Terra Ignota

Another story involving many of these topics is told in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. Very different (less space opera, more history) but quite interesting too.

I finished the quadrilogy Terra Ignota, also known by its first book title, Too Like the Lightning. It is one of the most unique set of books I've read, taking place in the 2400s but referencing events 300 years in our past, so it is as if our current time is right in the middle of both ends. It is quite long and flowing in its writing, something that not everyone may like. It has a very high amount of allusion to other Western works, particularly ancient Greek works, so if you're not familiar with those, read them before reading these books. I am also reading Fire and Blood, which is on the opposite spectrum, much terser but somehow still enjoyable as its blunt style makes imagining the scenarios that play out in the story much easier than the flowery prose of Terra Ignota.

> it's very much one book that happens to be like 4000 pages long rather than four separate books. It's a good way to approach it. Because otherwise part two and so on feel "more of the same", and you may be a bit let down (like me) hoping there would be "new schtick" in the new books > The fandom is teensy tiny Count me squarely in that fandom.

it's a quadrilogy, not a book, but I'd pick Ada Palmer's _Terra Ignota_ series without hesitation. I'm comfortable arguing for it fitting within the constraint of the question, largely because it is making one sustained argument that's carried out throughout the entire series -- it's very much one book that happens to be like 4000 pages long rather than four separate books. Anyway, Ada Palmer is a sci-fi writer whose day job is as a professor of Renaissance and Enlightenment-era European philosophy, and everything in this series (set in the 2500s in a world where the geographical nation state collapsed and world governments are now large voluntary organizations) is heavily informed by her training as a historian of philosophy. She finished the series last year, and though each book has gotten nominated for the big awards, she's had the misfortune of publishing on more or less the same schedule as N.K. Jemisin, whose stuff typically wins the Hugo, Nebula, or both. The fandom is teensy tiny -- I've seen it described as "six people and a shoelace" -- but most people who read it get fanatically devoted to it.