Politics | Book Chatter

Too Like The Lightning
By Ada Palmer
Tor Books, January 2017, 448pp.

The Short of It:

This was a wild read to ponder. Good discussion book.

The Rest of It:

“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.”

What sucked me in was the premise. What kept me going were the questions.

The story is told from Mycroft’s POV. The problem? He’s a convict, slightly annoying, and an unreliable narrator. Everything he says, including those moments when he speaks directly to the reader, has to be taken with a grain of salt. Truth or fiction? With Mycroft, you’re never quite sure.

Religion has been done away with. Countries are no more. Instead, there are Hives, communities of like-minded individuals who can move from Hive to Hive as they see fit. Which raises the question: who’s in control? I couldn’t help but compare this world to the one we live in now. Certain people are still considered elite. You can take a guess who those people are.

Is it really utopia when there are so many social constraints? Who gets to rewrite history? As Mycroft navigates this world and ends up protecting the one kid who could upend everything they know, we’re pulled into questions about what it means to be a society. Even with familiar social norms gone, isn’t it still the top tier calling the shots?

My book club chose this for October, and although it was dense in places and sometimes hard to navigate, the world building and the questions it raised kept our discussion going. This is the first in a four-book series, and it feels like we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Recommend. It’s sci-fi, but it’s also politics and a whole lot of philosophy.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.

Nuclear War: A Scenario
By Annie Jacobsen
Dutton, January 2026, 416pp.

The Short of It:

A terrifying nuclear scenario that could absolutely happen.

The Rest of It:

Terrifying? Yes. Realistic? Absolutely. Nuclear War: A Scenario is based on intel from retired military personnel and walks the reader through a nuclear incident as it’s happening. Second by second. In five seconds, this is the impact. Two minutes in, this is what’s happening. You get the idea.

Reading this book while our current President is building a bunker to rival no other, was chilling and infuriating because given the picture that this book paints, no one is surviving. Six floors of a bunker will not save you. This is hard to read about but factual.

In this scenario, the Pentagon is the target. This seems probable to me. Taking out the command center would be the way to go. Once the bomb is dropped, it provides several stages of destruction. There’s the detonation, the flash of thermal radiation, the blast wave, electromagnetic pulse (EMP), and the formation of a radioactive fallout plume. If you aren’t one of the lucky ones to die on impact, you face horrible burns, immediate loss of limbs, burned out lungs.

If you survived all that, then your real challenge comes next. Survival. Water and food, all contaminated. All food sources, obliterated. This goes on for a very long time.

If there is no water, the fires from the blast are left unchecked and just continue to burn which damages air quality and UV filters, creating a nuclear winter; a projected drop of about 35 degrees. That means crops and livestock are wiped out.

In this scenario, it will take approximately 25K years for the earth to recover. Read that again.

Writing this book had to be quite the undertaking. It’s fascinating and you cannot stop reading even though the outcome is so grim. It’s broken down into locations and time. What’s going on in California? Or D.C.? Or at military bases around the world? More importantly, what is the President doing? His cabinet? Held against this current administration I’d have to say that we have NO HOPE of surviving such an event.

Grim.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.

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