From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality. Adapted and produced by GraphicAudio with a full cast of actors, immersive sound effects and cinematic music!
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...
Performed by Chris Stinson, Kay Eluvian, Nazia Chaudhry, Valentina Vinci, Wyn Delano, Lydia Kraniotis, Gabriel Michael, Lise Bruneau, Rose Supan, Holly Adams, Scott McCormick, James Konicek, Nora Achrati, Jacob Yeh, Jenna Sharpe, Neha Gargava, Stephon Walker, Bradley Foster Smith, Ryan Carlo Dalusung, Nanette Savard, Alejandro Ruiz, Carolyn Kashner, Christopher Walker, Zeke Alton, David Cui Cui, Marni Penning, Elena Anderson, Brandon Burton, Darius Johnson, Chris Davenport, Robb Moreira, Bianca Bryan, Matthew Schleigh, Rick Rohan, Eric Messner, Melody Muze, Colleen Delany, Michael John Casey, and Ken Jackson.