Thread by @doctorow

Today in @Wired, @GregoryJBarber profiles my friend, colleague and collaborator @Ada_Palmer, an extraordinary writer, librettist, historian, scholar, activist and performer:

wired.com/story/ada-palm… 1/

Ada just wrapped #TerraIgnota, her 4-volume depiction of a weird, uncomfortable future, informed by world-class Renaissance scholarship (she's a tenure Chicago history prof specialized in the suppression of forbidden knowledge during the Inquisitions).

us.macmillan.com/series/terraig… 2/

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. 3/

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." 4/

Terra Ignota depicts a world where our major problems - climate, war, shortage - are solved, where nations are replaced by affinity groups (you can live anywhere and be an EU citizen, but also be a "citizen" of FIFA), where distance is conquered by hypersonic sub-orbital cars. 5/

And yet, this is a fraught place, and one where the social conventions are as far from our own as the mores of the Renaissance. People in Palmer's world do not discuss gender or religion, and have a taboo on discussing *which* gender they identify with. 6/

They live in "bashes" - communal polyamorous households - and tolerate invasive censorship in the private and public realm as the price of peace.

As Barber writes, the future history of Palmer is as unpredictable and contingent as the history she studies and teaches. 7/

Palmer is celebrated for her annual U Chicago LARP, where 45 students spend a month role-playing as cardinals in the runup to the 1490 election of the Medicis' Pope.

doctorow.medium.com/against-the-gr… 8/

I find this exercise profoundly intriguing. Every year, two of the final candidates are the same, their places guaranteed by the "great forces of history." 9/

But every year, the other two candidates are always different, because even though the forces of history bear down upon us, we also have human agency.

That one of the major themes of Terra Ignota, and it's a message of hope: *what we do matters.* 10/

Though Palmer has only written four books so far, her work has had a large effect on the field, especially in the works of the marvellous @BluejoWalton, whose association with Palmer has led to a string of fascinating novels touching on classics and antiquity. 11/

The profile gets into Palmer's life circumstances: the chronic illness and pain and low blood-oxygen that has her working from a reclining position for weeks on end, taken away from the world in reveries of scholarship, music and imagination. 12/

The fruits of these jaunts into innerspace are many and gorgeous, especially her music, which includes the haunting space-travel ballad "Somebody Will":

sassafrassmusic.com/songs/sci-fi-f… 13/

Palmer is such a multitalented quintuple threat, whose talents range from game-design to seminar design. 14/

We collaborated on a U Chicago grad seminar series on the parallels between historical and contemporary systems of information control, contrasting the Inquisitions with modern reactions to online speech:

ifk.uchicago.edu/research/facul… 15/

The profile is great, but it only gives a taste of what a conversation with Palmer is like (at one point, she discusses how Voltaire would view the contemporary state of science fiction). 16/

Palmer is very much alive to the way that history is used and abused to justify the present day. 17/

She rails against the idea of "dark ages" and "golden ages" and scoffs at the notion that the pandemic will automatically create a renaissance (a fallacy based in the incorrect assumption that the last renaissance was brought on by the plague). 18/

Her ability to fuse scholarship, art, and politics makes her a standout in the field. The completion of Terra Ignota is a major milestone, and it's great to see it celebrated with such a fitting tribute. 19/

Image:
Sanna Pudas (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ada_…

CC BY 4.0:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.… 20/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/mon…