I first heard about Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning this past fall when I went to Worldcon in Helsinki with my aunt. There, Palmer won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. I filed the book away into my ever-growing list of books to read, hoping to eventually get to it. However, when I decided to do my Intro to Gender and Sexuality Studies final project about female authors in science fiction, I thought it was time to dive into Too Like the Lightning.

Too Like the Lightning is a far-future science fiction novel set in the year of 2454. The narrator Mycroft Canner, follows the events of a few days in the history of 2454, which will be continued in the next three books. Canner has found a young child who can animate toys into autonomus beings. This is extremely dangerous in a society, which has banned most discussion of religion.

The worldbuilding in Too Like the Lightning is superb. Firstly, the society no longer holds much value in the gender binary, with all the characters going by they/them pronouns. Secondly, rather than being tied by a national identity, citzens are allowed to choose which “Hive” they belong to. Hives are divided by the different vocational interests the groups represent. Finally, rather than having strict biological families, individuals can choose a group of people who share similar values with them, to form a “bash”. Members within the bash can then marry amd have children, but the bash as a whole is present in raising the children.

Too Like the Lightning had the potential to be an extremely well written socially conscious science fiction novel. With the agender characters, and loose family structures I was excited to see how the novel would cover what sounds like a millenial dream. However, the novel managed to fall short of my expectations on these accounts. There was a distinct lack of same-sex relationships, when with the lack of the traditional gender binary should be much more prevalent. Moreover, Canner decided to use gendered pronouns within his narrative. On a positive note, Canner did not assign the pronouns by sex, but rather by gender performance, which is progressive compared to our modern world. Despite these slight complaints, I found the story to be riveting and I cannot wait to read the second book in the series, Seven Surrenders, a copy of which is waiting for me back in the States.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

-Laura