Welcome to the Palmerverse

Ada Palmer’s Renaissance-informed science fictional futurism.

Today in Wired, Gregory Barber profiles my friend, colleague and collaborator Ada Palmer, an extraordinary writer, librettist, historian, scholar, activist and performer:

https://www.wired.com/story/ada-palmer-sci-fi-future-weird-hand-progress/

Palmer has just wrapped up Terra Ignota, her four-volume series depicting a deeply weird and uncomfortable future that is informed by her world-class scholarship into Renaissance history (she’s a tenured U Chicago history prof who specializes in the suppression of forbidden knowledge during the Inquisitions).

https://us.macmillan.com/series/terraignota

The Wired profile gets into the book’s odd contours — the deeply alien and marvellously plausible social norms it depicts — and connects them to Palmer’s historical work. As she is fond of saying, “We know less than 1% of what happened 500 years ago, and at least two-thirds of what we know is wrong.”

Terra Ignota depicts a world where our major problems — climate, war, shortage — have been addressed, where nation-states have been replaced by sprawling affinity groups (you can live anywhere and be an EU citizen, but you can also be a “citizen” of FIFA), and where distance has been…