it adds up to a really cool novel of ideas. There's tons of interesting political ideas, ideas about gender, ideas about religion, and so on. If you're going to compare the setting to something, it might be a less dark and gritty Snow Crash, but certain parts resemble ideas and ideals in things like Scott Alexander's Archipelago. Too Like The Lightning does make a really wonderfully interesting world, with a unique future that's complicated at pretty much an ideal level for me to read about and remember every major group, and there's just a ton of worldbuilding. The book is not hard SF - it's very soft SF in terms of physics and science it cares more about the social systems and politics and societies in a really neat future Earth.
Nonetheless, the book is a worthwhile read and interesting in a lot of ways.
The book does feel like the ending, while on a decently high note, isn't really resolving the conflicts it set up it's more of a setup for the sequel, and the end feels quite abrupt.
I have intentionally not tagged this as RT on the title, because several characters still have opaque motivations that are not entirely clear by book's end and could very well boil down to 'is good/evil', but I suspect later books in the series will explain more, and anyways the majority of the cast has pretty well thought out motivation and beliefs, and finally even the weirdly motivated characters are still really interesting and different (it's hard to explain more without drastically spoiling major setting/plot elements). It's the first part of a new series, and basically it hit like 90% of my "HOLY SHIT THIS IS GREAT" buttons, and I think that it might be of interest here on r/rational too, as a genuinely original SF story and setting. So, I just finished reading the book Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer.
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