An Expert on the Past, Ada Palmer has Little Trouble Inventing a Detailed Future

Cory Doctorow has described Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning (Tor, 2016) as a book "more intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall."

That praise reflects Palmer's immense skill in building a world 500 years in the future but also her vast knowledge of the past. And it's no surprise that Palmer knows something about the past. In addition to launching the first of a four-volume series with Tor, she is a cultural and intellectual historian at the University of Chicago, where she studies (among other things) the history of publishing and the Italian Renaissance.

She says that knowing exactly how the world has changed over the last 500 years - politically, culturally, socially - has helped her imagine plausible changes for the next 500.

In Too Like the Lightning, the 25^th century is enjoying a reinterpretation of the 18^th century Enlightenment, although with flying cars and non-geographic nations. Society congratulates itself for having banished organized religion and gender distinctions (Palmer writes much of the book using the singular "they") but, as in so many cultures, people are blind to their own shortcomings.

"This is a particular future that didn't do a good job finishing the end game of feminism and gender equality," Palmer says, explaining that "they erased it too fast, stopped the conversation and consequently still have tons of baggage."

Before she put pen to paper, Palmer spent five years planning the world of Too Like the Lightning, including forecasting the future history that shaped it. And it took another eight years for the book to be published.

But critics and readers agree that it was worth the wait. The second installment in the Terra Ignota series, Seven Surrenders, was originally slated for publication in December but Tor has pushed back the release to February to make room for a paperback version of Too Like the Lightning first.

Related link: Voltaire's Micromegas

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Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape.

Enlightenment meets traffic jams in Zen City

"The future begins with a traffic jam."

This is how Eliot Fintushel described to me the setting of Zen City (Zero Books, 2016), his science fiction novel about the obstacles encountered along the path to spiritual fulfillment, when I interviewed him on the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction.

In Fintushel's book, the quest for enlightenment manifests as a physical journey as his protagonist, Big Man, makes his way from an eternal traffic jam (in which people have been rooted so long on a highway exit ramp that they've created cults around their Econoline vans and Chevrolet Chevelles) to the City, where those who have achieved true enlightenment are literally merged into a single body-consciousness that transcends reality as we know it.

More than a commentary on Buddhism, the story is a meditation on religion and the challenge of using "robes and rituals" to find enlightenment, Fintushel explains. The problem is when enlightenment itself becomes a sign of status, he says, undermining the goal of enlightenment, which is supposedly a state of "no status."

Fintushel's adventure is both poetic and funny, meditating on language as much as belief. He is playing with the "limits of identifying things," evoking the viewpoint of a baby. "If you watch a baby's eyes moving around, they don't fix on objects or even on people the way we do. They don't have categories of objects and people. And I'm assuming, for the sake of the fiction anyway, that that's more real than the reality of objects and things and people."

The Brexit Interview: Dave Hutchinson's Fictional Europe is Falling Apart but Don't Call Him Prescient

Don't call my latest guest on New Books in Science Fiction prescient. Even though Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe Sequence envisions a continent crumbling into ever-smaller countries, the idea that his homeland could Brexit the European Union hadn't occurred to him when he started writing Europe in Autumn.

The book chronicles the adventures of Rudi, an Estonian cook-turned-spy who discovers the existence of an alternate Europe, one in which the Eurasian continent has become a Brexiter's dream come true, a bucolic but boring England that extends from Spain to Siberia.

Its sequel, Europe at Midnight, isn't really a sequel but a spinoff, introducing new characters who explore the dark side of Europe's parallel universes. Both books are imaginative, elegant and unexpected, combining elements of thriller and science fiction. And there's more to come. A third book, Europe in Winter, is due out in November, and a fourth and final book, Europe at Dawn, is in the works.

I was fortunate to have Aubrey Fox (author of Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure) as a co-host for this interview. He not only recommended Hutchinson's books to me, but he's an avid fan of both science fiction and mysteries. Among the topics Hutchinson discussed with us were the ideas that inspired him to write Midnight in Autumn, the ups and downs of his long writing career, his decision to write a series when he'd set out to write only a single book, and, of course, the Brexit vote, which took place the day after our conversation.

Art in Motion

So this guy sits down and just starts drawing the guy opposite him. Takes him about 90 seconds to produce a picture. Enough time to create a pleasing likeness and elicit a donation from the subject, who takes the rendering with a smile.

Girl Walks Out of a Bar

Lisa F. Smith, my colleague and friend (right), had a righteously fun book party to celebrate the publication of her memoir Girl Walks Out of a Bar, which she wrote in our writing workshop led by Jennifer Belle. The party was held in The Writers Room, of which Donna Brodie (center) is executive director.



Jennifer, left, gave an amazing toast in which she praised Lisa for her beautiful, candid writing about recovery from addiction.



Lisa's personal story is inspiring--and humorously told, and I recommend everyone interested in a) lawyer who work in a high-pressure environments b) people who learn to succeed despite life's challenges or c) having a good laugh buy Lisa's book!

The Eternal Optimist: An Interview with Philip K. Dick Award Winner Ramez Naam

My new podcast for New Books in Science Fiction is an interview with Ramez Naam. Here's my write-up that goes with the interview:

In the fictional battles between humans and machines, the divide between good and bad is usually clear. Humans, despite their foibles (greed, impulsiveness, and lust for revenge, to name just a few), tend to find redemption, proving mankind's basic goodness through love, friendship and loyalty.

Machines, on the other hand, despite their superior physical and mental capacities, usually prove themselves to be (largely through the absence of the aforesaid capacity for love) to be dangerous and unworthy of the empires they seek to rule. But what if the humans and machines were combined - not merely cyborg-like in a jigsaw mix of man and robot but more elegantly, through a perfect blending of mind and matter? Ramez Naam does just that in his Nexus trilogy by wedding a human being's soul - her memories, feelings and intellect - to the most powerful computer ever built.

In Apex (Angry Robot, 2015), the trilogy's third installment and winner of this year's Philip K. Dick Award, things go awry. Su-Yong Shu, the brilliant Chinese scientist whose consciousness has been folded into a massive quantum computer deep under Shanghai, isn't feeling so hot. In fact, she's gone insane. It may seem, at first, as if Naam's message is the same - that any artificial intelligence, when it gets smart enough (and even when it's the result of a machine-human blend) craves power and will lead to mankind's destruction. But Naam's message is more complex: while the original computerized version of Su-Yong Shu goes on a destructive rampage, a copy of her consciousness in India finds its way back to sanity.

And through the journeys of these identical twins, we realize that Su-Yong Shu is neither human nor machine. She is something new, a powerful and mysterious being who has all the best and worst qualities of both man and machine - seemingly infinite capacities of intellect, strength, fear, paranoia and love. In his New Books in Science Fiction interview, Naam discusses the pluses and minuses of human enhancement, why he's remained steadfastly optimistic about transformative technology since the 2005 publication of his non-fiction book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, and the extensive outlines he develops before sitting down to write. This is the second time Naam has appeared on the podcast. Dan Nexon interviewed him in 2013 about the first book in the trilogy, Nexus.

From the Interview:
"I have contact lenses in. I have a smart phone. I have a Fitbit. My fiance is on birth control. We have already upgraded ourselves quite a lot. My view in reality is that generally when you give someone the option of technology that improves their life in some way, and it's safe enough and it's cheap enough and enough people have done it already ... people are just going to do it because people want these things. But everything is a little bit of a double-edged sword. No technology ever comes with zero downsides. So my phone means - the digital world means - that hackers can steal my identity or steal from my accounts, or it lets child porn go wild, or the NSA can spy on all of us far more easily." --Ramez Naam

Reintegration and Transformation: A Trip to the Muscogee Nation

Work last week brought me to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, where I was lucky enough to spend three and a half days learning about a program that helps people make one of the hardest and yet most important transitions of their lives.

I (and my colleagues) were inspired by everyone we met: from the staff of the Muscogee (Creek) Reintegration Program and their clients, to those who work for agencies that partner with them and the Muscogee officials who fund them.

Leah, left, Tony and Adelle.

We were there to make a video for the Tribal Justice Exchange and its website Tribal Access to Justice Innovation about how the Reintegration Program helps tribal citizens returning from incarceration build new lives.

In a reflection of Muscogee values and culture--which emphasizes restoration and community healing--the program helps ex-prisoners find housing (and provides up to four months rent), find jobs, re-build relationships with families, and make fundamental changes in their lives.

Juan Carlos outside John H. Lilley Correctional
Center in Boley, Oklahoma.

Over the course of 11 years, the program has earned the support of the community, making a persuasive case that everyone benefits when an ex-prisoner is supported rather than shunned. Reentry programs not only lower recidivism but strengthen communities, helping formerly absent parents become productive caregivers and transforming inmates who cost the state thousands to house and feed into law-abiding taxpayers.

We interview Dr. Wayne Johnson,
former director of Education and Training for the
Muscogee Nation.

Not only was I impressed by the dedication of the staff, led by Program Director Tony Fish, but I was impressed by the commitment of the four former inmates we met, all of whom expressed through words and actions a strong desire to reintegrate with their communities and families.

Fish said one of the qualities necessary for the success of the Reintegration Program's clients is resilience (a characteristics that also explains the survival of Native Americans to this day, Fish pointed out.)

I saw that resilience in Tony's staff, who showed incredible commitment to their clients, and in the clients themselves. One remarkable woman, Allison, had suffered trauma and addiction but had transformed herself in prison, where she built bridges back to her family, found purpose through religion, and took classes to learn new skills. When she was released, she gathered recommendations from her teachers and others who had seen her grow and now has a job as an advocate for victims of domestic violence.
   

Juan Carlos films staff from the Reintegration Program speaking with a client who had just moved into a new home. (I'm holding the boom).

Making new friends: Juan Carlos, Leah, Adelle and I felt very lucky to make new friends in Reintegration Program staff Carrie (third from left) and Anita (right).