Search results for ""Author Ada Palmer""

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

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After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God.Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse.Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe’s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.

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The year is 2454. The sun is setting on a hard-won golden age. For three centuries, humanity has enjoyed peace and prosperity fuelled by technological abundance, oracular data analytics, careful censorship... and just a little blood. In a world dominated by seven factions, or 'Hives', the price of peace has been a few secret murders, mathematically planned to ensure political and economic balance. But now the secret is out, the balance is slipping and war beckons. Convict Mycroft Canner knew this war was coming – he committed his terrible crimes to forestall it. Now, he has just one card left, a wild card no degree of statistical genius could have predicted: a thirteen-year-old child with the power to work miracles. Turning thought into matter, matter in life, this child has the power to save the world, or to doom it.

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The year is 2454. Three centuries of peace and a hard-won golden age have come to an abrupt end. The once steadfast leadership of the seven Hives is crumbling, soured by corruption and deception. Savagery and bloodlust, three-centuries suppressed, have been unleashed. The terrible truth is that centuries of peace were bought with a trickle of secret murders. The killings were mathematically planned, meticulously organised to preserve the balance – to ensure no faction could dominate. But now the secret is out, the balance has tipped, the Hives' utopian façade has slipped. Just days ago, humanity stood at the pinnacle of civilization. Now everyone – Hives and Hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and convicts, warriors and saints – is preparing for war.

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The year is 2454. Humanity has engineered a hard-won golden age, forged in the aftermath of a bitter conflict that wiped both religion and nation state from the planet. Now seven factions or 'hives' co-govern the world, their rule fuelled by benign censorship, oracular statistical analytics and technological abundance. But this is a fragile Utopia – and someone is intent on pushing it to breaking point. Convicted for his crimes, celebrated for his talents, Mycroft Canner is the indentured instrument – and confidant – of some of the world's most powerful figures. When he is asked to investigate a bizarre theft, he finds himself on the trail of a conspiracy that could shatter the tranquil world order the Hives have maintained for three centuries. But Mycroft has his own secrets. He is concealing a much greater threat to the seven Hives, a wild card no degree of statistical analysis could have prophesied. This threat takes the unlikely form of a thirteen-year-old called Bridger. For how will a world that has banished God deal with a child who can perform miracles?

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