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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I was really put off by the Terra Ignota series. I struggled through it, but her writing really didn't gel with me. I've been resisting reading "Inventing the renaissance" because of that, though it does come highly recommended.

I found it very USian [0] - obsessed with religion (and the overt assumption that emperors are a good thing was unsettling). And I also found her position that all the best of human thought lay in the past (the greek classics and the renaissance specifically in this case) deeply at odds with my worldview.

[0] I have noticed that US writers tend to feature religion prominently in their writing (e.g. Brandon Sanderson, not that this stops me from enjoying his writing, which I do). I read a new writer and make a bet whether they're USian after a couple of chapters based on their attitude to religion, and I've been mostly right.

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A couple thoughts here...

Palmer's handling of the different groups in Terra Ignota takes both sides, in every case. The case for why people join the imperial group has to be made, and made honestly. But problems with that approach are also pretty clear, and well explored: at the very least, elites get weird if they aren't responsive to the people, and the elites in Terra Ignota get very, very weird. I think she takes a bit more time setting up the positive case for the imperials exactly because it's pretty alien to us. Or, at least it was before our current global swing towards authoritarianism.

Europeans were also once pretty obsessed with religion, as you might recall. They may be less so now, but who's to say the pendulum won't swing? This is one of the things I loved about the series -- the future or build is very different because the pendulum has swung in ways that aren't obvious to us, from our modern perspective. Just as the people of Florence would find some of our obsessions pretty strange and unexpected.

good thoughts. Thanks for sharing :)

When did people start thinking it was ok to assume that the viewpoints of characters in a work of fantasy are what the author actually believes? Why is this so common in modern literature criticism? what is going on?

> and the overt assumption that emperors are a good thing was unsettling

God forbid a piece of literature explores a concept you find unsettling.

Fair points. But it wasn't so much the viewpoint of any individual character as the assumptions underlying the entire cast.

But you're right - I should read her other works precisely because this one unsettled me

I’m not sure why you seem so interested in vetting the beliefs of the author of a fantasy series. Just engage with the text.

It's not so much vetting their thoughts, as dealing with my own inner voice ranting at the beliefs I see in their writing.

There's a few other books that I've been unable to finish purely because I disagree with the author so much that I just can't read their work. I end up shouting at them (sometimes actually shouting at the book) so much that that forms my engagement with the text and it becomes pointless trying to read any more. At least I managed to finish Terra Ignota.

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