Teaser Tuesday: “Perhaps the Stars”

So this week I was reading Perhaps the Stars, the final book of “Terra Ignota”:

I don’t normally plow right through multiple books in a series, but in the case of “Terra Ignota” I’ve found that I kind of have to do that or else I forget all the intricacies of the machinations being pursued by the various factions, not to mention who all the loads and loads of characters are. (Even though the story is narrated in the first person, that narrator is privy to just about everything that’s going on with everyone, a sort of Forrest Gump of the future.)

Anyway, the previous book in the series, The Will to Battle, ended with a very big bang as the global civil war got underway, and Perhaps the Stars picks up right where its predecessor left off; some unknown faction has seized control of the worldwide system of hundreds of millions of flying cars and is using them as, essentially, guided missiles to destroy any other form of aerial conveyance. Because the cars are powered by antimatter, this tactic produces explosions of city-flattening enormity*, so transportation has pretty much ground to a halt and returned to the age of trains, horses, and sailing ships, leaving Our Heroes scattered across whichever continent they were on when the system went down. This includes our new narrator (taking over narration duties from the missing Mycroft Canner**), who is stranded with a single ally in Romanova. Romanova, in case you can’t guess from the name, is a copy of ancient Rome, which was built in Sardinia after the original got destroyed some centuries prior to the events of Terra Ignota. So that’s not good. But at least somebody thought to bring dessert.

Those precious few beings in this Universe which Our Lonely Visitor could call ‘Mine’ were all lost: Heloïse to the Cousin crisis; Dominic to Asia; Martin to America; Mycroft to death. And I to Romanova. I couldn’t reach Them. I couldn’t reach any of them. There was nothing for it but to sit with Carlyle Foster-Kraye, eat three chocolate cakes, and watch the world burn.

Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

Yes, it’s Carlyle Foster-Kraye again, feeling much better after watching that video about sharks eating bananas (which, believe it or not, turned out to be relevant to the plot). And, well, you know what they say:

Now, the observant reader may have noticed some let’s call it interesting use of capitalization in that teaser. The “Lonely Visitor” in question, a character who is sometimes also referred to as, among other things, “the Alien” (also capitalized), is a being from another universe who was apparently invited over for tea (more or less) by his rather-less-nice counterpart in the main Terra Ignota universe. In his own universe he is, essentially, all-powerful, but in this one he’s a normal human being; if you think of him as the Beyonder from Marvel Comics before his many retcons and without any actual powers outside his own universe**, you’re not far off. Anyway, once people figured out, over the course of the previous three books, that this character was basically a benevolent god, some of them were like:

And of course some of them weren’t. This isn’t the only reason for the global civil war, but it certainly didn’t help … Meanwhile, speaking of visitors from other universes, they turn up fairly regularly in my books. But they aren’t usually benevolent.

“I don’t intend to kill you. I intend to trade you.”

“Trade me? What are you, a colonist exploiting the natives? Trinkets for furs?”

“You have it backwards. They are the colonists. We are the natives.” He ran his spindly fingers through his thin grey hair, cast his gaze around the stone cavity. “There are factions out there, you know, in the places beyond our experience. They contend and jockey. When Arvidsson’s contingent sent him back, mine instructed me to deal with him, and I did. They wanted the books that were hidden here, and I obtained them. But then Victor rebelled somehow, and tried to trade me—and believe me, I was punished for my carelessness in allowing that to happen–and you and that woman managed to destroy my outpost, and as you can see, I am in no state to perform the rituals to create a new one. Fortunately, Arvidsson’s was available, thanks to the kind efforts of your father.”

James V. Viscosi, Father’s Books

* It doesn’t take long for people to realize they can weaponize this by shooting things into the air over their targets, thus causing the cars to destroy said thing and obliterating whatever happens to be on the ground below.
** Or, you know, as a Jesus figure.
*** Everyone thinks Mycroft is dead after the events of The Will to Battle, but it was revealed almost immediately upon his “death” in that book that he is, in fact, alive and will be returning, so this is not really a spoiler.