New Books In Science Fiction

Cory Doctorow has described Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning (Tor, 2016) as a book “more intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall.” That praise reflects Palmer’s immense skill in building a world 500 years in the future but also her vast knowledge of the past. And it’s no surprise that Palmer knows something about the past. In addition to launching the first of a four-volume series with Tor, she is a cultural and intellectual historian at the University of Chicago, where she studies (among other things) the history of publishing and the Italian Renaissance. She says that knowing exactly how the world has changed over the last 500 years – politically, culturally, socially – has helped her imagine plausible changes for the next 500. In Too Like the Lightning, the 25th century is enjoying a reinterpretation of the 18th century Enlightenment, although with flying cars and non-geographic nations. Society congratulates itself for having ban