paperback, 448 pages
English language
Published July 8, 2020 by Head of Zeus.
The final instalment in Ada Palmer's award-winning, critically acclaimed Terra Ignota series.
The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end. Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location.
The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world's stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held. The Hives' facade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past. But as the great secret becomes more and more widely known, that facade is slipping away. Just days earlier, the world was a pinnacle of human civilization. Now everyone? Hives and …
The final instalment in Ada Palmer's award-winning, critically acclaimed Terra Ignota series.
The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end. Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location.
The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world's stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held. The Hives' facade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past. But as the great secret becomes more and more widely known, that facade is slipping away. Just days earlier, the world was a pinnacle of human civilization. Now everyone? Hives and hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and the downtrodden, warriors and saints scramble to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war.
This whole tetralogy was bizarre, excessively wordy, and generally unpleasant, all the characters and their interactions were insane, finally culminating in a drawn out death wheeze of an ending. I only finished each book including the last out of a mild fascination with "could this get worse, or will it get better?" Was the author simply playing a colossal joke?
After a long wait for the final Terra Ignota volume, Perhaps The Stars does not disappoint. Yes, there are parts that on and on, but they work if you've bought in to the previous books. There is even in-story justification for this that was started in The Will to Battle.
The dense prose we've come to expect continues here, and I feel I need to complete a reread before I can write much more of a review.
In short, if you liked the previous novels then this is an extremely satisfying conclusion. Those who found the prior works to be more of a struggle won't have any relief here.
