Beginning ~ with a writing style

Beginning

You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of tranformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.

                    

Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, Book 1 of 4) ~ by Ada Palmer, 2016, science fiction, 448 pages

Mycroft Canner is a convict.  For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets.  Carlyle Foster is a sensayer — a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s.  It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech.  What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations.  And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety.  To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell.  To them, it seems like normal life.

And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destabilize the system:  the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true.  Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life.

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