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Too Like the LightningBook

by Ada Palmer

Who uses, recommends or left Too Like the Lightning, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

2 people

Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
Statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who writes the long-running blog Three-Toed Sloth and the Bactra Review of books.
likedaffiliate link

This is a deeply impressive effort to take seriously the line that "history is the trade secret of science fiction". That is, Palmer has tried to craft a 25th century which is as strange, as familiar, and as both-at-once-because-that's-not-what-we-meant, as our own time would have seemed to someone from the 17th century.

His monthly "Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur" post for May 2016 — the books he read that month and feels he can recommend.

2016-05-31·bactra.org ↗

Jacob Falkovich
Writer of the blog Putanumonit, on rationality, dating, probability and book reviews; based in New York.
mixed

This preamble is very pertinent to Lightning. The best facets of the novel are really good, and the worst parts are really bad.

Review of Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, opening a short series on speculative fiction he had been reading.

2017-04-21·putanumonit.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.