Just as you say, Palmer’s world-building and complex plots can sustain a long critical engagement. Palmer is a maximalist, the kind of author who likes many characters, many story lines (most but not all resolved by the end of the four books), and many layers of significance to it all. Why do you describe Terra Ignota this way? What do you make of the series’s recurrence to the (frequently disastrous) traditions of early modern and Enlightenment thought about what the good life should look like?īENJAMIN ALDES WURGAFT: Byzantine is entirely right. Palmer’s brand of science fiction is what you’ve sometimes called speculative social theory. They’re ambitious enough to stand up to it, though I find them maddening as well as fascinating. We’ve been mulling these Byzantine books for years, strange to say. REBECCA ARIEL PORTE: The conclusion of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, Perhaps the Stars, came out late this past year. Because Palmer often uses the dialogue form in her novels, particularly when her narrator is wrapped up in conversation with imagined interlocutors, Porte and Wurgaft have adapted the dialogue form themselves.
Porte and Wurgaft have distilled their correspondence to a briefer exchange, with special reference to the problems of providence and progress that Palmer explores through science fiction.
#HEROIC MAGIC MIRROR SERIES#
A long correspondence followed, especially as the series came to a conclusion with Perhaps the Stars in 2021. In 2018, Rebecca Ariel Porte, a writer and literary scholar, sent the first book of the Terra Ignota series to Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, a writer and intellectual historian, and the book fascinated him because of its dramatic treatment of enduring themes in the history of ideas. But the serpents of organized religion and the old human habit of identifying with a gender are hard to banish, and so is war. The masculine-feminine spectrum of gender is seen as an anachronism everyone is a “they.” Due to the devastating “Church Wars,” religious conflicts that helped usher in the Hive era, it is a crime to speak of God in public. Many of these experiments (perhaps surprisingly) revive old political ideas like monarchy and empire. The conflicts produced by scarcity, poverty, and expropriation have all but vanished, making room for new experiments in social and political organization. No one needs to work more than 20 hours a week. Each household, or “bash’,” grows its own food on a “kitchen tree” or in a “meatmaker,” and technological and social progress have created abundance for all. This is made possible by the “car system,” a network of millions of autonomous vehicles that can reach any point on the globe in less than two hours. The majority of people join “Hives,” geographically distributed, ideologically driven political bodies whose members live anywhere they please. The world has been at peace for centuries, and only 10 percent of the population lives in old-fashioned geographic nations.
In Palmer’s setting, the 25th century is a time as foreign to our own as ours would be to Thomas Hobbes or anyone in the 16th or 17th centuries. The quartet concludes with a war story, but also with collective acts of endurance and heroism that give us hope of a future beyond war and beyond the limits of the Earth itself. Canner knows all the most influential people of his day, and he describes their intrigues, crimes, and passions as he chronicles the fateful days leading up to the first war in centuries.
#HEROIC MAGIC MIRROR SERIAL#
Ada Palmer’s quartet of novels takes place in the mid-25th century and is narrated, primarily, by Mycroft Canner, celebrity serial killer, parricide, cannibal, genius, and Servicer, sentenced for his crimes to perform labor for others for the rest of his years. TERRA IGNOTA IS the story of how God, gender, and war come together to topple utopia, even as moral rot eats utopia from within.
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