Hello and welcome to this slightly longer than usual Author Interview, where today I’m delighted to welcome Ada Palmer to Track of Words to talk about her Hugo Award-shortlisted Terra Ignota series, as part of the blog tour for the fourth and final instalment in the series, Perhaps the Stars. With Terra Ignota now complete, I thought it would be a great opportunity to ask Ada about the series as a whole, the world in which these books are set and some of the influences behind these complex, thought-provoking stories. Ada has obliged with some fascinating and richly detailed answers – as I said, this is a somewhat longer interview than normal, but I think it’s well worth putting the time aside to read this and find out more about this incredible series!
If you haven’t yet read the Terra Ignota series then prepare yourself for an eye-opening introduction, while if you’re raring to go with Perhaps the Stars then look out for some spoiler-free thoughts on what to expect from the end of the series. Either way, without further ado let’s get straight on with the interview.
Track of Words: To begin with, could you tell us a little about yourself, and what sort of things you like to write about?
Ada Palmer: Well, I’m a historian, and I study the history of ideas, especially how events make ideas change over time, i.e. what new kinds of ideas were shaped or birthed by big events like the Black Death or the World Wars. What really excites me is how world views change over time, how people in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance had a wholly different understanding of their world and cosmos from ours, not just opinions but fundamentals like how you go about determining what is true.
Lots of people say it’s odd for a historian to write science fiction, but nothing prepares us for SF better since the past and the future are both long periods of time in which events and ideas and people and tech all change, and change each other, so I think a historian’s tools are perfect for world building, and especially for thinking about how people’s ideas and ethics might differ in different eras. So in both my fiction (like my blog Ex Urbe) and my nonfiction my favorite things to write about are different world views, the ethics and metaphysics and social ideas people had in the past or could have in the future.
I also study mythology so I like to use mythological imagery – Homer in this series – and I’m interested in extremes of ethics, difficult choices and how to live with them. And I like writing about friendship, which I know sounds trite, but we have so much writing about romance and the very deep feelings it involves, yet friendship can also have very powerful emotions – grief, guilt when we fail each other, discovering each other, healing – and I think we need to write about that more.
Terra Ignota book one – cover art by Victor Mosquera
ToW: Congratulations on publishing the final book in your Terra Ignota series! Now that you’re looking back on the completed whole, how would you describe this series to someone who hasn’t read any of these books?
AP: When book 1 was coming out my editor would go on about how impossible it was to do an elevator pitch for it, and even with years of practice it’s still hard. It looks at borderless nations, taking place in a 25th century where a network of self-driving flying cars make it possible to get from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else on Earth in about two hours, so you can live in the Bahamas, work in Tokyo, have a lunch meeting in Paris, while your spouse works in Buenos Aires and has a meeting in Yangon and it’s all a reasonable commute. After a generation or two of that, it no longer makes sense for people’s citizenship to go with the place they happened to be born, so everyone lives like an ex-pat living in whatever part of the world had a nice house when their parents were house hunting.
So it led to nations becoming borderless: when you come of age you choose which of the world’s many citizenship options you feel best reflects your values and identity and you join that nation, living by its laws, paying its taxes, protected by its resources, even if everyone else on your street and even in your home has picked a different law, everyone living as a political minority surrounded by other minorities. The series then looks at how conflict would play out in a world where you can’t have border squabbles because everyone is everywhere, so all friction happens everywhere at once. It also has a bit of a who-done-it (though a long one so you don’t even fully understand what the it is that someone has done until the last page of book 1), and (the part that starts sounding weird) it’s written in the style of an 18th century philosophical novel like Candide, for reasons which I promise make sense as you read!
ToW: What are the key things that we need to know about the world in which these stories are set?
AP: A lot of people who read it find themselves debating whether it’s a dystopia or a utopia, often disagreeing fiercely with friends who feel the opposite, which is exactly what I hoped for. The world of Terra Ignota has a lot of wonderful elements: world peace, a 150-year life span, getting to live near your friends since you can all commute, unprecedented political self-determination, Mars terraforming underway. But it also has a lot of unsettling elements: censorship, severe religious restrictions, constant surveillance, a lot of popular support for absolute monarchy, people who aren’t participants in the system living on ‘reservations’, a lot of things that raise alarm bells. And it has a lot of things that are eerily unchanged for something so far in the future: there is still a European Union, and a King of Spain.
Even on narrower levels it’s a weird mixture, like gender, where on the one hand genderless language is the norm (all the dialog uses the singular they), but on the other hand both the narrator and a lot of other characters have a lot of strong and off-putting ideas about gender so as a whole it’s neither genderless nor not genderless, and it’s different in a lot of ways but the same in some uncomfortable ones. My goal in creating the strange mixture was to reflect what I think the present would look like to people from a couple centuries in our past: some things are wonderful (80 year lifespan! No smallpox! Airplanes!), some would be (why is everyone mostly naked? Why are women doing some stuff they didn’t used to but not all stuff? Why is the aristocracy so weird?), and some would be depressingly the same.
We too often think about science fiction futures where the changes are either all bad or all good, or sometimes with one big bad thing like a meteor strike and everything else recovering. But the real future will evolve as ours did, with a lot of changes, a lot of people trying to cause change for the better, and a lot of old entrenched systems trying to continue unchanged, resulting in a mixture which will feel like part utopia, part dystopia, part relic, and part alien world. I wanted the reader to think about the fact that our future will probably be like that, not a complete failure or complete victory, but a mixture of partial victories and compromises, which I think is something we aren’t asked to think about enough when we’re called on to try to help make a better world.
And that, even in a few centuries, there will still be the need for more change, for continuing the kind of work we’re doing now to make things better bit by bit, and continue to try to fix things that need fixing. If you’re someone who cares hard about working toward a better world, would you say your labors are worthwhile if what we get is a world that is genuinely substantially better, but somewhat unpredictable, with some new problems and some old relics, and still needs work just like today? That is the most likely outcome for our world, after all. Not this specific future I’ve imagined, but one like it, mixed, not all utopia or all dystopia, a mix, with many partial victories and much work still to do.
In some ways it’s easier imagining a future that’s all good or all bad, if it’s all good we’re done, and if it’s all bad we burn it down in a fiery revolution, which is how most dystopian fiction ends these days. It’s a more fatiguing prospect thinking about how the kind of work to make a better world that we’re doing was already underway 300 years ago and will still be needed in 300 years. But I think it’s important to remember that, and that fixing the problems around us is an act of teamwork, not only with others today, but over generations, passing the project forward, trusting the future to keep the efforts up, as those before us trusted us.
Terra Ignota book 2 – cover art by Victor Mosquera
ToW: Do you have a certain sort of reader in mind as the audience for this series?
AP: It’s aimed at people who like big chewy ideas, and like to keep chewing on them long after reading. People often tell me they find that, much more than with most books, the book keeps coming back in their thoughts months later when a new technology, or a political debate, or a challenge friends are facing will remind them of one of the world building elements or questions in the text. I know a lot of people who work in tech like it for that reason. It invites thinking about how social technologies can change the world – not the smart phone but using the smart phone to make something like Twitter – and how that can have secondary, and tertiary effects.
It’s also a book that’s built for discussion, reading with friends and debating together how different parts of the world make you feel, or how different revelations about the characters feel. And it has lots for people who enjoy mythology, and lush literary language, and has some fun mystery elements, for those who enjoy following the slow, reliable work of our detectives which surfaces from time to time amid the series’ other elements like a dolphin coming up for breath. And it has Latin and lots of stuff that linguists find super fun!
To give one concrete example of what I mean by the utopia/dystopia mix, one thing the book looks at is how gender and gendered language are changing. Gender is a very old social construct, but one that’s been changing very rapidly in our lifetimes. Things like the pressures on gendered labor as women entered more professions post-WWII, the rise of trans awareness and trans rights movements, and how quickly the use of the singular they has spread, which is documented in Shakespeare’s day but became much, much more common very quickly in the past two decades.
The way people use gender in the Terra Ignota future isn’t like our present, or like our past, or anything anyone alive today has experienced or would ever want, it’s no one’s ideal. Instead it’s a weird and contradictory mix of ways gender could be used, uncomfortable for everyone because it erases parts of the way we are used to using gender and exaggerates other parts beyond how we use them. For example, people in this future use gender neutral language in most speech, but as the narration shows they still let gender affect a lot of their behavior without admitting it, and the narrator uses he and she but treats them as archaisms like thee and thou and applies them in strange and unexpected ways, based on his opinion of people’s personalities rather than people’s identity, or bodies, or anything like ways he and she are used at present.
It’s a mix, like everything in my world build, some utopia and some dystopia stirred together, so no one can be comfortable with all the uses of gender in the book, but discovering which uses of gender one finds uncomfortable is very informative, and different people find they’re struck by different ones. I intended it to be a self-discovery experience, discovering how you personally react when reading long stretches of dialog without gender, or reading moments when the narrator uses an unexpected pronoun. Different people find different gendered moments in the text feel good, or bad, or natural, or alien, and we can learn from that how we ourselves feel about gender, how much we do or don’t fall into stereotypes or judge a character we perceive as male one way but feel differently if they’re suddenly gendered female. My hope is that the experience furnishes tools for thinking, both about one’s own biases & reactions, and about what kinds of changes in how we deal with gender as a culture can lead to a better future than Terra Ignota’s weird mix.
The gender example is just one small thread within the book, but is similar to how it also encourages one to think about citizenship, nationality, space exploration, family units. Lots and lots of elements have a mix of things that feel positive and things that feel uncomfortable, all intended to encourage self-discovery and those meaty questions where you talk with a friend and discover that some part of the world build struck the two of you very differently, and then talk about why.
Terra Ignota book 3 – cover art by Victor Mosquera
ToW: What were some of your goals for the series when you first set out to write it?
AP: I think you don’t write a novel unless you have a lot of different goals, otherwise you could accomplish it with a short story. If I had to synthesize it down to a sort of meta-goal, it would be that I love reading, and so many amazing authors have given me so much, so many ideas, experiences, tools for thought that make my life richer, so I wanted to write a worthy reply. I think writing is the epitome of ‘pay it forward’. Authors send books out into the world to join the Great Conversation which happens over generations, and I think what an author most wants is for others to receive and think about those ideas, and to write something in reply. The reply might be seen by the original author, but will definitely be seen by the same readers who read the earlier author, contributing like the next comment in a discussion, moving the conversation forward to the next stage. I think that means more than anything, so having received all these amazing works that authors I respect and learned from gave so many hours and efforts to, I wanted to pay it forward.
ToW: I read in another interview that you’re heavily influenced by 18th century philosophers – for anyone (like me) who’s not particularly well up on 18th century writing, could you tell us a bit about what this entails?
AP: I’d say authors rather than philosophers, because they’re not writing esoteric academic criticism or sitting in a cave contemplating like a hermit. 18th century authors like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot wrote fiction, and essays, and romances, and mysteries, and jokes, and angry rants, and even science fiction. Voltaire’s Micromegas is a novelette-length SF story where huge aliens from the star Sirius and the planet Saturn come to Earth and make first contact with humans, though the humans are so tiny to them that they can barely see a whale and need to use a magnifying glass to see humans, but it’s classic First Contact, except when they talk what do they talk about? About whether scientific empiricism can prove the existence of God, and whether Thomas Aquinas or Descartes is more correct about the nature of the soul, and what purpose the Creator of the cosmos had in making the cosmos, and how humanity fits into that purpose. They aren’t the questions we ask in our First Contact stories, they’re the questions which were hot topics to people in the Enlightenment.
Reading that made me re-examine other First Contact stories, things like classic Star Trek, H.G. Wells, golden age things, and I noticed how many questions in, for example, Cold War era First Contact stories were roundabout questions about the Cold War: whether sentient species always fall into war, how often they wipe themselves out, whether empire can be rehabilitated; and First Contact stories of other eras asked questions shaped by those eras’ preoccupations. But all that time, for the centuries we’ve been writing SF and especially in the 20th century, the tools of SF have been improving. We have more established genre methods, established concepts (telepathy, teleportation, cloning, artificial intelligence, antimatter, moon bases), so I then looked at the 18th century ones again and wondered what Voltaire might have written if he could have had the tools of the modern SF genre at his command, but used those tools to ask the questions 18th century people asked, about Providence and the role of humanity in things etc.
Because no one had done that, those questions weren’t hot questions anymore by the time SF became a sophisticated genre, Voltaire only had very few tools to work with. And I realized it was exciting re-asking Voltaire’s and Diderot’s questions about Providence using modern SF tools, so that’s what I decided to do, throwing history and SF together, which is why some people call Terra Ignota “future historical fiction.”
ToW: What about other influences within SFF? Are there particular authors, series or stories (whether current or otherwise) that you enjoy and draw inspiration from?
AP: Yes, lots. The biggest is Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which was my model for complexity of world building and how complex a narrator can be, how many different onion layers of complication a narrator can add to a text. Also Delany, especially Empire Star, and Alfred Bester, both his short fiction and especially The Stars My Destination, which was a big influence on pacing, on my flashy party scenes, and on some of the themes, especially about humanity’s relationship with space and space travel.
I’ve also really enjoyed discussing readers who are reading Terra Ignota in parallel with Malka Older’s Infomocracy and its sequels, since they both look at non-geographic political structures, and connect to the hopepunk genre of looking at futures which aren’t dystopia but also require hard work, and the discussions of the two side by side have been great. Same with Jo Walton’s Thessaly books, which she wrote partly in response after reading the first Terra Ignota books, and Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden, which isn’t out yet but is very much in that space and great to compare, all of them books about how we could make a society different from ours which could be better in some ways but still far from perfect, and the project of working to make those systems better.
I also read a lot of Japanese science fiction, so people familiar with it will recognize influences from Osamu Tezuka, Naoki Urasawa, and some particular works like Gundam, and Revolutionary Girl Utena.
ToW: If it’s possible then without spoiling things for those who haven’t read all the previous books in the series, would you be able to tell us a bit about Perhaps the Stars and what to expect from it?
AP: You know how, late-on in a musical or symphony or opera, when you’ve heard all the melodic motifs and rhythms, there comes that part where the composer weaves them all together and there’s this one huge piece where you finally realize they all harmonize and fit together and the full melodic tapestry is present? Book 4 is like that. I needed 3 books to get everything laid out and now I get to work with it all to the climax, so the peaks it ramps up to are just so much thicker and bigger.
Using cooking as a metaphor, I think some series are variations, like vol. 1 is making a cherry pie, vol. 2 strawberry rhubarb, vol. 3 lemon cream, vol. 4 mince pie from scratch, each one getting a bit more complex but largely parallel. And I think other series are more about scaling up, i.e. vol. 1 we baked a cake, vol. 2 we baked a three-layer cake, vol. 3 a super ambitious five-layer wedding cake, etc. But Terra Ignota (like Book of the New Sun and some other things) is much more like taking three full volumes to prepare the ingredients, and we were mincing onions, and infusing herbs into the olive oil, and marinating things, and by the finale of book 2 some elements for the stuffing or the sauces started going into the pan to get sautéed, but it’s only now that I have all the ingredients prepared and I’m finally putting it all together, so much that was building up, not just events and character development but languages, theme, even the rhythm of the prose, which has been slowly shifting over time between iambic, dactylic, and unstructured meter, and now I get to the payoff of all that work.
A lot of readers say that they love book 1 just for the world building alone, and even if there weren’t more to come they would still find it a rich and meaty read, but the first few books were also laying the groundwork for something on a large scale, something that I couldn’t do in fewer than four volumes – now it’s time.
Also, a lot of my beta readers agree that people will find it hard to believe I wrote Perhaps the Stars before COVID. I finished the book in October 2019, but a lot of it reflects on large-scale crisis and disruption of society, on whether crises bring out the best or worst in people and what crisis behavior we do/don’t respect, on whether society is handling crisis better than in its past, and on distance, what it feels like to be somewhere and not able to effortlessly travel as we’re used to. A lot of it strikes very close to home for the pandemic experience, but I really did write it all beforehand. I think it’s just that these are big, perennial questions of global crises in general, the strain it puts, the way the extremes bring out sides of people that we have only seen subtly before, so it matches our COVID experience but is modeled on things like reading letters and memoirs from WWI or WWII or the Black Death or historic invasions, reflecting in my historian hat on what we learn about a society from seeing it face a challenge on that scale.
Also it’s huge! In word count it’s twice the length of the first book, a bit fatter but actually even longer than it seems because they made the typeface smaller and the bottom margin a little narrower to fit it all in – not just payoff but lots of payoff, and I needed every word.
Terra Ignota book 4 – cover art by Victor Mosquera
ToW: What have you enjoyed the most over the course of writing this series? Is there a particular character, scene, theme or anything else that stands out as something you really enjoyed working on?
AP: I’m going to miss writing in Mycroft’s voice a lot, it’s been such a part of my life for so long, when I got to the last paragraph it felt like saying goodbye to an important…friend but also an important skill I’d polished, like setting down an instrument for the last time. I’m picking up new instruments (i.e. starting a new series with new narration) but it still feels like a big moment.
I’m also particularly proud of what I achieved with Homeric language in the last volume. It’s no exaggeration to say that there are only two chapters in the entire 4th book which weren’t in some craftsmanship sense harder to write than even the hardest chapter of the first 3 books – this is where everything is coming together and the structure and what I’m aiming at in each chapter is just much more complicated, in ways you can see as you read. There is a lot in there I could never have accomplished at the craftsmanship level I was at when I started book 1. But it’s the Homeric language I’m probably most proud of. All the way through the series there are tiny touches of Homeric language, mostly similes comparing things to parts of nature in the style Homer does – comparing things to rivers, floods, the sea, horses – and at first it’s just occasional, a couple times in a chapter at the most, but as the tension of the series ramps up and the crisis approaches it becomes very slowly more frequent, in ways most readers aren’t aware of.
For example, in book 2, when the sun rises on the day-of-no-return day of Mycroft’s history, that’s the first time that I use the full-on Homeric image of rosy-fingered dawn, one of the little tipping points as we realize the Iliad is coming. It ramps up slowly, but in book 4 that means it gets to climax, and there are scenes in there which are very intensely Homeric and very epic, both in the epic events climax of a piece of fiction way, and in the sense of classic epic i.e. using formal epic imagery, and meter. A lot of the prose is in fact secretly in iambic pentameter just with the line breaks taken out, and while the reader isn’t conscious of it you do perceive it unconsciously, and I make the meter be more perfect the more intense and Homeric I want the scene to feel, so I intentionally break the meter a few times in a paragraph in most sections, so that when I get to the ones that are fully perfect meter, the rhythm of it draws you in and feels like epic.
That was very hard, and there are a lot of places where I spent an entire day on one paragraph or even on one sentence to get it right. But it worked, and I’m very proud of that because it was a very challenging thing to try!
ToW: What’s next, now that the Terra Ignota series is finished? Do you have plans to write more stories in this world? Something totally different?
AP: Vikings! See, the next series is easy to describe, not like the first. Terra Ignota is complete as I had always planned it, and while I might coordinate with other media things with its world, like some of the artwork I’ve been working on, or music, the books have done what I set out to do and are complete. The new one draws on my long-time love of Viking mythology, which many are familiar with from my Viking myth music. There are lots of ways to write about Vikings, but I’m a historian so I’m interested in digging deep into the latest scholarship especially on Viking ethics, cosmology, and metaphysics which has made a lot of great strides recently with new readings and understandings of texts enhanced by recent archaeology and chemical analysis, and I’m also interested in grounding the myths in historical development over time.
Short version: if the Viking gods are real, and only the Viking gods are real, and this is the Viking cosmos, but history is real history, why did they let the worship of their pantheon die out? I’m also very interested in Viking theodicy. Theodicy is the problem of the existence of evil, often phrased in theological terms, “Given the existence of God(s), why is there evil?” We’re familiar with a variety of answers to this: the myth of Pandora’s Box is one, the Stoic idea of Providence is another, various Christianities mix Providence with the idea of the Fall, etc. But for Vikings it’s not that they have a different answer, it’s that they ask a different question: “Given the fundamentally harsh, dangerous, uninhabitable nature of the world, filled with ice and storms and fire and volcanoes, where survival is so desperate, why is there good? If this is how harsh the world is, how is it possible to create anything good? Especially to create the means for human life?”
It’s an up-side-down theodicy which doesn’t presume the default should be a perfect world but that the default should be lifeless ice, and hard work had to be done to carve out space for good. It’s a very interesting reversal of the usual ways we examine ethics in myths and religions, so I find it an amazing space to dive into. Book 1 is underway, coming slowly because of my health, but it’s coming!
ToW: I understand the covers for each of the books (all by Victor Mosquera) are based on different cities in the world of Terra Ignota. To finish off, if you could choose to live in any one of these cities, which one would it be and why?
AP: Difficult! Book four certainly has the most tempting city since we’re seeing one of the orbital cities the Utopians built on a towed asteroid that’s orbiting the Earth, and it’s hard to turn down the chance to live in space! And also in a Utopian capital, which is certainly the group I would join. But book 2 has Romanova, the global Hive capital where most of the big political decisions are being made, and one of the points of Terra Ignota is that the world has some improvements over ours but a lot of vital work still to do, so if I lived there I would want to be working toward that change and teaching and advocating just as I do now.
So if I could live in Romanova, teach at the Romanova Campus, and be one of the voices for the change that’s needed, that would be an amazing place to be. Much of the point of the world also is that you don’t need to live where you work, so I know I could live elsewhere and work in Romanova, but I like living right in the middle of the city in the midst of things, being at the hub where I can host conversations, so I’d love to live in Romanova if I could, and use my home itself also as a tool to advance conversations and change.
Though I must add, it might be cheating, but the French edition is going to be five volumes, because book 4 in French is too long to fit in one volume. Their extra cover shows the Almagest, the mobile space elevator with a small floating sea-surface city at its base which is the most important arrival/departure point for Earth connecting with space, the crossroads where the terraforming missions launch from, where students taking field trips to the Moon pass through, where both Earth and space are always right there. That would be an amazing home, the things and people you could see and meet!
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Ada Palmer is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a cappella vocal music on historical themes, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. She writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com.
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I’d like to say a massive thank you to Tor Books for inviting me to be part of this blog tour, and to Ada for not just taking the time to chat to me, but contributing such in-depth, thought-provoking answers! If you’ve enjoyed this interview, make sure you check out the other stops on the Perhaps the Stars blog tour, which you will be able to find over on these sites on the following dates:
Nov. 2: Nine Bookish Lives
Nov. 4: Books, Bones, and Buffy
Nov. 5: Before We Go Blog
Perhaps the Stars is available in the UK right now, and is published in the US tomorrow, so check out the links below* to get hold of your copy!
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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