Contemporary Authors

• The Recovery of Classical Philosophy in the Renaissance, a Brief Guide Leo S. Olschki (Florence, Italy), 2008
• Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2014

1. Seven surrenders LCCN 2016043354 Type of material Book Personal name Palmer, Ada, author. Main title Seven surrenders / Ada Palmer. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Tom Doherty Associates, 2017. © 2016 Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm. ISBN 9780765378026 (hardcover : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3616.A33879 S48 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Too like the lightning LCCN 2015298981 Type of material Book Personal name Palmer, Ada, author. Main title Too like the lightning / by Ada Palmer. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : TOR, 2016. Description 432 pages ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780765378002 (hbk.) 0765378000 (hbk.) Links Contributor biographical information https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1617/2015298981-b.html Publisher description https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1617/2015298981-d.html CALL NUMBER PS3616.A33879 T66 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance LCCN 2014002577 Type of material Book Personal name Palmer, Ada, author. Main title Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance / Ada Palmer. Published/Produced Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Harvard University Press, [2014] Description xiv, 372 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780674725577 (hardcover : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 095223 CALL NUMBER PA6495 .P35 2014 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 4. The recovery of ancient philosophy in the Renaissance : a brief guide LCCN 2008420284 Type of material Book Personal name Hankins, James. Main title The recovery of ancient philosophy in the Renaissance : a brief guide / James Hankins, Ada Palmer. Published/Created Firenze : L.S. Olschki, 2008. Description vii, 94 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9788822257697 8822257693 Shelf Location FLM2015 188891 CALL NUMBER B181 .H365 2008 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2)

• Ada Palmer Curriculum Vitae - https://history.uchicago.edu/sites/history.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/AdaPalmer-CV.pdf

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  Page 1of 5ADA PALMERCurriculum VitaeThe University of Chicago773-834-8178Department of HistoryFax: 773-702-75501126 East 59th Street, Mailbox 47 adapalmer@uchicago.eduChicago, IL 60637EDUCATION:Ph.D., History, 2009, Harvard University, Cambridge, MAM.A., History, June 2003, Harvard University, Cambridge, MAB.A., History, cum laude, 2001, Bryn Mawr College,Bryn Mawr, PAA.A., with distinction, 1999, Simon’s Rock College of Bard, Great Barrington,MANon-DegreePrograms:oSeminario di Alta Cultura, 2010, Istituto Internazionale di Studi Piceni, Sassoferrato, ItalyoAestiva Romae Latinitatis, 2004, with Fr. Reginald Foster, Rome, ItalyACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT:University of Chicago, Department of History, 2014 –Present, Assistant ProfessorTexas A&M University, Department of History, 2009 –2014, Assistant ProfessorPUBLICATIONS:Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. I Tatti Renaissance Studies Series. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.“Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Ideas. Pennsylvania PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. July 2012 (volume 73, issue 3), pp. 395-416.The Recovery of Classical Philosophy inthe Renaissance, a Brief Guide, Quaderni di Rinascimento44. Co-author with James Hankins.Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. [Florence]:Leo S. Olschki, 2008.“Lux Dei: Ficino and Aquinas on the Beatific Vision,” Memini, Traveaux et Documents6, Société des études médiévales du Québec. Montréal: 2002,pp. 129-152. Forthcoming Publications:“T. Lucretius Carus, Addenda et Corrigenda,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, vol. 10. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. Forthcoming 2014.“The Recovery of Stoicism in the Renaissance,” in The Routledge Handbook to the Stoic Tradition,ed. John Sellars. Forthcoming 2014.“The Use and Defense ofthe Classical Canon in Pomponio Leto’sBiography of Lucretius,” in Vitae Pomponianae, Biografie di Autori Antichi nell’Umanesimo
  Curriculum VitaeAda Palmer.Page 2of 5Romano (Lives ofClassical Writers in Fifteenth-Century Roman Humanism), proceedings ofa conferencehosted by the Danish Academy in Rome and the American Academy in Rome, April 24th2013, to be published in Renaessanceforum(Forum for Renaissance Studies, Universities ofAarhaus & Copenhagen). Forthcoming 2014.“Epicureanism,” in Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, Springer Reference.Forthcoming 2015.Book Reviews:Review of Marie Thérèse Jones-Davies ed., Le Plaisir au Temps de la Renaissance(Turnhout: Brepolis, 2010),Renaissance Quarterly,vol. 66 n. 1 (2013) 330-1.Review of Stéphanie Lecompte, La Chaîne d’Or des Poètes: Présence de Macrobe dans l’Europe humaniste(Geneva, Librairie Droz. S.A., 2009), Neo-Latin News 70.1-2 (2012), 102-4.TEACHING FIELDS:Renaissance and Early Modern EuropeEnlightenment EuropeLong Durée European Intellectual and Cultural History Religion, Atheism and FreethoughtHistory of Scienceand TechnologyReception and Transmission of Classical TextsCOURSES:Italian RenaissanceRenaissance and Reformation EuropeThe Craft of History: Intellectual HistoryEuropean Intellectual History from Ancient Greece to the Early Middle AgesEuropean Intellectual History from the High Middle Ages to the 17thCenturyThe French Enlightenment and the Encyclopedia ProjectSeminar in Historiographyand Historical WritingFELLOWSHIPS AND RESEARCH GRANTS:While at Texas A&M University:oNational Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute: Roman Comedy in Performance, August 2012 oVilla I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Fellowship, 2011-12 oTexas A&M University Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research Co-Sponsorship Grant, Fall 2012 oTexas A&M College of Liberal Arts Strategic Development Fund, co-developer of “Classical Transformations Center” proposal, 2011 oTexas A&M College Faculty Research Enhancement Award, 2011
  Curriculum VitaeAda Palmer.Page 3of 5oTexas A&M Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities, 2010 oTexas A&M International Research Travel Assistance Grant, 2010oTexas A&M University Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research Faculty Stipendiary Fellowship, 2009-10 While at Harvard University: oFulbright Scholar, Italy, 2006-7 oFrederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, Harvard University, 2006-7oVilla I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Readership, 2005 oHarvard University History Department Summer Research Grant, 2002CONFERENCE PAPERS:“Weak Empiricism and Provisional Belief: the influence of Lucretius and Epicurean Skepticism onMontaigne, Gassendi, Mersenne, and Scientific Thought,” presented at the Renaissance Society of America Conference, New York, March 27th2014. “The Archetype of Noble Suicide in Early Modern Biographies of Philosophers,” presented at Libraries, Lives andthe Organization of Knowledge in the Pre-Modern World, American Academy in Rome, December 12th2013.“Sources as Weapons in the Competition Among Humanist Editors of Lucretius, from Leto to Lambin,” presented at Medieval and Renaissance Transformations ofAntiquity, hosted by the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and Texas A&M University, Villa Vergiliana, Cuma, Italy, Sept. 29th 2013.“Opinio Non Christiana: Lucretius’Renaissance Reception, Humanist Reading Practices and Philosophical Skepticism,” presentedat the Italian RenaissanceSeminar Series, Oxford University Centre for Early Modern Studies, May 6,2013.“The Use and Defense of the Classical Canon in Pomponio Leto’sBiography of Lucretius,” presented at Vitae Pomponianae, Biografie di Autori Antichi nell’Umanesimo Romano (Lives of Classical Writers in Fifteenth-Century Roman Humanism), hosted by the Danish Academy in Rome andtheAmerican Academy in Rome, April 24th2013.“Humanist Biographies of Lucretius,” presented at the Renaissance Society of America Conference, Washington D.C., March 22nd2012.“Renaissance Biographies of Classical Philosophers,” presented at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Fellows Seminar Series, Dec. 7th2011.“Sustenance of the Soul in Renaissance Reconstructions of Classical Libraries,” presented at Cultured Sustenance: an Interdisciplinary Symposium, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Texas A&M University, April 2011.“How Humanists Read a Famous Atheist: the Evolution of Renaissance Reading Methods Exposed through a Survey of Marginalia in Renaissance Copies of Lucretius, 1417-1600,” presented at the Renaissance Society of America Conference, Montreal CA, March 2011.
  Curriculum VitaeAda Palmer.Page 4of 5“Pagan Imagery in Poetry on the Death of Raphael,” presented at TAMUInterdisciplinary Early Modern Studies Working Group, Oct. 6th2010.“Opinio Non Christiana: Lucretius’ first Renaissance readers examined through their marginalia.” Presented at From Studiolo to Street: A Harvard/Princeton Graduate Conference in Early Modern History, Cambridge MA, January182008.“Lucretius, Epicureanism and Atomism in the Renaissance.” Presented at the American Philological Association Conference, Boston, January92005.“Reception of Lucretius, Epicureanism and Atomism in the Renaissance.” Presented at the Early Modern Studies Workshop at Harvard University, Cambridge MA, December 14th2004.LANGUAGES: English, Italian, French, Latin, Ancient Greek, Gothic, German (reading).AWARDS AND HONORS:I Tatti Prize for Best Essay by a Junior Scholar, for “Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Ideas 73.3(July2012), 395-416.2013Texas A&M Student Led Award for Teaching Excellence Fall 2010Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching 2005, 2006, 2007Nominated for the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, Harvard2004Seymour Adelman Book Collector’s Prize, Bryn Mawr College2001Division of Languages and Literature Prize, Simon’s Rock College 1999Leslie Sander Writing Contest Winner, Simon’s Rock College1999National Merit Scholar 1997-99Faculty Scholarship Award, Simon’s Rock College 1998-1999PROFESSIONAL AND SERVICE ACTIVITY:While at Texas A&M University:Co-Developer of the “Transformations of AntiquityConference,” September 27-29 2013, Naples Italy, co-organized by the Texas A&M University Classical Transformations Group and the ‘Transformationen der Antike’ (Transformations of Antiquity) group at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.Co-Convener and Web Developer for the Texas A&M Interdisciplinary Early Modern Studies Working Group, Glasscock Center 2010-2014History Department DiversityCommittee2012-2014History Department Library Committee2009-2010While at Harvard UniversityCo-Coordinator of the Harvard Early Modern Studies Workshop 2007-8The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy. Assistant to general editor James Hankins.Cambridge University Press.2007
  Curriculum VitaeAda Palmer.Page 5of 5Professional MembershipsRenaissance Society of America International Association for Neo-Latin Studies American Historical Association American Association of University WomenCOMMUNITY OUTREACH:Popular Nonfiction:“The Cruelty of The Crater,” introductionto Osamu Tezuka’s The Crater, Kansai Club, forthcoming 2014.Historical notes for Hetalia Axis Powers: Paint it Whiteand Hetalia World SeriesDVD releases. Co-authored with Lila Garrott, Lauren Schiller and Ruth Wejksnora. FUNimation, 2011-12.“All Life is Genocide: the Philosophical Pessimism of Osamu Tezuka,” in Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World, ed. Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog.Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio Libraries Unlimited, 2011.“‘You, God of Manga, are Cruel!’: Karma and Suffering in the Universe of Osamu Tezuka,” in Manga and Philosophy, ed. Josef Steiff and Adam Barkman. Chicago: Open Court, 2010.“Film is Alive: The Manga Roots of Osamu Tezuka's Animation Obsession,” invitedtalk ande-published essay for the event series “Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, Father of Anime.” Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington DC, November 13–December 13, 2009.“Black Jack: The Excluded Issues and Tezuka's Star System,” introduction to Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack (vol. 3 limited edition hard cover), Vertical Inc., 2008.Mythological notes for Mythical Detective Loki RagnarokDVD release. ADV Films, 2005-6.Fiction:Dogs of Peace, vol. 1of a four bookscience fiction novel series, forthcoming from Tor Books, 2016.Consulting and Blogging:Blogger for Tor.com, 2014to present.ExUrbe.com, 2011 to present.HistoricalConsultantforFUNimation, 2010 to present.Columnist for Tokyopop.com, 2006 to 2007.Mythology and Language Consultant forADV Films, 2005 to 2008.

• University of Chicago - https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/ada-palmer

  Assistant Professor

  OF EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY AND THE COLLEGE
  Affiliated Faculty, Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies
  Associate Faculty, Department of Classics
  Faculty Member, Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge

  PhD 2009 Harvard University

  Social Science Research Building, room 222 – Office
  (773) 834-8178 – Office Telephone
  (773) 702-7550 – Fax

  adapalmer@uchicago.edu

  CV

  Website

  FIELD SPECIALTIES
  Early modern Europe; the Renaissance, with a focus on Italy; Reformation; longue-durée intellectual and cultural history; postclassical reception of classical philosophy; Renaissance humanism; history of the book, printing and reading; history of education; history of science, religion, atheism, deism, heresy, and heterodoxy; music history; Enlightenment reception of earlier radical thought; Epicureanism, atomism, Stoicism, Skepticism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism

  NEWS
  —NPR reviews Too Like the Lightning
  —Scientific American interview with Palmer about her novel
  —Edits Volume of Student Essays as Part of Graduate Colloquium
  —Publishes Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Harvard, 2014)

  2014 Palmer.jpg

  BIOGRAPHY
  My research on intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is my way of exploring how history and thought shape each other over time. The Italian Renaissance is a perfect moment for approaching this question because at that point the ideas about science, religion, and the world that had developed in the Middle Ages suddenly met those of the ancient world, reconstructed from rediscovered sources. All at once many beliefs, scientific systems, and perceived worlds clashed, mixed, and produced an unprecedented range of new ideas, which in turn shaped the following centuries and, thereby, our current world.

  My first book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, explores scholars' use of Lucretius's Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura from its rediscovery in 1417 to 1600, focusing on the challenges its atomistic physics posed to Christian patterns of thought. In a period when atheism was often considered a sign of madness, the sudden availability of a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena in nontheistic ways and that argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God threatened to supply the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. At the same time, humanist scholars who idealized ancient Rome were eager to study a poem whose language and structure so often anticipated their beloved Aeneid. My book uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy and shows how atomism and ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became situated in Europe's intellectual landscape at the beginning of the scientific transformations of the seventeenth century. In it I employ a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, whose results expose how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century, fostered by the growth of printing, controlled the circulation of texts and gradually expanded Europe's receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.

  My recent work on the Renaissance has focused on classical transformations, i.e., how, thanks to humanist enthusiasm for reconstructing the golden age of ancient Greece and Rome, material received from the classical and medieval worlds was transformed in Renaissance hands and in turn transformed the Renaissance world. I am working on a long-term project on the imagined antiquity believed in by Renaissance humanists, and how their efforts to reconstruct the ancient world aimed, not at the ancient world as we now understand it, but at a very different ancient world whose character can be reconstructed from Renaissance paratexts, imitations, paintings, period translations, biographies of ancients, forgeries, and spuria which we often dismiss today as simple errors. Along with the Classical Transformations Group at Texas A&M University and the Transformationen der Antike group at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, I am working to change the way we think about reception studies, and bring greater attention to how each period transforms and is transformed by the materials it inherits from earlier eras.

  Much of my research has been conducted in rare books libraries, especially in Rome and Florence, where I worked with Renaissance copies of classical texts, both manuscripts and printed books. I have been a Fulbright scholar in Italy and a graduate reader and later a fellow at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. I completed my PhD and graduate teaching at Harvard University, and taught at Texas A&M University before coming to the University of Chicago. My article "Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance" (Journal of the History of Ideas, 73:3, [July 2012]: 395–416) won the 2013 I Tatti Prize for Best Article by a Junior Scholar.

  All my projects stem from my overall interest in the relationship between ideas and historical change. Our fundamental convictions about what is true evolve over time, so different human peoples have, from their own perspectives, lived in radically different worlds. The universe which Thomas Aquinas thought he occupied was not the universe in which Plato or Machiavelli or Freud believed they lived, and such beliefs in turn shaped the futures they tried to build out of what they inherited from the past. Our own current efforts to build the future are likewise predicated on what we believe is true, but what we believe is not what any past culture has believed, nor what any future cultures will believe.

  ADVISING AND GRADUATE TEACHING
  I welcome graduate students in the Renaissance and early modern Europe, especially those interested in Italy or France, Rome and Florence, intellectual change, humanism, radicalism, the diffusion of knowledge, the reception of the classics, the history of the book, education, religion, magic, the Church, or the role of patronage. I also welcome students working on long-term projects which span two or more periods: ancient, medieval, early modern and modern. Students with strong language skills, especially Latin, are particularly welcome.

  In addition to advising dissertations, I am happy to offer introductory and hands-on instruction to any student interested in working with rare books and manuscripts, especially students considering a career in library or museum work. My courses are designed to serve, not only specialists in my period, but also students who are studying later periods but want to examine the educational and intellectual background of the historical figures they are examining, and students of classics and the ancient world who want to learn about the postclassical impact of their subjects. I am also deeply interested in the craft of writing and welcome any student interested in discussing and developing writing skills.

  RECENT AND FUTURE COURSES
  Italian Renaissance
  Renaissance Humanism
  Intellectual History (Historiography and Methods)
  PUBLICATIONS
  Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I Tatti Renaissance Studies Series. 2014.

  "T. Lucretius Carus, Addenda et Corrigenda." In Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, vol. 10. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming 2014.

  "The Recovery of Stoicism in the Renaissance." In The Routledge Handbook to the Stoic Tradition, edited by John Sellars, forthcoming.

  "Epicureanism." In Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Marco Sgarbi. Springer, forthcoming.

  "The Use and Defense of the Classical Canon in Pomponio Leto's Biography of Lucretius." In Vitae Pomponianae, Biografie di Autori Antichi nell’Umanesimo Romano (Lives of Classical Writers in Fifteenth-Century Roman Humanism), proceedings of a conference hosted by the Danish Academy in Rome and the American Academy in Rome, April 24, 2013, to be published in Renaessanceforum (Forum for Renaissance Studies, Universities of Aarhaus & Copenhagen), forthcoming 2014.

  "Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance." The Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 3 (July 2012): 395–416.

  Coauthored with James Hankins. The Recovery of Classical Philosophy in the Renaissance, a Brief Guide. Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 2007.

  "Lux Dei: Ficino and Aquinas on the Beatific Vision." Memini, Traveaux et documents 6 (2002): 129–152.

  NEWS
  —NPR reviews Too Like the Lightning
  —Scientific American interview with Palmer about her novel
  —Edits Volume of Student Essays as Part of Graduate Colloquium
  —Publishes Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Harvard, 2014)

• Ada Palmer Home Page - https://adapalmer.com/about-ada-palmer/

  About Ada Palmer
  HOME » ABOUT ADA PALMER

  Me in Florence enjoying my favorite panino. Just about perfect.
  Me in Florence enjoying my favorite panino. Just about perfect.
  All my projects stem from my overall interest in the relationship between ideas and historical change. Our fundamental convictions about what is true evolve over time, so different human peoples in different times and places have, from their own perspectives, lived in radically different worlds with radically different rules. The universe which a medieval student of Thomas Aquinas thought he occupied was different from the universes in which Plato or Machiavelli or a Viking or Freud believed they lived, to the degree that what seem like simple fundamentals, such as reasoning from action to likely cause or consequence, yielded completely different “logical” answers in each of their worldviews. I find it fascinating how the different realities and rules which past peoples have believed in, and the science and technologies they generated, have in turn shaped the futures they tried to build out of what they inherited from the past, shaping the history of human civilization. Our own current efforts to build the future are also predicated on what we believe is true, our current models of science and ethics, and what consequences we think our actions will bring about, but what we believe is not what any past culture has believed, nor what any future culture will believe.

  My research on intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is a way of exploring how our ideas affect what civilizations do, build and aim at, and how events change those ideas, history and thought shaping each other over time. The Italian Renaissance is a great moment for approaching this question because at that point the ideas about science, religion and the world which had developed in the Middle Ages suddenly met those of the ancient world, reconstructed from rediscovered sources. All at once many beliefs, scientific systems and perceived worlds clashed, mixed and produced an unprecedented range of new ideas all at once, which in turn shaped the following centuries and, thereby, our current world. My blog, Ex Urbe, is a way of sharing my exploration of these questions in a more speculative and casual arena than academic writing.

  My interest in science fiction and fantasy relates to this too, since the imagined worlds and times created by Tolkien or Asimov or Tezuka are different from each other much as those of Plato and Aquinas are, and through them we can explore yet more variants on what people might be like, and what civilizations and futures they might build given different worlds. In my own fiction I use worldbuilding to explore alternate ideas and mindsets which human cultures could have, and how those ideas would affect both events and people’s understandings of their past. This is why I think of my forthcoming series in particular as “Future Historical Fiction,” looking at an imagined Earth future but in a style we usually use to examine Earth’s past.

  Education and Background: (see also my CV)
  I grew up in Annapolis MD and attended the Key School, then the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. In 1997 I became frustrated with high school, so left without graduating at the age of 16, and went to college two years early. I attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard for two wonderful years, then transferred to Bryn Mawr College for my final two years, because I wanted more Latin and Ancient Greek so I could be a Renaissance Historian.

  Myself with my advisor James Hankins and our co-authored book, at my Harvard Ph.D. graduation.
  Myself with my advisor James Hankins and our co-authored book, at my Harvard Ph.D. graduation.
  I graduated from Bryn Mawr in 2001, and chose Harvard for my Ph.D. specifically because I wanted to study with James Hankins, whose intellectual history work on the impact of the rediscovery of classical thought in the Renaissance fit my interests perfectly. While at Harvard I spent several long patches of time doing research in Rome and Florence, including once as a graduate fellow at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Institute for Italian Renaissance Studies, and once funded by a Fulbright fellowship. I completed my Ph.D. in 2009, and started that fall as an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University. I currently live in Chicago, teaching in the History department at the University of Chicago, but I continue to do extensive research in Italy, mainly at rare books libraries like the Vatican Library and the Laurenziana Library in Florence. I spent another year in Florence at the Villa I Tatti in 2011-12, and it was then that I began my blog Ex Urbe, which was based on a series of letters I used to write home to friends about my time and researches in Italy.

  My interest in writing began in elementary school, and I was already working on my first novel project by fourth grade. I took summer classes on essay writing at Johns Hopkins through the Center for Talented Youth program, and a course on prose poetry at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. I had already written more than 900,000 words of fiction before I began working on the four volume project that begins with Too Like the Lightning (forthcoming from Tor, May 2016), plus masses of nonfiction writing I did during graduate school. In fact, the one endeavor that improved my writing far more than anything else was when I had to cut down long academic pieces to half or a quarter of their original length without removing any content, an onerous experience but one I heartily recommend to anyone seriously interested in writing well. In my history courses I stress the craft of writing, how analytic essays, just like novel chapters, have structure, pacing, development and climax, and how important it is for the author to to think about the experience of the reader, whether in fiction or nonfiction.

  My mother is an artist, so we also did numerous projects together, from drawing and painting to this workshop on Venetian Masks
  My mother is an artist, so we have done many art projects together, from drawing and painting to this workshop on Venetian Masks.
  One of my earliest vivid memories is going to the little kids’ section of my local public library to see if there was a Dr. Seuss book that I hadn’t had out recently. Someone had mis-shelved a huge hardcover copy of the Hobbit amid the Dr. Seuss books, with a big red dragon on the cover. I picked it up (no small feat since I was so tiny) and said I wanted that one. Dad checked it out and read it to me, though, of course, he owned the Hobbit already, and a great collection of other fantasy and science fiction which I went on to explore with him as I grew up. It was with him that I started exploring comic books as well, and, eventually, anime and manga.

  My mother loves music, so started me on it early. I began Suzuki violin at the age of two, and had piano lessons. In the latter part of elementary school I started an experimental program designed by a music theory instructor from the Peabody Institute who wanted to try teaching music theory to younger kids. I also enjoyed playing the recorder in school, and through it met Renaissance music and close harmony a cappella, which remains my favorite form of music. I sang with many school choirs and the excellent Bryn Mawr Haverford Renaissance Choir before co-founding my own group, Sassafrass, while I was at Bryn Mawr. I began writing Viking-themed music in graduate school, excited by the mythology and fantasy themes I heard in the work of filk musicians performing at conventions. Viking mythology excites me, much like the Renaissance, because of how it is a window on a human culture which believed in and was shaped by a worldview radically different from our own, so my completed song cycle Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok examines, not just the stories, but the world and people that created them, and the kinds of cosmology and theodicy which made sense to a culture clinging to the icy edge of survival.

• Sassafrass Home Page - http://www.sassafrassmusic.com/group/members/

  Members

  Active Performers

  Ada Palmer is an assistant professor in the history department at the University of Chicago. She teaches European intellectual history, focusing on the Italian Renaissance and on the long-term history of ideas, especially the relationship between religion, science, atheism and the classics. Her research focuses on Latin manuscripts in Italian libraries, especially in Rome and Florence, which gives her many opportunities to enjoy and study Italian cooking. Ada is the composer of almost all Sassafrass’s music. She took Peabody music theory courses in childhood, and has studied violin, piano, guitar, and various medieval instruments, but her compositions are primarily vocal. Outside the Filking world, Ada writes science fiction and fantasy, and her first novel “Dogs of Peace” is due out from Tor Books in 2016. She enjoys many sci-fi, fantasy and gaming activities, especially LARPing and costuming. She is active in the anime fan community, running cosplay and gameshow events like Cosplay Human Chess, primarily at Anime Boston. She is also a manga scholar, working mostly on the works of the “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka. She has published several articles on Tezuka, and runs TezukaInEnglish.com. Ada’s interest in Viking culture and Norse Mythology stems from stories her parents read her in childhood. See adapalmer.com for more; Ada is on Facebook, and on LJ others usually refer to her as Thrud.

• Ada Palmer Home Page - https://adapalmer.com/about-ada-palmer/press-publicity/

  Press & Publicity
  HOME » ABOUT ADA PALMER » PRESS & PUBLICITY

  Speaking at the Anime Chicago 2015 Symposium "Osamu Tezuka God of Manga" photo credit Gabriel Marchan
  Anime Chicago 2015 Symposium “Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga” photo credit Gabriel Marchan.
  I welcome any and all inquiries (interviews, general press, work-related) about any of my research, teaching, fiction writing, composing and performing, and my work as an administrator of TezukaInEnglish.com and enthusiast of manga, anime and convention staffing.

  I can be reached at adapalmer@uchicago.edu

  Please direct fiction publishing inquiries to my agent Cameron McClure of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. Direct music-related inquiries to sassafrassmusic@gmail.com

  Below are several copy-pastable short bios, along with usable photos of myself. Feel free to use the bios in their entirety, or to edit or excerpt them to fit your needs.

  General:

  Adas rooftop florenceAda Palmer’s first science fiction novels Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders (volumes one and two of Terra Ignota, from Tor Books) explore how humanity’s cultural and historical legacies might evolve in a future of borderless nations and globally commixing populations. She teaches in the University of Chicago History Department, studying the Renaissance, Enlightenment, classical reception, the history of books, publication and reading, and the history of philosophy, heresy, science and atheism, and is the author of Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Harvard University Press). She often researches in Italy, usually in Florence or at the Vatican. She composes fantasy, SF and mythology-themed music, including the Viking mythology musical stage play Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok (available on CD and DVD), and often performs at conventions with her vocal group Sassafrass. She also researches anime/manga, especially Osamu Tezuka, early post-WWII manga and gender in manga, and has worked as a consultant for many anime and manga publishers. She blogs for Tor.com, and writes the philosophy & travel blog ExUrbe.com.

  General, History First:

  Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on radical thought and the recovery of the classics in early modern Europe, especially in the Italian Renaissance. She works on the history of science, religion, heresy, freethought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago, and often does research in Florence and Rome. Her first academic book Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2014) explores the impact of the rediscovery of classical atomism on the birth of modern thought. Her science fiction novels Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders form a tale of global politics in the year 2454, set in a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance and borderless nations, and written in the a style of an eighteenth-century philosophical novel like Candide. She is also the composer for Sassafrass, an a cappella group performing fantasy, SF and mythology-themed music, whose Viking musical stage play “Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok” came out on CD and DVD in 2015. She researches and publishes on anime/manga, has worked as a consultant for various anime and manga publishers, blogs for Tor.com, and writes the philosophy and travel blog ExUrbe.com.

  Academic focused:

  BESTSummer2010 FixedAda Palmer is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago. She is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on long-durée intellectual history and the recovery of classical thought in the Italian Renaissance. Her published monograph, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, uses Renaissance manuscript and print editions of Lucretius’ Epicurean didactic epic De Rerum Natura to expose how humanist reading practices controlled the distribution of newly-rediscovered radical ancient philosophy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and how this affected the capacity of classical radicalism to influence scientific and religious thought at the dawn of the modern era. Much of her research has been conducted in rare books libraries, especially in Rome and Florence, where she worked with Renaissance copies of classical texts, both manuscripts and printed books. She has been a Fulbright scholar in Italy and a graduate reader and later a fellow at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Her article “Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance” (Journal of the History of Ideas, 73:3, [July 2012]: 395–416) won the 2013 I Tatti Prize for Best Article by a Junior Scholar.

  Brief academic:

  Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on radical thought and the recovery of the classics in the Italian Renaissance. She works on the history of science, religion, heresy, freethought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago, and her first book is Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance.

  With my singing partner Lauren Schiller, as "Sassfrass Triskter & King" in WalesMusic focused:

  Ada Palmer is the primary composer for Sassafrass. Sassafrass began at Bryn Mawr College as a way of escaping the monotonous pop music performed by all the other singing groups. It was inevitably drawn into filk since all the members were already fans. Ada herself had been attending cons since middle school when her father started taking her to Dr. Who conventions, but Balticon gets credit for getting her and Sassafrass into a filk circle for the first time; Sassafrass’s song, “Somebody Will”, a space-themed exploration single from Sassafrass’s Friend in the Dark album, has been nominated for Pegasus’s Best Filk Song in 2011, 2012, and 2015. Because Ada studied a lot of music theory and especially Renaissance music, her compositions tend to be multi-part a cappella, with Renaissance, Medieval and, often, modal harmonies. Ada’s most recent project is a Viking-themed album “Sundown”, whose songs, when put together, tell the story of the creation and destruction of the Norse cosmology focusing on the murder of Baldur. Ada and Sassafrass have traditionally been most active on the East Coast, but the job market has taken Sassafrass members all over the country, so now they perform in a lot of unpredictable venues; they recently performed at Worldcon 2015 and Mythcon, and have completed a successful Kickstarter to raise funding for the upcoming Friend in the Dark.

  TezukaProInterviewAnime & Manga focused:

  Ada Palmer is the founder of TezukaInEnglish.com, now the primary English language web resource for information about Osamu Tezuka’s life, works and international publication history. She has worked as a consultant for Tezuka Productions and numerous American manga and anime publishers. She blogs about anime and manga for Tor.com, and wrote a bi-weekly column on manga, cosplay, fashion and otaku culture for Tokyopop.com (2005-2007). She has also worked as an Historical and Linguistic Consultant for FUNimation, and was a Mythology and Language Consultant for ADV Films (2005-9) and an Anime Network Field Representative (2004-6). Her work on manga has also brought her into the cosplay world, where she creates and competes, but usually runs, cosplay events. She has staffed many conventions, and for nine years has overseen cosplay events at Anime Boston, running their Masquerade and other events including her signature Cosplay Human Chess. Ada has made Anime Boston a trendsetter in the cosplay world, creating new events like the Anime Dating Game, and setting a record for the most cosplay events at any convention worldwide, with thirteen separate events and activities designed for types of costumers and cosplayers.

Palmer, Ada: SEVEN SURRENDERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Palmer, Ada SEVEN SURRENDERS Tor (Adult Fiction) $26.99 3, 7 ISBN: 978-0-7653-7802-6
War and chaos loom in this conclusion to the story begun in Too Like the Lightning (2016), in which a child with
godlike powers disrupts a supposedly serene future society built on Enlightenment principles.In 2454, nations, called
Hives, are no longer based upon geographical location but upon intellectual and philosophical alignment. This
arrangement has worked so well that peace has reigned for 300 years, so long that no one would even know how to
conduct a war if one were to break out. But a few decades ago, the Mardi family determined that war was inevitable,
and that the later it came, the more devastating it would be, and so decided to incite the war themselves to minimize the
damage. They were forestalled by our narrator, Mycroft Canner, who brutally murdered them to prevent that war from
ever coming about. Unfortunately, his efforts seem to have been in vain; the last surviving Mardi has returned to Earth
to continue his family's work. Public unrest rises at the revelation of some very unpleasant Hive government secrets
(some of which were similarly intended to keep the peace at any price) and the machinations of Madame D'Arouet, a
brilliant and politically connected brothel-keeper who uses sex and gender as weapons against a proudly gender-free
society that is therefore defenseless against such ploys. And then there is Bridger, a child who can bring toys to life,
who could save the world...or doom it. Sometimes the answers in a story are less satisfying than the intriguing
questions posed by a preceding volume; readers' appreciation of the resolution here depends on whether they accept the
author's argument that humanity will always tend toward war. Palmer also hedges her bets by not tying up all the loose
ends; she never explains the more supernatural elements of the plot and leaves the future of her world uncertain. Rich
food for thought; perhaps not entirely digestible.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Palmer, Ada: SEVEN SURRENDERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242391&it=r&asid=9db0e3eda311530aea287181120ecc9d.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242391
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506828004368 2/5
Seven Surrenders
Emily Compton-Dzak
Booklist.
113.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2017): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Seven Surrenders. By Ada Palmer. Feb. 2017.400p. Tor, $26.99 (9780765378026).
Palmer's continuation of the Terra Ignota political science-fiction series (following Too Like the Lightning, 2016) drops
readers back into the declared utopia where gendered pronouns and dress are taboo, practicing religion publicly is
outlawed, and seven philosophical "hives" have replaced all nations. The story is told primarily from the infamous
murderer Mycroft Canner's point of view, though in this book he spends much of his time imprisoned. Secret plans to
merge hives and a slew of power-hungry political figures have put the whole system in danger of collapse. Meanwhile
Bridger, the young boy with the curious ability to bring toys to life, has discovered the true extent of his power, and he
looks to Mycroft to help him unleash it. Does Bridger have the power to save their not-so-utopian world as it descends
into chaos? After decades of peace, will there be war? Palmer's second installment is as challenging a read as the first,
though true lovers of debate and philosophy who want to tackle life's biggest questions will feel rewarded for their
efforts.--Emily Compton-Dzak
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Compton-Dzak, Emily. "Seven Surrenders." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 53. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479078028&it=r&asid=15ad1e99d41d2e40eefa8fc3611bd2cf.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479078028
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506828004368 3/5
Seven Surrenders
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Seven Surrenders
Ada Palmer. Tor, $27 (400p) ISBN 978-0-7653-7802-6
Palmer's slow-paced second Terra Ignota far-future novel revisits the setting she established in Too like the Lightning,
in which wars are not remembered and communal organized religion has been replaced by private ceremonies. Readers
enter into this world as it's perturbed by a highly powerful child, Bridger, who can transform inanimate objects into
living things. Where Palmer succeeds is in her rich description of a world where sexuality is an intrinsic part of politics
and gender is an archaic, dying construct, as well as her allusions to breaking the connection between church and state
despite those who cling to religious fervor. Her descriptive passages are many-layered and engrossing, but they overdo
the futuristic terminology. The plot is difficult to follow, and the convoluted nature of the story is more apparent than in
the first installment. Fans of Palmer's will enjoy the second book, but a refresher might be necessary. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Seven Surrenders." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224861&it=r&asid=02eac86ccc93a8352043b26bb3187e1b.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224861
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506828004368 4/5
Too Like the Lightning
Emily Compton-Dzak
Booklist.
112.18 (May 15, 2016): p31.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Too Like the Lightning. By Ada Palmer. May 2016.416p. Tor, $25.99 (9780765378002); e-book (9781466858749).
Palmer's Terra Ignota series opener is thought-provoking, to put it simply. The year is 2454, and the world consists of
philosophical hives, rather than nations. This utopia includes a group called set-sets who live in virtual reality since
birth, laws against practicing religion in public, and a smell-tracks category at the Academy Awards. Even here,
though, the ability to bring inanimate objects to life is not normal. Enter Bridger, a young boy who has just such
powers. Mycroft Canner, our hero, is a convicted felon required to live a nomad's life of service. Carlyle Foster is a
sensayer, a spiritual counselor who helps people discuss religion without breaking anti-proselytizing laws. Both men
have stumbled upon Bridger and are determined to guide him and keep him safe. Although the primary plot centers
around a stolen list ranking the most powerful people on the planet and its political ramifications, the overarching
theme of the book is philosophy, from the debate about gendered pronouns to thoughts about the afterlife. Richly
detailed and ambitious, Palmer's debut requires careful reading.--Emily Compton-Dzak
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Compton-Dzak, Emily. "Too Like the Lightning." Booklist, 15 May 2016, p. 31. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453913614&it=r&asid=b13afc57eab1d264ae8fd586070dad61.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453913614
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506828004368 5/5
Palmer, Ada. Reading Lucretius in the
Renaissance
J.S. Louzonis
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
52.9 (May 2015): p1496.
COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Palmer, Ada. Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. Harvard, 2014. 372p bibl index afp ISBN 9780674725577 cloth,
$39.95
52-4609
PA6495
2014-2577 CIP
Adopting a distinctive quantitative methodology, Palmer (history, Univ. of Chicago) presents a cumulative analytical
survey of the paratexts routinely inserted by humanist readers and publishers into the earliest manuscripts, incunabula,
and 16th-century printed editions of De rerum natura--paratexts that contributed to eventual "definitive" textual
rendition of Lucretius. In her conclusion, she posits a significant evolution in the "reading" of Lucretius that in 15thcentury
Italy focused more on philological repair and textual recovery than on the poem's heterodox content and
climaxed in 1565 (in France and the Low Countries), when inexpensive pocket copies enabled readers to focus more on
content "absorption than repair." This radical transformation of the received text meant that the 17th-century audience
had a new freedom in its reception of De rerum natura as a foundational element of modernity. Released in the "I Tatti
Studies in Italian Renaissance History" series, Palmer's distinguished volume is a link in the catena of recent Lucretian
scholarship, a literature that includes Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (CH, Mar'12, 49-3702), Gerard Passannante's
The Lucretian Renaissance (CH, Apr'12, 49-4301), and Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science, ed. by Daryn Lehoux,
A. D. Morrison, and Alison Sharrock (CH, Mar'14, 51-3681). Superbly supported with excellent portrayals of original
manuscript pages and full apparatus. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through
faculty.--J. S. Louzonis, St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY
Louzonis, J.S.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Louzonis, J.S. "Palmer, Ada. Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic
Libraries, May 2015, p. 1496. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA416402398&it=r&asid=5cc9de92b1da5b2489f7cd546853f853.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A416402398

"Palmer, Ada: SEVEN SURRENDERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242391&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Compton-Dzak, Emily. "Seven Surrenders." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 53. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479078028&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. "Seven Surrenders." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224861&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Compton-Dzak, Emily. "Too Like the Lightning." Booklist, 15 May 2016, p. 31. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453913614&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Louzonis, J.S. "Palmer, Ada. Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, May 2015, p. 1496. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA416402398&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2016/05/10/476483675/science-fiction-and-philosophy-collide-in-astonishing-lightning
  Word count: 797

  Science, Fiction And Philosophy Collide In Astonishing 'Lightning'

  May 10, 20167:00 AM ET
  JASON HELLER
  Too Like the Lightning
  Too Like the Lightning
  by Ada Palmer

  Hardcover, 432 pages purchase

  "I am grateful, so grateful, tolerant reader, that you read on," says Mycroft Canner halfway through Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer's awe-inspiring debut novel. Yes, Canner addresses the reader throughout the book; as the main character and narrator, he breaks the fourth wall so pervasively that he feels compelled to explain himself. At length. This jarring form of narrative is just one of the many challenging things about Lightning. Dense and complex, the book is a beast. It imagines Earth in the year 2424 as a radically different place, with every facet of society reordered from top to bottom. Ostensibly a utopia, this new world order isn't entirely new; its blueprint is drawn from the philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Voltaire, in the same way Canner's narrative frames the tale as if he were Dr. Ralph in Candide.

  That said, Palmer's utopian vision of Earth isn't exactly the best of all possible worlds. Rather than nations as we know them, humanity has divided itself into Hives: Masons, Cousins, Humanists, and the list goes on. (Don't worry, there's a handy chart, including a detailed statistical analysis, provided within the story itself.) Advanced transportation allows people to cross the Atlantic in an hour; that system helps facilitate a largely conflict-free arrangement between Hives.

  It's an uneasy peace, and a recently stolen document of mysterious importance doesn't help matters any. Nor does Canner, a criminal sentenced to be a Servicer — a person whose punishment requires devoting themselves to helping others — or Carlyle Foster, a holy man in a world where religion must be practiced privately. Making things even more volatile is a boy named Bridger, who has the ability to bring inanimate objects to life — with one of his toys seeming to have an intriguing, cosmically horrifying potential.

  The plot is knotty, but it's nothing compared to the tangle of ideas at play. Palmer, a professor at the University of Chicago with a doctorate from Harvard, packs a textbook's worth of learning into Lightning. Historical references abound, as do bits of economics, genetics, and sociology. Politics, though, lies at the heart of the book. The world Palmer creates is extraordinarily intricate, with forces and organizations forming a delicate web of tenuous coexistence.

  Like the Enlightenment from which it draws inspiration, 'Lightning' is in awe of the fundamental questions of human civilization, chief among them: Can society be engineered? And if it can, should it?
  It's a thrilling feat of speculative worldbuilding, on par with those of masters like Gene Wolfe and Neal Stephenson. Her eye for political dynamics goes all the way down to the personal: Gender-specific pronouns are considered obscene and have become taboo. Yet as Mycroft tells the story, he consistently uses gendered pronouns — unreliably, it turns out — and what seems at first to be a minor detail winds up having more profound consequences. Not to mention plenty important to say about our current debate on the issue.

  Lightning is dizzying, and not always in a good way. Despite its frenetic intelligence, the first half of the book is bogged down by too much, too fast. It takes some work to get used to, but it's worth it. As Mycroft warns the reader at the start of the book, his narrative is written "in the language of the Enlightenment, rich in opinion and sentiment" — but all those philosophical musings and discursive asides serve a subtle purpose, especially when Palmer starts dropping bombshells about the characters. The pace picks up considerably by book's end, and it becomes clear how much fun Palmer is having with her orchestrated onslaught of concepts, characters, language, and plot. It's a genius kind of energy, and it's infectious.

  The biggest drawback is the ending: Lightning is the first in a series, and it ends abruptly. The next book, Seven Surrenders, is due in December. That may be just enough to fully savor and digest this first installment, a novel that's one of the most maddening, majestic, ambitious novels — in any genre — in recent years. Like the Enlightenment from which it draws inspiration, Lightning is in awe of the fundamental questions of human civilization, chief among them: Can society be engineered? And if it can, should it? Palmer doesn't answer those questions, but she frames, ponders, and dramatizes them as only the greatest science fiction writers can.

  Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.

• Strange Horizons
  http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/too-like-the-lightning-by-ada-palmer/
  Word count: 2423

  TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING BY ADA PALMER
  PAUL KINCAID
  ISSUE: 29 AUGUST 2016
  Too Like the Lightning cover
  Had Too Like the Lightning lived up to its aspirations, it would have been one of the most significant works of contemporary science fiction. That, perhaps inevitably, it fails in this ambition leaves a book that is engaging, entertaining, and interesting, but that contains too many confusions and contradictions to be fully satisfying.

  The aspiration, made explicit within a text which makes constant reference to Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and De Sade, is to imagine a world shaped and ruled by the ideals of the French Enlightenment. The Enlightenment can, perhaps, trace its origins back to that chilly morning at the end of January 1649, when the crowds on Whitehall witnessed the execution of the English king. It was an act that sent shockwaves throughout Europe, and prompted a radical reexamination of the relationship between governed and government. Political philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, began to think of government as emerging from the needs and wants of the people rather than being imposed upon them. As these ideas spread and developed, it led to the emergence of the Enlightenment, an inherently democratic movement that embraced Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Women. The ramifications of these beliefs were more than just political: if men and women were to have rights, then they needed to be educated (as Rousseau advocated) and informed (hence Diderot’s Encyclopedia); they should be free of the shackles if not of religion then at least of the Church (prompting Voltaire’s anti-clericalism); and there should even be sexual liberty (as De Sade, if few others, proposed).

  This, then, is the philosophical foundation upon which Too Like the Lightning is constructed. Or, at least, so the novel repeatedly tells us. Its twenty-fifth-century world has gone through cataclysms in the past, which are vaguely hinted at but never clearly defined, out of which a handful of great men imposed their will upon the world. The result of their forcefully applied benevolence is a new Enlightenment that echoes the eighteenth-century French original, even down to the costumes that world leaders wear in the privacy of their Paris bordello.

  We are presented, therefore, with a world in which there are supposedly no gender differences: even gendered language has been outlawed, so that everyone is referred to as “they” and “them” rather than “he” and “she.” This could have been an interesting literary device on a par with the non-gendered language in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013), except that the narrator has barely begun before he (yes, it’s a he) finds an excuse to refer to characters as he or she. By the end of the novel, the gender of every significant character has been unmistakably signalled. Nor does this equality appear to extend to jobs, since virtually every figure of power and authority is male, while the more prominent females tend to take on the roles of wife or lover or, of course, in one case the Madam of the brothel that seems to be the secret centre of world government. And, yes, there is the invitation-only brothel where the particular tastes of the world leaders are catered for, which tends to suggest that De Sade’s sexual liberty is here reproduced as libertinage.

  Voltaire’s anti-clerical beliefs are now fixed in stone. Religion is outlawed, and the spiritual needs of the population are catered for by “sensayers,” who talk over any moral problem in a way that is ponderously even-handed, and which very carefully avoids all reference to God. Not that the casting out of all religious observance necessarily makes this a secular society. One character, we eventually discover, is actually worshipped as a God by those close to him, while the most prominent sensayer in the novel, Carlyle Foster (a significant name, and we will come back to its implications shortly), is himself prone to all manner of inchoate religious impulses. In fact, for an anti-religious Enlightenment, religion plays an alarmingly central role in this novel.

  Diderot’s Encyclopedia is here, naturally, repackaged as a sort of internet to which everybody has instant and complete access through a device they wear at all times known as a “tracker” —which probably gives you a clue as to how this Enlightenment access to information has been subverted. Yes, the tracker allows you to summon at a moment’s notice a car that is part of a global transport network and that can get you, at no cost, to any part of the world in no more than an hour or two. To that extent, the tracker equates with freedom of movement, but it also allows you to be tracked; at every hour of the day or night your whereabouts can be detected. This is not, despite appearances, a free society.

  I apologise for taking so long to lay out the background to the novel, but the worldbuilding is complex and extensive; although cleverly worked, there is more infodump than plot in the novel, and the plot is absolutely dependent upon the structure of the world. The real, deep political structure of this mid-twenty-fifth century owes little if anything to the Enlightenment. On the macroscopic level, this is a world without nations (except for Spain)—although nationalities, or at least national rivalries, still seem to be a thing. Instead, one of the founding fathers of this world established supranational bodies which people join according to shared interests rather than place of birth. That there are only seven such Hives seems to me to smack more of authorial convenience than the likely divergence of human interests and affiliations, but that is by-the-by. On the personal level, this same impulse has done away with the family, replacing it with the bash’ (derived from the Japanese, “basho,” just as sensayer is seemingly derived from the Japanese “sensei”; Japan was not noticeably a part of the Enlightenment): a homestead in which people are drawn together by mutual interest rather than family ties (although the bash’ with which we are made most familiar does indeed seem to be based on family relationships).

  This reimagining of personal and political loyalties is the most interesting thing about the novel. As with so much else, however, Palmer undermines the idea as soon as she starts to describe it in practice. This is, I am sure, in large part intentional—because the historical person who is referenced at least as much as any of the leading lights of the French Enlightenment is Thomas Carlyle, and Carlyle was an anti-Enlightenment writer if ever there was one. The Enlightenment had led, with a strange inevitability, first to the American Revolution and then, more terribly, to the French Revolution. Both proved as shocking as that original beheading of Charles I, and prompted a reaction against Enlightenment ideas. Carlyle, an essayist whose work was common fodder of English schools at least until the First World War, though he has been somewhat forgotten since then, was the harbinger of a new Puritanism that took hold in Victorian Britain. More significantly, he propounded the Great Man theory of history, the idea that all of history is the story of a few great men, and these would serve as what he called “pattern men,” models of behaviour for the self-help ethos of the age. Carlyle’s view of the world, therefore, is both selfish and hierarchical, and, for all its protestations of an Enlightenment model, in detail the world of Too Like the Lightning is closer to what Carlyle might have imagined.

  This is a Great Man fiction. It was the actions of two or three great men who brought order from chaos, and initiated the settled and enlightened state of the world we see in the novel (though when their world-changing speeches are repeated during an anniversary reenactment partway through the book, they are strangely uninspiring). The seven Hives that now divide the world are each the domain of one all-powerful ruler (again following Carlyle’s ideas—this is not a world of representative or democratic government), and all but one of them is a man; the exception is the caring Hive, the Cousins, who provide the world’s sensayers (and so even here the woman is in a nurturing role). These modern masters of the world have each taken on the manners, costumes, and, particularly, the titles of eighteenth-century French aristocracy. It is this hierarchy that is one of the plot-drivers of the novel.

  Each year, lists are published which rank these seven world leaders. The rankings seem to be entirely subjective, or at least no objective criteria are even hinted at during the novel, and yet the relative rise and fall of anyone’s standing can apparently have a profound effect not just on their Hive but on the political and economic stability of the entire world. This year, however, one of these lists has been stolen on the eve of publication, and, moreover, a crude attempt has been made to pin the blame for the theft on the bash’ that controls the global transport network. Even more unsettling, this new list apparently presents a radical shift in rankings, which could do untold damage to the world order.

  The various rulers put aside their rivalries and private passions to deal with the emergency. They need to find out who, how, why, and, above all, how to stem the damage. The various investigations devolve, by happenstance as much as anything else, upon two men. One, J.E.D.D. Mason, is the adopted son of the most powerful of the rulers, an austere, puritanical figure with a mysterious power that has caused some of his followers to worship him as a god. The other is our narrator, Mycroft Canner (names in this novel are overly loaded with significance), who is the most curious of the Great Men who populate this story.

  Mycroft is many things, most of which would still look odd if ascribed to two contrasting figures, and when combined in this one character they make practically no sense at all. He is, first and foremost, a mass murderer: he killed practically all of the inhabitants of one particular bash’, devising exquisite and outlandish tortures for each one in turn. This was, we are told more than once, the worst crime in centuries, and it is one for which Mycroft offers no explanation, no exculpation. Yet we are invited to regard him as the unequivocal hero of this story. In this world, only the very worst of criminals are incarcerated; most are given a blue uniform and the name Servicers, and sent out to do public works. We might more readily recognise them as slaves. Such is the severity of Mycroft’s crime that he might realistically have anticipated imprisonment, but strings were pulled by the most powerful in the land and he was made a Servicer. That his crimes still resonate with the populace is shown when a crowd learns his identity and attacks him; in this novel, the only way we ever see ordinary people is as a mob.

  But it is not just that Mycroft has been given a relatively easy sentence; in fact, he has a remarkable amount of freedom. He mixes, unsupervised, with the most powerful people in the world, and is on fairly friendly terms with most of them. They grant him access to their private meetings, call upon him for all manner of highly technical jobs, and welcome him to their most glittering functions. Indeed, he seems to be some sort of genius with amazing insights into the most abstruse aspects of world government. The world, in short, could not function without Mycroft.

  All of this is less the creation of a complex character than an agglomeration of contradictions, but there is still more: Mycroft is a white knight, who has taken it upon himself to protect Bridger, a young boy who appears to be completely off the net. (I find it strange that Palmer makes no effort to tell us how unusual this must be in the excessively interconnected world she has created; perhaps she thought that Bridger was already strange enough.) Bridger has the ability to make inanimate objects (mostly toy soldiers) come to life. Mycroft recognises that this is a miracle, something that is going to change the world out of all recognition, and has vowed to protect the boy by keeping him away from the prying eyes of precisely those powerful people who are his associates and employers, those people whose power he is currently working all-out and wholeheartedly to defend.

  There are mysteries galore here: who is Mycroft, why did he commit his crimes, and how has he attained the position he now occupies; what is Bridger, and by the same token what is J.E.D.D. Mason; and even the most basic mystery, concerning the crime that sets the plot in motion and its ramifications for the entire system. It is fair to say that none of these mysteries are resolved in this novel. But then, Too Like the Lightning is far more about worldbuilding than it is about plot, so we will have to wait for a second volume to find out what, if any, the solutions might be (and, indeed, whether this new Enlightenment will lead in its turn to a new Terror, which I somehow doubt).

  As for the worldbuilding: the Enlightenment system is undermined too consistently for this to be anything other than intentional. And yet the alternating praise of Enlightenment and the questioning of it, the lauding of Voltaire and advocating for Carlyle, is never quite clear enough to make it seem anything other than a series of contradictions and confusions. Picking through all of this is a fascinating intellectual exercise, and there is more than enough here to hold the interest of the reader; yet it is too unsure of its own structures and intents to be fully satisfying.

  Paul Kincaid has received the Thomas Clareson Award and the BSFA Non-Fiction Award. He is the author of What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction and Call and Response. His book on Iain M. Banks will be published by Illinois University Press in 2017.

• Tor
  https://www.tor.com/2016/05/10/a-future-worth-having-ada-palmers-too-like-the-lightning/
  Word count: 2175

  BOOK REVIEWS
  A Future Worth Having: Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning

  Jo Walton
  Tue May 10, 2016 10:00am 19 comments 3 Favorites [+]

  Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning comes out on May 10th, and I’ve read it four times already.

  It’s quite a common experience when you’re a teenager to read a book that blows you away, that causes the top of your head to come off and your brain to rearrange itself and be a better more interesting brain thereafter. I’ve talked about this a lot, both in posts here and also fictionally in Among Others, it’s one of the fundamental experiences of the SF reading kid. It’s a much less common experience when you’re grown up. I read books now and I think “Oh I like this! This is a really great example of that thing”. I may get immersed in a book and hyperventilate but I won’t finish a book and think “Wait, who am I? Why is the world like this? Do I even have a head?” This did that to me, it gave me that experience of reading SF when SF was new to me, the feeling that I am a different and better person because I read this, and not only that but a better and more ambitious writer.

  Really, I’ve only read the current version of Too Like the Lightning once, but I read three earlier drafts, watching it get better each time. I read it first in 2012. Ada’s a friend—she’s one of the most awesome people I know. She’s a professor of Renaissance history, working on the history of ideas. Some of you may know her blog Ex Urbe. She also composes a capella music for her group Sassafrass, some of you may know her amazing Norse song cycle Sundown Whispers of Ragnarok. I’d known her for quite some time before she let me read Too Like the Lightning. Even in its early draft it blew me away, because it was so impressive, so ambitious, and it was doing so many things at once and making them work. I was lucky enough to read Too Like the Lightning and the sequel Seven Surrenders at the same time. Seven Surrenders will be out in December, so you don’t have long to wait. This is good, because in many ways Too Like the Lightning is introducing the world and setting things up, and then the payoffs come in Seven Surrenders. The payoffs are fabulous, and well worth waiting for, but you should read Too Like the Lightning right now, because even that one book alone is in itself mindblowingly great.

  The series name is Terra Ignota, and there will be four books. I’ve read the first three, and I am waiting enthusiastically for book four to be finished.

  Too Like the Lightning is a very difficult book to talk about to people who haven’t read it. It’s a huge complex book introducing a huge complex world, and it’s bursting with fascinating ideas. But there’s no simple elevator pitch explanation for it. I’ve spent the last four years dying to talk about it. As people have been reading the ARCs and loving it and posting about it on Twitter—Kark Schroeder (“most exciting SF future I’ve encountered in years”), Fran Wilde (“AMAZEBALLS. GET. READ.”), Ken Liu (“reflective, analytical, smart, beautiful.”), Ellen Kushner (“stylistically wacky and daring”), Max Gladstone (“I’m kind of in love with this book”)—I’ve been bubbling over with “I told you you’d like it!”

  Where to start? I once asked Steven Brust (who loves Too Like the Lightning and has written a back cover quote) whether the Vlad books were SF or Fantasy. “Oh yes, absolutely.” he replied, The same goes for Terra Ignota, but from a very different direction. This is science fiction, set in the future, with a moonbase and flying cars and Mars in the process of being terraformed. But it’s also fantasy, with a boy who can do miracles, and among the cans of worms it opens are questions about Providence and souls and immortality. (This isn’t a spoiler, you find out about this very near the beginning.)

  It has a wonderful warm first person voice, it’s confiding and confident and draws you into complicity with it. Mycroft Canner, the narrator, has secrets of his own, that are revealed over the course of the narrative. If you’ve read the first chapters, published here, that’s enough to give you the flavour of what the book is doing with that. If you don’t like them, I’d seriously advice against going on with it. I love this book with the passionate love of an exploding supernova, but every book isn’t for everyone. You need to be able to enjoy Mycroft’s voice if you’re going to take this voyage of immersion into a very different world. If you can relax into it and cope with the beautifully written and unusual prose, you’ll find it well worth the effort and very rewarding. I loved the voice from pretty much the first word.

  The world of Terra Ignota is a future but a world that grows organically out of our own in a very interesting way. Talking about this with Ada (for an interview that’ll eventually be on Strange Horizons), I realised that in the same way we have too many orphaned characters in genre, we also have too many orphaned futures. I love futures that feel like history—Cherryh, Bujold, Delany—that have the complexity real history has. But too often they don’t have roots in our present and our history, what we have is all new history. Either that, or they come right out of today, but not out of our yesterdays. It feels very odd to read a book written in 1982 and set in 2600 that’s full of the concerns of 1982, with the Cold War still going on, or like those very weird references to Winchell and Lippman in Stranger in a Strange Land. But it’s also odd to read something set in a future where you can’t see any path from here to there and there’s nothing left of our culture. John Barnes’s LOLO universe has a very clear path, but that path starts in such a very near future that it became alternate history before the later books were published. Near future SF does often connect right on, but very often as soon as there’s more distance, we lose the connection, all the and culture and history is new.

  Too Like the Lightning happens at the same distance to us that we are to the Renaissance, and many many things have changed, but others have stayed the same. There’s still a European Union—it’s really different, but it’s still there. There’s still a king of Spain. There was a king of Spain in 1600 and there’s one now, and there has been both continuity and a phenomenal amount of change in what it means, and in the Terra Ignota universe that change has continued, but the King of Spain is still there. One of the things that happens historically but that you don’t see much in SF is that periodically different bits of history will be rediscovered and reinterpreted and validated—think of Egypt in Napoleonic France, the classical world in the Renaissance, or the Meiji revival. One of the intriguing things that’s going on in Terra Ignota is a similar kind of reinterpretation of the Enlightenment.

  Another is that this is the future of the whole planet—this isn’t a society that has grown just out of today’s America, but also today’s Asia, South America, Europe. What ethnicity means has changed, but it’s still significant, and growing from our past through our present and on into their future.

  Some reviewers have been calling the world utopian, and it is certainly a future it’s easy to want to live in. But there are also things about it that are unpleasant—the book begins with a set of permissions for publication. There’s very definite censorship. And while religion is banned as a consequence of the traumatic and long over Church War, everyone has to have a weekly meeting with a “sensayer” (trained in the history of all faiths and philosophies) to talk one on one about metaphysics and belief. Mycroft explains this as the one outlet for talking about this stuff, which would otherwise be utterly repressed, but while I might want to have conversations about the soul with my friends now and then, being forced to have a regular meeting with a trained sensayer strikes me as just as unpleasant as being forced to go to church every week—worse, because it’s not a ritual, it’s a spiritual therapy session. But it’s not dystopian—it’s much more complex. Like history. Like reality.

  I said it’s difficult to talk about. Part of that is the way it all fits together, so you start talking about something and you find yourself deep in the whole thing. For a tiny example, I was telling a young friend about the bash’ houses, the fundamental building block of society, replacing nuclear families. Everyone lives in groups of adults, who mostly meet in college. There might be romantic pairings going on within that set (marriage is still a thing) or romantic pairings may be between people in different bash’es, but sex and romance isn’t the point of what draws people into a bash’, friendship is, shared interests and community. (And this makes one think, well, why do we structure our families and living arrangements around sexual attraction anyway? Why did I never wonder about this before? Is it a good idea, now that I think about it?) These are groups of friends, like groups of college friends sharing a house, wandering into the shared areas and hanging out. So bash’es are normal, children grow up in them and connect to their ba’parents and ba’sibs and go on to form bash’es of their own. They believe that this is the way to maximize human potential and happiness. Some people are solitary, but not having a bash’ is really exceptional. “I want to live in one!” my friend said. Well, tough, you can’t, because in this world today it’s hard enough for two people to find work in the same place and stay together, let alone a whole group. It’s the flying cars, the ubiquitous transport system that means no two points on Earth are more than a couple of hours apart that makes bash’es possible. So the flying cars are integral—they’re integral to the plot as well, but I’m not even going to attempt to talk about the plot. The bash’es are a consequence of the technology, and so are a whole bunch of other things. And I mentioned work, work and attitudes to work are another thing that’s really different and interesting in this world.

  When I said that I’ve been wanting to talk about Terra Ignota, it isn’t one thing I want to talk about. I want to talk about different things about it with different people in different contexts. With some I want to discuss the huge philosophical questions the series raises. With others I want to talk about the details of social or political organization, or the way the narrative is written (so clever, so delightful) or the way celebrity works, or gender—there are just so many things. Somebody will say something, and I want to refer to the books, on all sorts of subjects. But when it comes to reviewing and recommending Too Like the Lightning, I’m reduced to babbling about the effect it has on me.

  Sometimes I read a book and I know it’s going to be a huge important book and everyone’s going to be talking about it and it’s going to change the field and be a milestone for ever after. It’s always a great feeling, but it’s never happened to me before with a first novel written by a friend, which is an even greater feeling.

  I’ve been waiting for the book to come out so I can talk to people about it the way I used to wait for Christmas when I was a kid. Read it now. Preorder Seven Surrenders.

  Too Like the Lightning is available now from Tor Books. Its sequel, Seven Surrenders, publishes in December 2016.

• Tor
  https://www.tor.com/2017/03/10/book-reviews-seven-surrenders-by-ada-palmer/
  Word count: 770

  An Overstuffed Narrative: Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer

  Liz Bourke
  Fri Mar 10, 2017 2:30pm 11 comments Favorite This

  I called Ada Palmer’s debut Too Like The Lightning “devastatingly accomplished… an arch and playful narrative,” when I reviewed it last summer. Too Like The Lightning was one part of a whole, the first half of a narrative that I expected Seven Surrenders would complete—and back then I said I couldn’t imagine that Palmer would “fail to stick the dismount.”

  I may have been a trifle optimistic, for while Too Like The Lightning is a glittering baroque entry into the ranks of science fiction’s political thrillers, it saves its debut-novel flaws for the second part of the narrative. Seven Surrenders isn’t a poor continuation (or a conclusion: I’m given to understand that the Terra Ignota books will be four in number, with each two forming separate arcs) by any stretch of the imagination. But the span of months that separates the two volumes left me quite a lot of time to reflect on Too Like The Lightning. Time to lose the initial white heat of intoxication at Too Like The Lightning’s self-consciously archaising tone, its arch wryness, its playful blasphemy and neo-Enlightenment concerns. Too Like The Lightning dazzled with possibility: now Seven Surrenders has to turn all that shine into substance, and that?

  That’s a tall order.

  With Mycroft Canner’s Enlightenment-esque voice and their happily changeable approach to gendered pronouns no longer possessed of enchanting novelty, Seven Surrenders faces the challenge of turning the political and personal intrigues of Too Like The Lightning, its theologies and miracles and thematic concern with conflict in the post-scarcity age, into a coherent whole. But it turns out that it’s quite difficult to forge a climax and conclusion that satisfies the appetite when my expectations were raised pretty high: Seven Surrenders’ major problem is that there’s just too much going on across these two books for it to wrap up enough strands with enough attention paid to each that the reader feels that they’ve paid off.

  It becomes clear in Seven Surrenders that Palmer’s series is building towards war, a war that further books may, perhaps, deal with—or whose consequences they may deal with—in more detail. (Some of the statements Palmer’s characters make about war strike me as factually dubious—for example, claiming an absence of major non-colonial wars for a generation before the start of WWI ignores the Ottoman-Russian, Greco-Turkish, and Balkan conflicts between 1877 and 1914, which developed, if the major powers were looking, new tactics for warfare with modern weapons; while asserting technological change and lack of knowledgeable veterans as the primary causes of the high casualty rate of the Great War is definitely arguable.) But the clever card-pyramid of intrigue and secrets and betrayals and lies and plausible deniability that Palmer set up in Too Like The Lightning on the way to this end doesn’t come together cleanly, or with a minimum of confusion in Seven Surrenders. However realistic and true-to-life this confusing trail of conflicting agendas might be, the difference between real life and fiction is that fiction, ultimately, needs to make sense. And in a novel where the world’s biggest movers and shakers are all part of the same faintly sordid sex club, I feel that the gap between the global and the personal needs to collapse a little more smoothly and with fewer hastily-wrapped dangling strands.

  The political manoeuvrings, grand and personal, sit awkwardly alongside the peculiar immanent theology of Palmer’s novels. In Too Like The Lightning, the truth of Mycroft’s theological claims—the divinity of J.E.D.D. Mason, the miraculous powers of the child Bridger—rested in a state much like Schrödinger’s Cat, thanks to Mycroft’s unreliable nature as a narrator. But Seven Surrenders removes this fertile uncertainty, and give us narrative confirmation of the presence of divinity alongside the mundane.

  This doesn’t make Seven Surrenders a bad book, mind you: taken together, Too Like The Lightning and Seven Surrenders make one extremely promising debut novel, but one where the promise of the first half is let down by the execution of the second. Seven Surrenders remains playfully baroque, vividly characterised, and possessed of a lively sense of humour, as well as a lively and argumentative interest in future societies and the problems of utopia. It’s just not the tour-de-force second book I was hoping for.

• SF Bluestocking
  https://sfbluestocking.com/2017/03/06/book-review-seven-surrenders-by-ada-palmer/
  Word count: 896

  BOOK REVIEW: SEVEN SURRENDERS BY ADA PALMER
  MARCH 6, 2017 SF BLUESTOCKING LEAVE A COMMENT
  Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning was one of my favorite novels of 2016, and it was certainly among the year’s most unusual and ambitiously daring pieces of speculative fiction. Nevertheless, it felt a little unfinished, and anyone who loved it has no doubt been waiting with bated breath for the sequel that seemed necessary to complete what Too Like the Lightning started. Seven Surrenders is everything I thought/hoped it would be, with a vivid setting, intricate plot, high level philosophical and political ponderings and fascinating cast of characters, a truly worthy sequel to its brilliant predecessor and a powerfully compelling introduction to the conflict to come in the next book in the series.

  The future that Palmer envisions is still utopian-seeming, though some of the shine was certainly worn off by the end of Too Like the Lightning. In Seven Surrenders, we get even more details of the organization of society, government and families in this imagined future, and many of the questions that Lightning left us with are answered. The relationships and interplay between the various Hives are more interesting the more one learns of them, and the ‘bash family unit is more fully explained in this volume as well. In short, everything makes more and more sense the more you read of this series. I love that Palmer doesn’t spend a ton of time on tedious exposition on these matters, which would amount to hand-holding, but a glossary, appendix or wiki could be highly useful.

  That said, I read Lightning as an ebook but Surrenders in hardcover and I found it of great convenience to more easily be able to flip back and forward in the book to check information and reread sections to make sure I understood it. This is definitely a title that benefits from being read on dead trees instead of a screen, which I suppose is, incidentally, appropriate given the deliberately old-timey style of Mycroft Canner’s narration. Though I’ve largely transitioned to reading books digitally over the last few years, every now and then a title comes along that gives me a renewed appreciation for books as useful objects, enjoyable tactile experiences and beautiful artifacts. This is one of those books. If you can, get the hardcover. You won’t regret it, and it will look great on your shelf when you’re done.

  Mycroft Canner continues to be one of the most challenging characters in the genre. After the revelations about his past crimes in Lightning, he begins Surrenders in something of confessional mood. Though many of the ugly details of Mycroft’s crimes have already been revealed, Surrenders gives us a much deeper understanding of why he did it. We also learn more about nearly all the book’s other characters as their murder conspiracy, which keeps the whole world at peace, is unraveled and falls apart. Mycroft’s relationships to the structures of power in this world are explained. Other characters’ secret identities and motives are revealed. There are plots on plots on plots that are uncovered over the course of four hundred pages that detail just a few days of events and a couple of legit miracles. It’s heady stuff. I suggest taking notes.

  The big draw to this series, for me, is still the philosophy and the politics. I wouldn’t say that this is a particularly plausible future society, though that may simply be because I have a very difficult time imagining how we might evolve from here to there, but it’s a marvelous idea for how to organize a peaceful society. The political dynamics are complex and nuanced, and the Saneer-Weeksbooth conspiracy adds a great dystopian element to be explored. Palmer’s ideas about gender are somewhat less well-developed, although significant time is spent on gender in this volume. Mycroft’s use of gendered pronouns is inconsistent and the explanation given for Madame’s plot to reintroduce gender roles into society is less than convincing; frankly, I feel as if there is some huge complicated idea trying to be communicated that I’m just not quite getting. My hope is that this theme will carry on to the next books in the series, which promise to be about war.

  Listen. There’s not a ton to write about this series without giving the whole story away, and it’s hard to discuss the ideas in it without it turning into a lengthy thinkpiece, and I can’t even guarantee that you’ll get the concept. But there’s nothing else like this series being published right now. Too Like the Lightning was a revelation, and Seven Surrenders shines even brighter than its predecessor. The stage is set for the next pair of books to explore what a war might looks like in a world that hasn’t warred in centuries, and you can’t possibly want to miss that. I know that this isn’t a series for everybody, but I still can’t help suggesting that everyone read it as soon as possible. It’s a work of rare and special genius.

  Thank you to the publisher for sending me an early copy for review.

• Bryn Mawr Classical Review
  http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2015/2015-05-06.html
  Word count: 1351

  Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2015.05.06
  Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. I Tatti studies in Italian Renaissance history. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 372. ISBN 9780674725577. $39.95.

  Reviewed by Quinn Radziszewski, The Ohio State University (radziszewski.2@osu.edu)
  Preview

  It is a difficult task to track down the Renaissance reader. To do so, one must examine the endless marginal notes of scholars, the slanted scribbles of schoolmasters and the often incomprehensible doodles of their students. Ada Palmer’s entry to the I Tatti series is a testament to the reward of doing such work.

  Palmer’s meticulously researched volume traces the life of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura from its rediscovery by Poggio in the fifteenth century up through Diderot’s reading of the text in eighteenth century France. Palmer examines a wide range of sources, including manuscripts and incunables, paratexts, introductions, and Renaissance vitae, to determine how the act of reading Lucretius changed with time, and ultimately how the life of this text has shaped the way we read it today.

  The preface to the volume states explicitly that the focus of Palmer’s study is not atomism, but rather the forces that contributed to the survival of a text full of dangerous and controversial ideas. It is an important point that distinguishes the intent of Palmer’s work from that of Stephen Greenblatt’s 2011 volume The Swerve.

  Chapter One begins with the provocative claim that Lucretius was an atheist; in the Renaissance, this term could be applied to any behavior that would threaten orthodox belief, making Lucretius a prime target for the label. In today’s terms, Palmer describes Lucretius as a “proto-atheist,” identifying a set of doctrines that, though not explicitly atheist, might lead to a world lacking inherent morality. The author goes on to discuss the complicated web of relationships between Epicureanism, atomism, skepticism and atheism, tracing the rise of these schools through the works of Lorenzo Valla, Girolamo Fracastoro and Giordano Bruno, culminating with the work of Pierre Gassendi. Palmer concludes, however, that most humanists read Lucretius for his moral philosophy and poetic language.

  The chapter is also useful for Palmer’s excellent overview of Epicurean and Lucretian ideas, covering the definition of pleasure, the atomic gods, simulacra, which Palmer translates elegantly as “shells,” theories of sensation, and of course, the swerve. The reception of Lucretius from Cicero to Lactantius, Petrarch and Boccaccio is also covered here.

  The magnitude of Palmer’s research into Lucretian manuscripts comes to the foreground in Chapter Two, in which the author uses marginalia to determine points of interest among Renaissance readers. Palmer limits her study to manuscripts and incunables produced before 1515. Palmer’s statistical analysis of the occurrence of marginal notes is presented clearly, with a brief but satisfactory explanation of the problems posed by sample size and other factors. The author identifies seven areas of interest: philological correction, vocabulary, poetic language, cultural and historical points, natural and moral philosophy, and atomism. Palmer usefully distinguishes between readers making restorative efforts (operating within the first four categories) and those interested in the content for its own sake (the last three areas). Palmer concludes that Lucretius was of interest in this period primarily for those wishing to restore the past, or the text itself, and for its moral, medical, and philological aspects.

  In addition to presenting statistics on the entire group of manuscripts, Palmer studies in detail four eminent Renaissance readers: Pomponio Leto, whose annotation focuses on religion and moral philosophy; Marcello Adriani, who uses Lucretius’s arguments against superstition in his own attacks on Savonarola; Machiavelli, who displays a surprising interest in the mechanics of Lucretian physics; and Pietro Vettori, who rejects atomism as absurditas in sententia. Perhaps most striking is the section on Machiavelli, in which Palmer also argues that The Prince is indebted to Lucretius’s mechanistic universe, which is able to operate without the oversight of any deity.

  Chapter Three operates on the premise that Renaissance readers considered works by authors of sound morality inherently better and more valuable than those by immoral authors. Accordingly, references to and proto-biographies of Lucretius were influential in the life of the De Rerum Natura in that they shaped the view of Lucretius’s character. Biographers boosted Lucretius’s reputation by presenting him as a predecessor of Virgil, as an author read and emended by the eminent Cicero, and as a poet on the same level as Ennius and Ovid, according to Statius (Silvae II.7). He was also, according to Eusebius, a madman who committed suicide, and lover of the boy Astericon, according to a letter falsely attributed to Jerome. There is a brief digression on the confusion of Lucretius with the author Lucilius, both names being abbreviated in the same way.

  Chapter Four presents various justifications for reading authors who deviate from the Christian worldview. Palmer expands on Chapter Three here, presenting eight biographies of Lucretius and one list of quotations on the author, considering how each presents the text and author to the reader. Many, like Leto, focus on the value of language and philosophy, while others such as Avancius, Girolamo Borgia, and Petrus Crinitus emphasize Lucretius’s place among the poets of the Golden Age. It is only relatively late that a biographer presents the text as a useful source of natural philosophy—Denys Lambin, in 1570. Two of the biographies presented are also interesting in that they are reworked, or one might say plagiarized, from other biographers presented here, providing an interesting commentary on the idea of intellectual property in the sixteenth century.

  Chapter Five considers print editions of Lucretius’s text, which continue to be annotated and often contain paratexts. Palmer finds that readers become rather passive in the late sixteenth century, though Lambin’s commentary, Montaigne’s annotations and the work of Pierre Gassendi stand out. Lambin attributes Lucretius’s “mistaken” ideas to Epicurus, an interesting defense strategy, while Montaigne finds value in Lucretius’s inclusion of Skeptic philosophy. The work of Gassendi, on the other hand, makes full use of Lucretius’s weak empiricism.

  Palmer concludes that Lucretius emerged first as a poet and moral philosopher and second as a natural philosopher and atomist in the sixteenth century. The moment of the text’s rediscovery began a period of restoration that allowed readers to dismiss ideas that were too radical in favor of linguistic and historical material. As the text became more readable and more widely available, the reader’s focus shifted towards the content, and a second stage of reception began. As Palmer states succinctly, the text of the De rerum natura changed along with methods of reading it.

  Palmer includes three useful appendices to the text. Appendix A provides a list of Lucretius manuscripts with detailed descriptions, divided by period, and a bibliography of secondary sources. Appendix B contains capitula for all six books of the De Rerum Natura, which Palmer posits may have begun as marginal notations and been incorporated into the text by scribes at a later time. Appendix C lists surviving editions of Lucretius from 1471-1600, possible lost editions, “ghosts” attested in other sources, and a table of individual copies inspected.

  The only typo appears on page 206, line 6, “rather he invokes [the] fact that the True Faith itself…”.

  Palmer has produced a clear and useful work for advanced scholars of Lucretius, easy to consult and thorough in all areas. The volume is also useful to beginning students; the first three chapters in particular work well as an introduction to the study of Lucretius and reception in general. On the whole it is a highly valuable contribution, for the sheer volume of manuscripts consulted, the methodology with which they are analyzed, and the lively narrative the author creates around them.

  The title makes for an outstanding entry in the ongoing I Tatti series, which has become well-known for producing necessary and insightful volumes such as this.

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