Too Like the Lightning (e-book) (used book) | Ada Palmer | bookbook.eu

Description

As is the custom in the 25th century, convicts must wander the world being as useful as they can to all whom they meet.

For his crimes, Mycroft Canner is required to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets.

Carlyle Foster is a sensayer—a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.

The 25th century world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations.

To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.