The Will to Battle - (Terra Ignota) by Ada Palmer (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 ... 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' faðcade 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"--

Book Synopsis

The Will to Battle is the third book of John W. Campbell Award winner Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, a political science fiction epic of extraordinary audacity.

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' façade 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 façade 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--scrambles to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war.

Praise for Seven Surrenders

"A cornucopia of dazzling, sharp ideas set in rich, wry prose that rewards rumination with layers of delight. Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent."--Ken Liu, author of The Wall of Storms

"Seven Surrenders veers expertly between love, murder, mayhem, parenthood, theology, and high politics. I haven't had this much fun with a book in a long time." --Max Gladstone, author of Ruin of Angels

Terra Ignota Series
1. Too Like the Lightning
2. Seven Surrenders
3. The Will to Battle
4. Perhaps the Stars

Review Quotes

Praise for Book 3 of Terra Ignota, The Will to Battle

"It is increasingly clear that we are in the hands of a new master of the genre....There's a resonance and richness to the Terra Ignota series that is like almost nothing else being written today." --RT Book Reviews, 5 stars

"Innovative, mesmerizing and full of fun. Ada Palmer lets her imagination weave a truly great political science story in an imagined world - full of lessons from real-world history." --Washington Book Review

"One appreciates the wry humor and the ingenious depth of her worldbuilding. The interplay between reader and narrator is especially enjoyable." --Publishers Weekly

"Any reader who has ever thrilled to the intricate machinations of the Dune books, or the Instrumentality tales of Cordwainer Smith, or the sensual, tactile, lived-in futures of Delany or M. John Harrison... will enjoy the mental and emotional workout offered by Palmer's challenging Terra Ignota cycle." --Locus

"This series is one the best things that has happened to science fiction in the 21st Century and I can't hardly wait to see where Ada Palmer is going to take us with Perhaps the Stars." --SffWorld

Praise for Book 2 of Terra Ignota, Seven Surrenders

"A breathless and devious intellectual page-turner, Seven Surrenders veers expertly between love, murder, mayhem, parenthood, theology, and high politics. I haven't had this much fun with a book in a long time." --Max Gladstone

"Wonderful 18th-century style narrative voice....a richly and highly sophisticated novel that calls for repeated re-readings." --SFRevu

"The eloquence of Palmer's reflections on social issues cannot be denied." --Library Journal, starred review

"Palmer crafts one of the most compelling narrative voices around in describing this impossible, fascinating and plausibly contradictory world." --RT Book Reviews, 4-1/2 stars

"Devastatingly accomplished...An arch and playful narrative that combines the conscious irreverence of the best of 18th-century philosophy with the high-octane heat of an epic science fiction thriller." --Liz Bourke

"Palmer proves that the boundaries of science fiction can be pushed and the history and the future can be married together." --Publishers Weekly

Praise for Book 1 of Terra Ignota, Too Like the Lightning

"Bold, furiously inventive, and mesmerizing...It's the best science fiction novel I've read in a long while." --Robert Charles Wilson

"More intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall...If you read a debut novel this year, make it Too Like the Lightning." --Cory Doctorow

"Astonishingly dense, accomplished and well-realized, with a future that feels real in both its strangeness and its familiarity."--RT Book Reviews (Top Pick)

"The Terra Ignota books are is the kind of science fiction that makes me excited all over again about what science fiction can do." --Jo Walton

"Excellent." --Craig Newmark

About the Author

ADA PALMER is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a cappella music, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. Ada is the author of the Terra Ignota series, including Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, and The Will to Battle.