About the Book
From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, 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 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. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life. And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life... Performed by Chris Stinson, Kay Eluvian, Wyn Delano, Nazia Chaudhry, Zeke Alton, Alejandro Ruiz, Nora Achrati, Lise Bruneau, Jacob Yeh, Marni Penning, Taylor Coan, Ryan Carlo Dalusung, Brandon Burton, Dawn Ursula, Holly Adams, Lydia Kraniotis, Neha Gargava, James Konicek, Elena Anderson, Emlyn McFarland, Bradley Foster Smith, Robb Moreira, Chris Davenport, Anthony Palmini, Daniel Llaca, Niusha Nawab, Christopher Walker, Bianca Bryan, Shawn K. Jain, Mark Harrietha, Duyen Washington, Matthew Schleigh, Shravan Amin, Nanette Savard, Shanta Parasuraman, Nicole Perez, Megan Poppy, Torian Brackett, Natalie Van Sistine, James Lewis, Carolyn Kashner, Christopher Walker, Christopher Williams, Colleen Delany, Tia Shearer, Yasmin Tuazon, Megan Dominy, Stephon Walker, Terence Aselford, Scott McCormick, and Rose Elizabeth Supan.
About the Author :
Ada Palmer is the author of the Terra Ignota fiction series and winner of the John W. Campbell Award. She is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a cappella music, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. She writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com.
Marni Penning is a classically trained, award-winning stage and film actress who has performed in fifty-four productions of twenty-three of Shakespeare's plays to date. On the small screen, you may have caught her appearances on Guiding Light, All My Children, Law & Order: SVU, Saturday Night Live, or The Sopranos. Marni has been a voice-over artist for many years and was a disc jockey in college; she studied voice-over for animation with the legendary Pat Fraley, so her specialty is character voices and complex accents. Marni got into narration through the Library of Congress Books for the Blind program, and has appeared in over 100 large-cast recordings for Graphic Audio. Her warm, rich, inviting voice adapts equally well to cozy mysteries, sci-fi thrillers, YA fantasy, and quirky romances. She lives just outside Washington, DC, with her husband, son, dog, fish, and chickens. Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales on 27 October 1914. In 1934 his first book of poetry, Eighteen Poems appeared, followed by Twenty-five Poems in 1936, Deaths and Entrances in 1946 and in 1952 his final volume, Collected Poems. He also published many short stories, wrote filmscripts, broadcast stories and talks, did a series of lecture tours in the United States and wrote Under Milkwood, the radio play.During his fourth lecture tour of the United States in 1953, a few days after his 39th birthday, he collapsed in his New York hotel and died on November 9th at St. Vincent's Hospital. His body was sent back to Laugharne, Wales, where his grave is marked by a simple wooden cross.In June 1994, his wife, Caitlin Thomas, died in Italy, where she had spent most of the years of her life after the death of Dylan Thomas. Her body is buried next to his.
