps things up
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 14, 2019
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The second instalment of Palmer's Terra Ignota series continues the tale told by Mycroft Canner, the reformed criminal at the nexus of the power elites of this 25th century world. The theological - and downright magical - aspects that had appeared in Too Like The Lightning become markedly stronger, an I'm not sure that I should any more class this as science fiction, although I find the distinction unimportant, as this is very much a philosophical novel, and still utterly wonderful.

The author delves further into some of the philosophical ideas of the previous volume, while introducing some more and deeper, and all handled wonderfully within the storylines, never feeling forced or crowbarred in. I think it is the fact that these novels are so unashamedly philosophical, along with the density of ideas and the fact that there is so much dialogue, that has lead to some reviews considering them somewhat pretentious. I don't see this at all; the lofty aims are both laudable and superbly executed.

I had thought this story was simply a duology, but see there is a third book, and a fourth on the way. I am certain Ada Palmer will continue to deliver to the high standard she has set
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boundry
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic treatment of the Enlightenment and national global imaginaries
Reviewed in Canada on October 13, 2017
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"“Freud said all technology is a prosthetic god, a set of tools we weak humans strap on to give ourselves the powers we crave: computers for omniscience; trackers for omnipresence; medicine for immortality; armor for invulnerability; guns for Heaven’s wrathful thunderbolts."
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FeydRautha
5.0 out of 5 stars Un thriller de SF politique
Reviewed in France on April 14, 2018
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On avait quitté le premier tome, Too Like The Lightning, sous le flot des révélations, et Seven Surrenders va continuer sur cette lancée sans ralentir le rythme. Le propos est chargé de concepts politiques, religieux et philosophiques, et l'ensemble du récit est relaté par Mycroft Canner sous la forme de monologues ou de dialogues entre intrigants. L'ensemble du roman se déroulant en sept jours, il ne nous en reste plus que trois à vivre dans ce deuxième volet. Les événements vont donc s'accélérer et nous allons nous enfoncer plus encore dans les méandres des complots politiques qui se trament à tous les étages de cette fausse utopie et qui corrompent le pouvoir politique, le système d'éducation, le système de transport, les médias,...

Ce second tome confronte deux visions du monde. La première est le conservatisme du Léviathan. Les forces animant cette voie sont les pouvoirs politiques en place qui font tout pour préserver la façade de l'utopie, perpétuer cet âge d'or qui a vu 300 années de paix, quitte à recourir aux assassinats ciblés pour résoudre les tensions avant même qu'elles ne se s'expriment et assurer la stabilité de la société.
La seconde s'inscrit dans une volonté de changement à plus ou moins long terme. Sur le long terme, deux Ruches envisagent un avenir différent pour l'humanité. Les Utopistes ont déjà conquis la Lune et terraforment Mars pour en prendre possession dans 250 ans. Les Brillistes, eux, favorisent la numérisation de l'esprit humain. Mais d'autres forces travaillent à la destruction pure et simple de cette société corrompue. Le roman se dirige inévitablement vers la guerre.

Après la lecture de Too Like The Lightning, j'attendais beaucoup de sa suite. La forme du roman philosophique version siècle des lumières fonctionnait à merveille dans le premier tome et s'avérait pertinente pour décrire cette société utopiste. Elle possédait en outre une saveur délicieusement transgressive. Pour ce second tome, Ada Palmer aurait dû relâcher la contrainte. Son récit aurait alors gagné en dynamisme par un changement progressif de la forme qui aurait suivi l'effondrement de la société. Tel qu'il est écrit, Seven Surrenders montre quelques longueurs, et ne possède plus la qualité de surprise de son prédécesseur.  Reste qu'à la fin, la tension est à son comble. Je lirai avidement les deux tome suivants.

Vous pouvez lire si vous le voulez une critique plus détaillée sur mon blog dont l'adresse se trouve sur mon profil.
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning!
Reviewed in Spain on March 24, 2017
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Delicious, stunning, surprising. Very talky but when the words are this good that's no bad thing. I loved getting back into the world from Too Like the Lightning, even if Ada Palmer is dead set on showing us just how thin a veneer overlays utopia.

But damn, now what?
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Nolan Denman
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent read; some difficulty from its bridging a gap ...
Reviewed in Canada on April 20, 2018
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An excellent read; some difficulty from its bridging a gap in the storyline, which makes the beginning and end a bit less definitive, but overall quite enjoyable.
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