Description

The final instalment in Ada Palmer’s award-winning, critically acclaimed Terra Ignota series.

For years, the leaders of the Hive clandestinely committed terrible deeds in order to maintain an outward semblance of utopian stability. But the facade could last only so long. Global travel and worldwide abundance may have tempered humanity’s darkest inclinations, but conflict remains deeply rooted in the human psyche. A catalyst – in the form of a special little boy – was all it took to ignite half a millennium of repressed chaos.

Now war spreads across the globe, splintering old alliances and awakening sleeping enmities. All transportation systems are in danger, fracturing a long-united world and threatening to obliterate everything the Hive system built.

With Mycroft Canner nowhere to be found, his successor must attempt to restore order in a world spiralling ever closer to irreparable ruin. But is the key to salvation to remain Earth-bound or, perhaps, to aim for the stars?

‘Incredibly ambitious and groundbreaking… Palmer writes gloriously lush prose stuffed with asides, allusions and nods to the reader’ Guardian

Publisher Review

'To smooth our vision of the impact of technology on our society, I can't suggest a better guide than the Ada Palmer series of Renaissance historians and science fiction writers' * ExBulletin * PRAISE FOR ADA PALMER: 'More intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall' Cory Doctorow. 'Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent' Ken Liu. 'The kind of science fiction that makes me excited all over again about what science fiction can do' Jo Walton. 'Incredibly ambitious and groundbreaking... Palmer writes gloriously lush prose stuffed with asides, allusions and nods to the reader' Guardian. 'Part novel, part series of nested essays, part project, The Will to Battle is much greater than the whole; an exercise in both narrative flexibility and philosophy... It's a powerful expression of what the genre can do' * Starburst *