Plans changed with every pope, and since the pendulum of politics meant popes were usually replaced by their enemies, each pope hated his predecessor, so, out of sheer spite, dismantled whatever half-built urban reconstruction he’d begun.

cries in American politics

It turns out history isn’t written by the winners; history is written by the people who write histories.

This line actually stopped me dead in my tracks when I read it yesterday, and I’m still mulling it over.

In context, I know she’s talking about a very literal conflict that had winners and losers, and that the actual outcome may not matter as much as the perceived one. The “winner” is whoever has the most compelling story, regardless of the real events that really happened.

But I think this ties into some of the larger themes she’s been exploring, about the stories we find compelling and valuable in the first place, the lenses we use to examine them, and the framing of history as a series of blended and overlapping continuums (continua???) vs a bunch of discrete events that can be neatly separated from one another. When you think about the phrase “history is written by the victors”, what does it mean to win when it comes to history? By that same token, what does it mean to lose? Who gets to make that determination, and when, and why?

I don’t actually have answers to any of these questions, but I love that Palmer is encouraging us to think along these lines. (When did the World Wars end, anyway? If the lens you’re using is large enough and the timeline you’re creating is long enough, can we even say that they did?)

On a related note, anyone who hasn’t read Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota sci-if series should absolutely do so, because it’s bonkers in the best way and left me reeling in similar philosophical spirals.

Setting aside the first book, this is the most structurally solid of the series so far and it’s making for a great reading experience. The level design is strange but relatively straightforward, and the bubbles have kept everything quite focused. The quests added additional complexity but never overshadowed the main goals for the level, and the result is that everything feels like it’s being propelled forward at a good pace without ever getting too confusing.

I feel like Dinniman is getting better at balancing the pacing and the plot and the big character moments. Although Carl has commented that various parts of the level feel like they’re on rails, it doesn’t feel that way to actually read the story itself and that’s a pretty tricky thing to pull off.