Back on my Terra Ignota BS Again (abstract theme, no spoilers)
I think both a large part of what makes Terra Ignota such a great series and what contributes the most jarring sense of missing or altered parts of the narrative is that the narrator is embedded in a cultural episteme that's familiar enough to us to not be utterly alien, but results in many visibly "off" things to someone approaching it from outside that perspective.
So while Mycroft is a *massively* unreliable narrator, the unreliability of the resulting text is not entirely (debate topic: is not primarily?) an individual quality so much as a result of his culture.
re: Back on my Terra Ignota BS Again (abstract theme, no spoilers)
Foremost example being Thomas Carlyle's historical narrative ("Great deeds of Great Men") being taken as a baseline established piece of academic truth
This shows itself not only the political makeup of the setting, but how it is portrayed (and on yet another layer of metatextual weirdness, how it is portrayed then impacting the setting itself; The first two books are published in-universe at the end of book 2, and have been widely read by the start of book 3)
So you have this perspective that feels *jarringly* monofocused on what's basically a classical pantheon of gods dictating the course of human history, in the form of the Hive Leaders and major political influencers like The Anonymous or Madame. The whole narrative and the characters within ends up giving those vibes, being more a story of gods and tragic heroes than an overview of human affairs at a time of massive upheaval.
And not all of that is explainable by "Mycroft misrepresents things", though much of it is down to who he focuses his story on and how he chooses to portray them. But Mycroft both comes from that culture, and (if we take his baseline 'factual info about setting' as truthful, which other narrators appear to confirm) is quite overt about its leaders-as-gods cultural trappings;-
Their sacred burial site for great political figures is literally called The Pantheon, after all.
re: Back on my Terra Ignota BS Again (abstract theme, no spoilers)
This is, btw, a fantastic elaboration of the classic future-SF trope of weaving your own setting's history into real world history; The "I will join the ranks of great physicists like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein or Freep Gargolbort!" style of worldbuilding
Terra Ignota takes it a step further, where those fictional-historical figures (the founding figures of the Hive system, for instance) are deeply immersed in the history and the people that came before them, but interpret a narrative of that history close-but-different enough to our own to feel familiar but distinctly 'off'.
They are then narrativised in turn, and those that came before them remain, take on wildly different cultural associations (Thomas Hobbes), etc, as the culture shifts. The whole fabric of history, as a story we tell ourselves of where our foundations lie and how we got here, is permeable and recursive in Terra Ignota in ways that go almost entirely unnoted and unscrutinised in STEM SF.
re: Back on my Terra Ignota BS Again (*huge* spoilers)
Bonus Round:
- Mycroft raised Bridger
- Mycroft taught Bridger his worldview
- Mycroft taught Bridger Greek Mythology, with Apollo's Illiad as *the* central text in his education
- Bridger changed reality with miracles, sometimes subconsciously
- By the time of the first book, Bridger is 14
Is the Pantheonic nature of world politics actually accurate in-fiction because the narrator raised a kid with godlike abilities, who then internalised his cultural episteme and made it into literal-truth?
[SFX: Metatextual explosion]
