With Perhaps the Stars, Palmer finally gets to the fireworks factory she's been teasing this whole series. WAR! (Hoo, yeah! What is is good for?). With the Olympic truce over, and those capable of making weapons of mass destruction abducted by the Utopian Hive, the battle lines and alliances are rapidly coming into definition. But before the war can go hot, two key technologies of the world fail entirely. The suborbital flying cars switch to an autonomous flight-denial mode, smashing any object in the air to earth. And the global tracker network, the universal internet of the 25th century, is jammed and hacked, forcing everyone back to line of sight lasers, cables, and messengers. The Hive War will be fought in a style Napoleon would have mostly recognized, even if troops are armed with stun guns rather than muskets.

In a blessed dose of sanity, the narrator for much of the book switches from much troubled, much overwritten Mycroft, with his digressions to the Reader and Hobbes, to the much more direct 9th Anonymous. 9A spends the first chunk of the story isolated in the global capital of Romanova on the island of Sardinia, fighting their own private war to rebuild communications and clarify the messy field of foes in grand alliances of Remaker and Hiveguard. Palmer manages to depict war with great clarity. It is confusion, and fear, and moments of glory are so much moonshine. War is unvarnished evil.

I also enjoyed the revelations of yet another conspiracy. The Gordian Hive, based in Brillist psychodynamics, is revealed to be the architect of plans against Utopia, with the fate of the human race at stake. Their leader, Felix Faust, believes that the Utopian project of space colonization is a diversion from a better goal of immortality via mind-machine interface. With keen insight, they saw the coming war as well, and while Utopia believed that a small war now was necessary to prevent a worse war in the future, Gordian glimpsed a chance to become humanity's visionary branch, and used their skills to move the war in that fashion.

This is a thrilling conclusion, so why is this not five stars? Three reasons.

First, while the Utopian project of space colonization and flashy miracle tech is well-defined, their Gordian adversary is not. All scifi technology is ultimately an illusion, smoke and mirrors, but Gordian's "pick a number, pick a color, fascinating" mind tricks are more illusory than most. Utopia's plan is enacting Tsiolkovsky's quote, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” Diaspora is both maturity and distancing, the end of a unified humanity. Gordian deserves a grander vision to match Utopia. Not merely a garden Earth, but one of telepathy, new forms of connection, new depths in the psyche. Gordian is drawn as psychoanalysis+, but what if they inherited from Timothy Leary and Teilhard de Chardin more than Freud, charting new vistas of an intelligent, emotive, psychedelic universe? What if the Utopian/Gordian conflict was about two version of world where dreams have become real.

Second, there are still undigested lumps of Hobbes and Homer blended in amongst Palmer's writing. I reached my limit with these philosophical/theological asides in book 3, and while Perhaps the Stars wastes less time on them, it still wastes time on them. The Ninth Anonymous narrates much of the book, but Mycroft returns, and I'm thoroughly done with his voice.

And third, J.E.D.D. Mason is the pivot of the plot, the single figure who could unite the Hives in his person thereby destroying the diversity of futuristic political systems, and a divine alien visitor brought to this universe by our flawed creator, who can only perceive and act in absolutes. I don't mind religious themes in my science-fiction, but J.E.D.D. reads too often as a ponderous nullity, with Capital Letters a crude effort to capture the totality and strangeness of their thoughts. Where this beam of the story needs to be iron, it is instead rotting wood.

On completion, Terra Ignota is great, but frustratingly flawed. It has some of the best and most original ideas I've seen in recent speculative fiction. It also has ideas which are either so outre or flawed on conception that no other author has chosen to use them, and for good reason.