The Will to Battle

The Will to Battle—the third book of 2017 John W. Campbell Award winner Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series—a political SF epic of extraordinary audacity

"A cornucopia of dazzling, sharp ideas set in rich, wry prose that rewards rumination with layers of delight. Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent."—Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings

The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end.

Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum
within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location.

The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives
bought the world's stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So
that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held.

The Hives' façade of solidity is the only...