Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)

by Ada Palmer

Once upon a time there was a bright young atheist named Denis Diderot. In his Eighteenth Century, atheism was just blossoming, and keen libertine minds hungered for a firebrand to stir and lead them. He could have made himself the Pope of Atheists, but he refused, for Diderot, while denying any afterlife, dreamed of worldly immortality, not for himself, but for the dead, the dreams and achievements of ages past, and for his world. His Philosopher’s Stone would be a book. The second half contained technical plates illustrating all the technologies humanity had achieved: weaving silk stockings, annealing metal, baking bricks; so with a single copy even the lowest peasant could reconstruct all the tools of civilization. The first half was the same for thought. Thus, if a new Dark Age should fall upon on the Earth, but a single copy of this book survived, every achievement of the human race—from bronze to Liberty—could be restored. Diderot named this talisman of immortality Encyclopédie, and, fearing that his personal beliefs might bring the wrath of the authorities upon the project, he voluntarily suppressed his own work, publishing nothing of the revolutionary atheism which like-minded doubters of his age so hungered for. The public who named Voltaire ‘le Patriarch’ dubbed Diderot ‘le Philosophe,’ the Philosopher, guardian and caretaker of all thinkers and all thought. The grand title of ‘Arch-Heretic,’ which he deserved, he left to others, to Machiavelli, Hobbes, misunderst...