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finished reading Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota #4)

Ada Palmer: Perhaps the Stars (Hardcover, Tor Books) No rating

i think i'm too overwhelmed to really write anything about this book rn, it's too much. spätestens ab der hälfte war ich auch nicht mehr wirklich ausreichend aufnahmefähig (there is so, so much going on in this text, and my memory not nearly good enough to keep all strands in my head at once)

commented on Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota #4)

Ada Palmer: Perhaps the Stars (Hardcover, Tor Books) No rating

this is probably the only sci-fi work i have ever read which has a solid page of text entirely in latin (and then has the gall to make that horribly weird latin, since most of it was presumably added three-words-a-time over centuries, for complicated in-universe regions)

commented on Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota, #1)

Ada Palmer: Too Like the Lightning (2017, Head of Zeus) No rating

that whole bit about the legally untranslatable latin dialogue, except one of the people present also speaks unreasonably obscure latin nobody else is used to, so the narrator reasons it's fine to at least give translations in 'normal' (in-world modern) latin, and then his anonymous editor suddenly inserts a paragraph saying "oh yeah i translated the latin but i suck at it & did so in secret from the others, so not sure how accurate it is" is still so absurdly over-the-top funny to me (all three versions are in the text, so one can compare)

even better since the editor clearly attempted to translate the obscure version of everything, not the narrator's "reasonable" gloss, so there's lots of overly-literal translations of idioms and such

also the latin speakers exchange a couple sentences beetween them in english without putting in much effort, so the grammar leaks and everyone else is …