An amazing novel — likely the best I’ll read this year.

The title is a little awkward and the cover makes it look like generic space fantasy, but there is nothing generic about Ada Palmer’s Too Like The Lightning.

I first looked at this novel out of duty. It’s a science fiction novel by a woman, and that’s something I want to support. So I read the first few pages, posted at Tor.com — and I was hooked. I needed a new audiobook, so I downloaded it in that format. I wasn’t far into it when I began mentally comparing it to Dan Simmons Hyperion. Like that novel, Too Like The Lightning is complex, fascinating, with unique characters drawn in exquisite detail, it’s deeply concerned with political structures, and in many ways it grasps aspects of the genre and reworks them, raising them to a new level.

When I recommend a book here on my blog, I usually say little or nothing about the plot, and I’m going to hold to that this time as well, because working out the plot is part of the intrigue of this book. Suffice to say that it takes place on Earth, a few hundred years in the future, in a diverse and intricately worked-out culture. It focuses on the workings of an aristocracy, treats gender in interesting ways, and offers abundant asides exploring history and philosophy. It is the most erudite work I can remember reading in the science fiction genre. It is very obviously science fiction, and yet it’s one of those novels that could have been published outside the genre — and maybe it should have been. It deserves a large audience.

I listened to Too Like The Lightning as an audiobook. The narrator, Jefferson Mays, is excellent. But as a measure of how much I admired the story, I ordered the hardcover for my shelf when I was only halfway through. The second book in the series is scheduled for a December 2016 release. The publisher is Tor Books.