Note: the following contains heavy spoilers for the Terra Ignota series through the end of the final book

“One point eight! We did it! One point eight!”

This line, delivered by Tully Mardi in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, marks the emotional denouement of a four book lead up to and through a worldwide war. The war is over, communications are back online, it is time to tally up the total casualties. After more than a year of global conflict, of a population of 10 billion people only 1.8 million have died — victory.

Without having read the books, it is difficult to appreciate how sweet this moment is. Rereading it for this blog, I found myself shedding a tear. The joy is as infectious as it is perverse. There is of course nothing to celebrate about 1.8 million people dead — except for the fact that it could have been so, so much worse. And Mardi has spent their entire life working towards the brutal goal of a war with as few causalities as possible. They can plausibly claim credit for singlehandedly lowering the death toll, their life’s work has not been in vain.

Palmer puts her work into the realm of hope punk, and writes far more eloquently about the goals of that ethic than I am able to. It is a genre dedicated, in her view, not to the easy drama of dark lords and righteous rebellions but the far messier prospect of making a flawed world better. It is a celebration of the grinding, life-consuming work of putting one’s shoulder to the wheel and pushing the arc of history a little bit further in the right direction.

The world of Terra Ignota is in many ways utopian, compared to our current world — the oppression of religion and gender have been put aside without (fully) banning them, prisons are archaic and rarely used, until the events of the novels, war and hunger have been distant memories for centuries. There are compromises, to be sure, but not only do all the characters think they live in the best era Earth has ever seen, they are arguably correct.

And yet.

The entire series is about how such a system can crack, where the compromises are necessary and when they are unbearable. It is about a lot of other things as well — theodicy, Greek mythology, Enlightenment philosophy, ethics, hope, gender, vengeance, scientific advancement, linguistic ambiguity and a host of other topics. But the core tensions are the points at which this system has failed to meet the aspirations of those living within it, and, crucially, how they make the system better.

The ability to sell a war of 1.8 million dead as an emotionally satisfying victory is impressive. But for me it also raises a related question. If you can sell small victories, can you also create a narratively compelling story where one character — in this case Tully Mardi — is not responsible for so much bloodshed avoided?

While Terra Ignota has a massive cast, it wavers at times into being great man fiction, with a few characters playing all the key roles in a world of ten billion people. Palmer does undercut this in some ways in later books — the cast of “great men” at the end is significantly different from that at the start, and is more expansive than at the start. There are moments that truly celebrate the vast number of unknown people working across a world at war to provide comfort and aid and minimize the casualties.

Still, the series focuses largely on the actions of a few key players even in a narrative that self-consciously looks incremental political and social change, not total revolution, for salvation. By the end the key players have changed, but several have gathered together more power in a single person than any Roman emperor or modern authoritarian. Meanwhile, the most radically decentralized, anarchic system of governance at the start of the books is revealed to have been manipulated by a few powerful key people; for it, progress is reform into more of a traditional democracy, a consolidation of power, not a distribution of it.

To be perfectly clear, the Terra Ignota series is one of my favorite books in recent memory. It is a paperback fulgurite, the energy of a lightning bolt frozen in text, and will likely crop up in many future blogs to come. It makes marvelous use of its form — a novel with (largely) one viewpoint — and it is a form that demands a reasonable group of people to follow. It is difficult to imagine a compelling novel that documents political upheaval both in full and from the perspective of someone laboring at one corner of a mighty project.

Still, I feel a novel that can make 1.8 million dead in a world of 10 billion an emotionally satisfying narrative might be able to do so without giving power over those 10 billion to just a handful of people.