Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)

by Ada Palmer

Not even I (and I have tried) can track that organized anarchy which is more a unit of measure than a hierarchy: a school of fish, a gaggle of geese, a constellation of Utopians. They did not pick the name for the reason you think. A constellation is a group of distant objects which form a tight whole from our perspective, but may really be light-centuries apart, one a nearby dwarf, a second a giant a thousand times as distant, a third not a star at all but a galaxy, which to our distance-blinded eyes seems just another speck. Just so, when Andō wonders, “Who runs their police?” the answer may include some individuals, a wholly separate bash’, and a vast corporation somewhere which may never have met the others, since all is done through casual cooperation. A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shapes of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars.