Professor Ada Palmer is a leading scholar on Renaissance Italy and the author of Hugo Award-finalist science fiction novels. Her four-volume Terra Ignota fiction series chronicles a world war in the 2450s, with fascinatingly complex future world-building. Her nonfiction opus, Inventing the Renaissance, was a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Her next work will be Norse mythology-based sci-fantasy. Dr. Palmer teaches at the History Department of the University of Chicago, where her fully immersive 1492 Papal Conclave reenactment course has been covered by the New York Times.
In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Professor Palmer’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.
I’m a big fan of all your work! Thank you so much for being here, Professor Palmer.
Please, just Ada.
All right, thank you, Ada. To use the terminology of the Renaissance, you are an umanista of considerable renown, so I wish to show deference to one of the nobility of the Republic of Letters.
Well, I hope our modern Republic of Letters is democratic rather than oligarchic!
It’s a nobility of merit! You’ve earned it.
So, how did you come up with Terra Ignota? It’s like the most detailed future society system that I’ve ever seen. And there’s such a tradition in science fiction of really complex technological extrapolations, but still basically the norms of the time when it was written. A lot of the classic Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke stuff was basically projecting the 1950s in space But you actually looked at this and you’re like, okay, what if the 2450s, not just in technology, but in culture, are as different from now as the 1600s were? And that really ties into your background and your ongoing work as a scholar of Renaissance Europe. Can you tell me how that leap happened?
I mean, I became a historian because I wanted to write science fiction and fantasy.
Oh, wow. I didn’t know that.
I wanted to write science fiction and fantasy from my earliest childhood. My dad was a nerd. I was reading, Heinlein juveniles when I had to stand on tiptoe to reach up to the bookshelf to pull them down. And becoming a historian was the perfect training for it, because nothing teaches you to think about changes in society like studying changes in society, right?
I had that essay in Strange Horizons a few weeks ago about how I argue that all science fiction and fantasy writers are historians because we’re practicing the craft of making judgment calls about how the world changes. So I pursued history as the subject of my doctorate, knowing that it would resonate with and be symbiotic with my science fiction.
People often ask, you have two careers, right? Isn’t it overwhelming?
I say, yes. And if I weren’t also a historian, I would write more novels and they would be less good.
That’s very interesting.
Because it makes them slow. It makes them complex. It makes me work minimum five years on the world building, and ask all the questions a historian asks, right?
One of the core ones being, because I’m used to working in centuries, when I set out to do a world-build, I zoom out and ask myself, what is in flux now, that wasn’t the same 200 years ago and therefore will probably not be the same 200 years from now?
What is unstable?
And I’m not trying to guess exactly what it’ll be like, but I know it’ll be different.
So what are examples of things that are in flux? The family unit is in flux. The tension between the extended family and the nuclear family. So the family unit will be different.
Gender is in flux. Gender is all over the place right now. We don’t know where it’s going, but whatever it’s like, it’s not going to be exactly like this anymore. 100 years from now or 50 years from now it’s going to have moved in some way, that’s moving fast.
Marriage is in flux.
The proportion of the population that lives in urban versus rural environments and the fascinating and recent explosive existence of suburbs, which are incredibly unstable, are gonna be different.
Transportation is rapidly in flux and is going to be different.
Food consumption and food use and the food distribution networks are clearly in flux and are going to be different. You can make a list of say 15 major structures in the world that are young in their current form.
Another one is countries, right? Nationalism and the idea of country equals people and country equals culture is about 180 years old, has been developing a lot in that period, and is very much in flux. And then there’s the counter trend of the development of unions like European Union.
So what a country will be in 150 years or 300 years is definitely not going to be what a country is now. There will be further dynamism, both in the question of should country equal culture and the question of big unions like the European Union.
So I have another world built for a novel project that I’m co-writing with Jo Walton about an exoplanet terraforming mission. In that one, all of these same things that are different in Terra Ignota are different, differently.
And in that one, it’s a future world build where all of the units are geographic unions. The European Union and the African Union and the Central American Union and AOSIS, the Association of Small Island States, and the Commonwealth, all of these. All of these large multinational but still geographic political units that all exist now in like forms. The European Union is the most solid, although the Commonwealth is also pretty solid and the eldest.
And that’s a completely different hypothetical answer to the same question. The question being: countries are wonky right now. How will they change?
Fascinating.
Being a historian teaches you to ask very fundamental questions. Like, what is the staple grain and how are people getting it? And that has different answers in different times and places.
Then you ask the question, does that feel stable or unstable? So [that influenced in Terra Ignota worldbuilding] everything from the political system to the kitchen trees, where people have a programmable tree in their kitchen that produces the fruit that they’ve programmed it to produce s a distribution mechanism for produce. Because produce is one of the most inefficient and cost ineffective distribution networks we have right now, since the vast majority of produce is thrown away in transit or grocery stores.
Those kinds of answers are simply in response to, “What is clearly complicated or in flux in our society that wasn’t the same earlier, so it won’t be the same later?” Make sure all those are different.
I have a bunch of worlds that I’m world building for different projects. I’ve already world-built thoroughly the worlds for the next four series. And I’m working on the fifth one!
I can’t wait to get to know those worlds someday.
I have those worlds almost in order as on a conveyor belt, moving forward. Like assembling a circuit board on a computer, more and more ingredients and components are being put onto them as they come closer to the front of the line. So I will take the notion I had and then I’ll go to the first world I’m world-building and ask, does this fit in this world? Or is it incompatible somehow with being in this world? If it’s compatible, does it resonate with the other stuff I already have in this world?
And so as I was building my world with flying cars and non-geographic nations, I had each of those independent ideas. I went to that world and said, can the person who is a professional living doll live in that world?
Yeah, they could. Cool, what would that mean? It turned out that that character resonated really fascinatingly with the hyper-gendered world of what I was doing with 18th century philosophy.
So those two components cross-wire really well. But I thought of them independently and simply took the character idea and compared it to this world under development. Many components of the world also arose independently of each other but then had strong resonances when they connected up. And if a thing doesn’t fit in the first world because it’s incompatible, then I’ll go to the next one.
I love that so much. I’ve never really published fiction, but I’ve been world- building just in my spare time since I was a little kid. Drawn maps and worlds for fantasy or future settings, but I’ve tended not to have a plot or characters or the things people like to see in a story besides political arrangements and agriculture and climate and stuff.
To extend your Renaissance analogy, it’s like someone seeing a master at the craft that they want to apprentice at. I just love, love, love seeing the complexity and richness of what you write.
And I’m not surprised it takes a minimum five years, because it feels like a whole world. Most fiction feels like it’s sort of taking one aspect of the world and sort of pulling on it and maybe dragging the existing world out of shape in that direction, but it’s still fundamentally the same world. But you’re like, no, it’s been 400 years. Everything’s changed.
I really personally resonate with the idea of the Hives a lot, because I am an American citizen, but I just moved to the European Union because I married a French woman. And I do freelance work, I’ve lived in a bunch of places around the world in my fairly short adult life so far. I literally just got off a call earlier this morning about the complexities of being a citizen of one country and living in a second country while doing remote work for a client in a third country.
That was the model for the Hives. I came up with them while I was in Florence at a research institute where everybody who was there was from all over the world. I was sitting there listening to a conversation, a couple where the husband was was Spanish and the wife was Australian. They had two kids, one of which had been born in the UK and the other of which had been born in the U.S., as they were traveling around research fellowships. And they were now living in Italy, discussing which citizenships their kids were eligible for and what the advantages were of each citizenship. Out of these five options!
And that felt so modern and so interesting and so beneficial for human beings, right? That was what made me think, what if there were a system like that where there’s a buyer’s market instead of a seller’s market for citizenship, and people get to intelligently and prudently make this choice?
And that is increasingly the case. It sort of gets a bad rap in some corners because some of the people who are most visibly multi-geographical like that are very rich people trying to avoid tax jurisdictions by going to Monaco or Dubai or something. But it’s also fundamentally an incredible efflorescence of human creativity and romance and innovation and creation to allow people to not be hemmed in by one by one geographical unit.
Yeah, and right now it very much requires a certain level of affluence to be able to take advantage of these structures that enable this, and there are many barriers, social and financial. But if those barriers are lowered by something like the history of the development of the [supersonic flying antimatter-powered] car network, as I imagined it, we can get to a world where that becomes more and more common.
You can see the effects, especially in Europe’s Schengen Zone, of people being able to travel so much more recently.
But travel isn’t the barrier, right? The barrier is employment opportunity.
Yeah, exactly.
The barriers to getting a job in the target place and then relocating to it. And the tax and regulation systems that different places have for whether you’re taxed a livable or unlivable amount, whether you’re being taxed by multiple countries at the same time.
We see more countries setting up structures to enable this, like digital nomad employment visas.
Italy just started one a few years ago, a new residency status that’s intended basically for self-employed people who work remote and want to live in Italy to be able to pay much more moderate taxes than people who are fully having their primary citizenship in Italy, with the assumption that that person is also having to pay double taxes for some other country. And that kind of structure multiplying is the kind of process that can enable buyer-market citizenship.
Since the crazy evil stuff that’s happened in politics, as the U.S. has started brutally attacking migrants and deporting scientists, the entire U.S. population might soon decline for the first time ever.
That seems like a massively consequential thing down the line. I mean, China’s entire current rocketry program was founded by one Chinese scientist who was deported from America during McCarthyism in the 1950s and had to go back to China and then developed nuclear missiles for China.
It is a massive mistake to turn away talent as a political entity, geographical or non-geographical.
Yeah. I mean, as Fix the News is constantly saying, every study we have shows the one problem in immigration is there isn’t enough of it.
Absolutely.
I love Fix the News. I interviewed Angus Hervey a couple of years ago.
I’m working with Fix the News now! We’re going to do a podcast together.
That’s amazing! I love that so much. And I am really grateful that you’ve come on this interview, because I’m trying to build my own corner of the wildly under-served positive humanistic news market, and you are a luminary in that.
One thing that I see a bit in Fix the News and in your writing and in a bunch of other things is that secular but religious-level intensity commitment to humanity and its biosphere making the world a better place. That’s very powerfully expressed in your Utopia Hive in Terra Ignota. People make a profound vow to devote their lives to “disarming Death blade by blade” and all of this stuff. It’s incredibly inspiring. I love your idea of the Utopians’ civilizational Infinite To-Do List. I love that the Utopians highlight to their members that sometimes the hardest thing to do if you really care about a cause is sort of forcing yourself to take a break. All the little things you built in with characters like Huxley and stuff.
Where do you see stirrings of Utopia Hive-style ideology today?
I mean, I meet people at cons all the time who either say they’re living by it or they wish they could live by it. To which I always say, if you wish you could live by it, that means you already are.
Beautiful.
And I think that’s all over the place. We want to be building a future. And it is in competition with the doomerist idea that you build the future by burning the present. Which is one of the tensions that the book looks at. There are people there who feel like you make or guard a better world by destroying this one. And the book ultimately comes down against that thesis, right? Those who assented too quickly to achieving this by war did so badly. But also that once there was a war, one of the goals of the book was to say, okay, one option for a better future is world peace. Another option for a better future is, okay, we have another world war, but almost everybody behaves better in it than in our past.
Your plot devices of the Peacewash, the prisoner exchanges.
Or even the uniforms, right? That moment where there’s this prisoner’s dilemma system where everyone will not wear the uniforms. And then MASON is like, wait, but maybe we will. Maybe we just will. Maybe we’ll actually pass this prisoner’s dilemma thing. And the answer is they mostly do, right?
And so what if the future is, we make sufficient cultural development and our values shift such that when we do have these conflicts, they are better conflicts? That is also a win condition. And that’s part of the book’s interest in something I think which is very important, which is exploring the fact that partial victories are real.
You haven’t lost the quest for peace when there is war. Then your quest for peace takes the form of, can we have the least war, the smallest war, the least destructive war? That is a victory for peace as well. It’s a partial victory. And all real victories are partial victories.
I’m trying in my writing a lot to cheer for the partial victories. Every new solar farm built, every new battery chemistry being researched, every new landscape preserved or ecosystem restored, every new malaria vaccine deployed, every little thing is a partial victory and they matter. They add up to incredible profound changes in the state of humanity.
In your Terra Ignota universe, it’s established way back in the first book published in 2016 that as part of the backstory for that 2450s world, the United States self-destructs in the 21st century and the European Union becomes the model for global democratic governance. And I remember finding this implausible when I first read it, but honestly, it seems more plausible every day.
Well, remember, I was world-building for ages beforehand, and I finished writing book one in 2008. So that was an idea I had in 2006.
Wow. So how does it feel in the year 2026 to see the European Union sending troops to deter an American invasion of Greenland, to see the U.S. making so many massive self-inflicted errors and the EU coalescing more than ever?
I mean, the answer is one could already sense in 2006 that the direction that religion and religiosity were moving in America was bringing America into a state of tension over the degree to which prominently visible religious movements were becoming politically poisonous.
One of the very formative things that I read that affected the development of Terra Ignota is a really interesting analysis of how in America between 2000 and 2006, in the percentage of Americans on polls that ask about religion, there was a massive swing away from answering Christian toward answering other. Not toward answering agnostic or atheist or any other organized religion, but away from answering christian toward answering other. “Christian” went down and “Other” went way up.
And when they interviewed people who had made that change. a lot of them said, “Well actually I’m Christian but I hate what the church is doing. I hate what the religious leaders are doing. I don’t feel comfortable around the organized religion people. I am still doing my version of Christianity, I’m doing it solo.”
And it was a big swing. Like 10% of the population had gone from saying Christian to saying other in five years. And that was to me really interesting.
And you see it in other religious spheres as well, right? So for example, if you look at a much more recent study, the percentage of Americans who identify as Norse pagan has skyrocketed, has multiplied by 20 in the past decade. There are now more people in America who say they are Norse pagan than Episcopalian. But almost none of them are involved in organized practices. It’s almost all private.
People who respect and like religiosity and are drawn to having a belief structure are seeing Christianity and Islam be represented by their most horrible faces, with the worst pundits and the worst rhetoric and the worst propaganda fore-fronted in what we see. Many people don’t want to be associated with that, so they’re reaching for a private religiosity, whether that private religiosity is a pagan revival religiosity, Greek or Wiccan or Norse, or reaching for a private practice of Christianity or a private practice of syncretism.
There has been this interesting trend away from group religious practice toward private religious practice from people who are disgusted by the very visible nastiness of central organized religion. Now, there’s tons of perfectly healthy religious organizations in America right now as well, right? You can find excellent Jewish organizations and excellent Muslim organizations and excellent Christian organizations all over the place. But there’s so much media about the worst faces, especially of Christianity.
There are versions, like the New Apostolic Reformation, Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalists, the Dominionists, the Seven Mountain Mandate, that are in many ways like American Taliban in terms of how they seek to dominate the state.
Even the weird, heretical American versions of Catholicism. Catholicism is a very well-established religion, and in calmer times, you’re not going to start large amounts of change in what’s happening in the local Catholic church.
One of the officials in the current regime’s DHS, one of the people whose day job is to organize mass surveillance and kidnapping to tear kids away from their families, just offered to lecture the Pope on Christianity. And he claims to be Catholic!
The American heresy. That’s its technical name. This weird American destiny thing that comes out of Calvinism but is infecting even American Catholicism.
So there’s a huge swing of people who are uncomfortable with the organized religion they see around them. And nonetheless, theists. Searching for, reaching for a private practice of various sorts. Which made me think about, okay, well, what does that person want?
What that person wants is a sensei. What that person wants is a structure that allows for the organized practice of solo religion.
How could one have an organized practice of solo religion? Well, one could use the therapist model. In the Terra Ignota books’ fictional future history, the organized public practice of religion became illegal [outside “reservations” like Vatican City] after the devastating Church Wars [and individualized “sensayers” act as private spiritual guides]. That again is born out of that trend. That’s really what I was thinking about and noticing this is happening more in America than elsewhere.
The rhetorical Christian versus Islam conflicts in the Middle East under Bush I and Bush II were also already there, right? The current moment is a descendant of that.
So I was able to imagine, what if this got worse? What if this got worse over time? What if America ends up being where the most toxic version of Christianity gets put in the forefront?
We have this increasing split between a fringe religious organization that nonetheless is trying to control government and a majority of people who want to be left alone and live in an abundance prosperity world and are more and more turned off of the other.
I visited the Masonic Lodge in Washington, D.C. and realized how much Washington, D.C. is, in a small-c conservative sense, more conservative than many American cities because it has old money and family stuff and ideas of old and hereditary structures of power inherited from founding father worship, right? You go to the Masonic Lodge in Washington, D.C. and there are stained glass windows of the founding fathers and the creepy animatronic George Washington that gives you a Masonic blessing. And I could see and feel how that, if it became exaggerated and crossed over with organized religion, could become a toxic structure that could drift farther and farther from where the majority of the American population would be.
So all of those as factor possibilities were clearly around, and not things I thought would happen, but things that I thought could happen.
One thing I really loved about your Inventing the Renaissance is the idea of how history doesn’t periodize itself like we want it to. Things overlap.
There’s that classic story of Poggio Bracciolini that was famously profiled in Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, the Italian bookseller widely credited with having some substantial influence on the Renaissance by obtaining that copy of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and getting it translated from Latin into Italian. And during his famous journey, he stopped at knightly jousts and passed through the Hundred Years’ War, and Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake. All this iconic medieval stuff was happening right at this key moment for the Renaissance.
I literally audibly gasped out loud when I got to that point in Inventing the Renaissance about Machiavelli’s annotations to Lucretius.
I think it is a real testament to your skill that you made it an absolute mind-blowing reveal of someone’s annotations in the footnotes in a copy of a Latin text in the 1490s, since you’d provided so much context on how important that connection was.
If I just started with “Machiavelli’s annotations were different from everyone else’s,” you’d be like, well, yeah, he’s Machiavelli.
But to show, here is the whole weight of the future resting upon this incredibly clear, quantitative, undeniable, proved fact, here he is being unique and being different…it’s bringing the storyteller’s art to history!
Starting with your Ex Urbe blogs, and especially after Inventing the Renaissance, I can’t believe how sympathetically I feel towards Machiavelli now. I had heard of him as the guy who was like, “princes should do whatever they have to do to remain in power.”
These people become propagandized into villains. Like the real Dr. Faustus, Fausto Sozzini, [Faustus Socinus in Latin]. Nobody ever is prepared for what the real Dr. Faustus really did.
The real Dr. Faustus founded a heretical variant of sort of quasi-Protestant religion [Socianism, an early form of Unitarianism], whose scary core theses were absolute pacifism, abolishing social class, and embracing egalitarian universal suffrage.
He went to a city full of heretics in Poland [Raków, or Racovia in Latin] and converted them to this and they tried to set up an egalitarian utopia.
And they prospered under his guidance for about a decade. The ones who were nobility renounced their nobility and labored alongside their comrades. Everyone took vows of absolute pacifism. The former nobility couldn’t cope with not wearing a sword, because it just felt naked without one, so they wore wooden swords as part of their commitment to absolute peace.
They tried having everybody cycle through all the different forms of labor so that everybody would farm and everybody would be a potter and everybody would be a hunter and everybody would be a smith. It worked disastrously, because all of these occupations required specialization so they gave that up after some unsuccessful experiments and did specialize in occupations. They ended up focusing on pottery as their major industry. Exported a lot of pottery, became financially self-stable.
And then this egalitarian utopia was so scary to its neighbors that the local populations of the nearby cities entered and massacred everyone.
Wow. Like a much more heroic version of that brief Münster commune in 1530s Germany.
Yeah. And for about a century, a saying for being on the road to disaster or someone having a horrific unthinkable plan was “You’re on the road to Racovia.” Meaning, if you do this, the next thing you know we’ll have equality and no nobility and pacifism! That’s the worst and scariest thing! Dr. Faust must have made a pact with the devil to advance such evil ideas as egalitarian pacifism!
Just playing on the name, that’s like if a couple hundred years in the future, all we remember of Dr. Fauci is that he was this person who wants to make your blood magnetic with diabolical instruments.
Faust was literally demonized, said to have made a deal with the devil, because the bad guys shaped that narrative of history.
I had never thought of Machiavelli as a founder of utilitarian philosophy before reading your work.
And I was so touched by that anecdote about him putting on his fanciest clothes to read alone, because he was entering the presence of the greatest minds of history.
You feel for the guy!
You describe him as “SPQF,” a patriot of the Florentine Republic trying to protect it by any means necessary in this time of crazy war.
I love this period that you write about, the sort of core Italian Renaissance period, roughly like 1480s to 1520s-ish, that period of Lorenzo de Medici and Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci —
I think of it as the period when most of the Ninja Turtles are active.
I love that!
So, many of the things people think about when they think about great culture. But it was a nightmare to live through, as you write in detail. There was constant war, plague all the time, normalized assassinations, political strife.
I think that that’s a really powerful message for our times. You might feel that everything is terrible, but maybe you’re the Michelangelo of this period. Maybe you’re the person who will be remembered 500 years later for building something so incredible in the midst of these terrible things happening that it’ll shape our entire planetary culture.
Yep! And we don’t know what weird moment, like Poggio finding Lucretius, the future will pick out to be like this. “This is what caused the 21st century - clearly it was the invention of reality television!” Something that we would be like, what?
One thing that I’d love to hear your opinion on, that I write a lot about, and that is absolutely in flux right now, is renewable energy. The situation has changed so unbelievably dramatically for renewable energy in the last 10 years.
Yeah. I mean, really in the last five. It’s over a really unstoppable hump of being unilaterally cheaper than any other option. And now just capitalism is on the side of a green economy.
Yeah! No matter how stupid the politics gets, it will not change that humanity now knows how to make clean electrons cheaper than any source of dirty electrons.
Like the Trump White House has held multiple fossil fuel lease sales now that have not attracted a single bid. They’ve tried to sell off the rights to mine for coal in Montana, drill for oil in Alaska, and no one’s interested. They’ve literally had to close auctions with no bids, not once, but several times. And this is a big part of the reason why I’m so optimistic.
Every so often, capitalism helps. And this is an arena where even capitalism is on the side of, “This just makes sense.” It’s the right call, and it’s going to happen.
One of the things people have been saying, correctly until recently, is that a downside of distributed energy, millions of solar panels everywhere and power generated everywhere, is that it means that when there’s a disaster you can’t redirect masses of power trivially the way you can with a big grid. One of the advantages of our old power grid is when there’s a big disaster somewhere, you can suddenly reroute enormous amounts of power from this half of the state to the other one. That redirection of power is much harder when you’re dealing with thousands of tiny systems, right? But now we have blimp wind turbines!
We could just make a fleet of blimp wind turbines and the blimp goes to the place and you plug it in. So we’ll even have flying power plants to solve this problem! Everything is fine.
And we have virtual power plants! Software to make all the little home batteries act as one to send power.
Which is why really, the biggest crisis that is causing the other crises to be on the scale that they are, is the news economy. The bad news, right? If you think about it, since 2016 mostly, a multi-billion dollar industry of crisis news voyeurism has developed. It’s way bigger than the coal industry.
And I don’t mean journalism. I just mean “bad news, crisis!” news. There are billions of dollars being made on having an emergency to report on every day.
And we see rapidly that demand for emergencies exceeds supply. There was a major controversy in the 2024 presidential election about an “emergency” of “Haitians eating cats” that just never happened. The political right especially will just gin up emergencies based on absolute lies.
That was deliberate propaganda on the part of racists. The one that I think is even more of a crystal clear example is the November 2024 release of the World Health Organization’s giant breast cancer study. Which confirmed that overall cancer survival rates have improved by 40 in the last 15 years! Just every number in every possible was way better than we ever imagined. We’re doing incredibly on breast cancer. A huge cause being that people are getting mammograms earlier. Younger people are getting it detected and then we’re taking action, and that early detection is is doing wonders.
Every newspaper that ran anything on this study ran it with a headline like “Young women are getting more cancer! What’s giving us cancer?!” That’s not what it is! They’re twisting better detection into bad news!
And that wasn’t any political party’s line, right?
The “Haitians eating cats” was political party propaganda. No political party propaganda, left or right or anything, benefits from “We’re getting cancer more.” It’s only the bad news industry.
I notice this so much with climate and renewable energy. Every single bit of progress for renewable energy is reported as “it might barely each pass the target this time, but can it keep it up?” Well, actually, we set an incredibly ambitious goal and then we exceeded it. That’s the actual headline here!
And that is causing despair! Which in turn is causing inaction and radical action and people feeling like the world is on the wrong track so the only way to do something is to burn it down. The bad news industry is feeding so many other problems, and addressing the bad news industry is in many ways one of our biggest issues.
That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to give people weekly roundups and daily doses of hope, of positive change. And there is really so much. It’s hope, but it’s also reality.
Yeah, reality. We’re not getting reality. We’re getting the opposite of rose-tinted glasses. We’re getting flame-tinted glasses that are recasting everything as if it’s on fire.
There’s a great author, Jason Pargin, who I interviewed a while ago. You’d love his work, I think. “The black box of doom” was his term for the opposite of rose-tinted glasses. And his most recent book is titled “I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom.” Technically it had no science fiction elements, but it felt very much like science fiction, if that makes any sense. It was describing real-world 2020s stuff in a sort of other-izing way that makes you see how weird it is. Things like, “in this pass in California in the 1840s, the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism after getting snowed in. In this pass today, in the same season at the same temperature, someone complained because their DoorDash tacos were late.”
And it had a really positive point. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. The whole arc is people realizing, both in the story and in a meta way that we have a black box of doom around all our heads and we’re seeing everything through a doom lens.
But, yeah, rose tinted glasses versus black box of doom.
The Ray-Bans of Doom!
One of the many incredibly inspiring concepts of Terra Ignota is the idea of the endless conversation of humanity, the Great Conversation.
I mean, this is Petrarch’s idea, right? This is an old one.
Yeah, but somehow it never quite gelled for me emotionally until I read your use of it in Terra Ignota. You really made it feel real to me, even though I know it’s an old idea.
I activated the idea.
Yes, exactly.
I’d read the Aeneid well before I ever read Terra Ignota, and that’s explicitly Odyssey fan fiction. Building on the past. I knew that intellectually, but I felt it emotionally in Terra Ignota, the way that your “Anonymous” characters view Voltaire as the First Anonymous.
Well, the 19th century especially gave us this negative idea of responding to past things, that makes it “derivative.” Everything’s derivative. It should not be a negative word, of course. We’re going to derive things from other things and build stuff on stuff!
It’s what Francis Bacon points out makes us the giants compared to the children who are the ancients, right? And yet, the 19th and early 20th centuries had this cult of originality and genius, which turned the word derivative into a slur.
And really, that idea of changing the world through through being derivative but in a productive way, through standing one level higher on the shoulders of the people before you, that Baconian idea is really what drove, that really is in a sense the Enlightenment. The idea of cumulative progress, not trying to recover the lost secrets of a golden age.
I’m trying to contribute to the Republic of Letters, trying to carry on the Conversation in my own small way. And that is just so deeply inspiring to me.
You know, one feature of our culture is that we always poised in a tension between attitudes which construct the past as better than the present and which construct the future as better than the present. And it’s easy to say “conservative” and “progressive” but that’s not really what that means. Because sometimes it will be the progressive movement that is like, “What we need is to go back.”
Like, “back to the good old days of unions.”
Yeah. Hippies were not conservative. But hippies were, “the past is better than the present.” Let’s reconstruct the past in the future in important ways.
And we have these constructions of which should be tried to turn the present into.
The present is always seen as the least good!
What should we try to turn the president to? Are we improving it by making it more like the past? Or are we improving it by making it more like the future?
Different flip-flops back and forth will make one or the other better. There’s that really brilliant moment at the end of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, where Ozymandias is looking at investments and is all poised to switch over from the nostalgia-marketed perfume to the millennium-marketed perfume at the moment that he knows that humanity is not longing for its past, but looking forward to its future.
Often that is the way you digest a big change, that will result in a flip-flop of thinking that either the past or the future is better. Though often you have groups at the same time who are celebrating the one or celebrating the other, but really both are celebrating both, right? If we think about the progressive movement right now, it wants awesome blimps with wind turbines in them, but it also wants awesome blimps with wind turbines in them so that the rivers and fields will be like they were, so that nature will be restored to its primordial state
Which is why you have so much hostility, for example, in the progressive movement to things like managed forestry. There’s this sort of “any interference with the forest at all is as bad as clear-cutting the forest” attitude that you get. Even a progressive movement will usually be a mixture of “these are the things about the future that we want, these are the things about the past that we want” and we layer them on each other, even as our primary allegiance is to future as opposed to past. A future in which the right parts of the past are back, right?
I love that example. I’ve written some petitions to Congress and state leaders about prescribed burns in forestry. In much of the Northern Hemisphere, there has been no forest since the last ice age that wasn’t shaped by humans. If you zoom back all the way to no humans, you’re back to glaciers, not forest. All of North America was managed by indigenous peoples. The idea of the totally unmanaged forest is itself ahistorical.
Canada has been resistant to any suggestion of emulating Britain in doing managed forestry. But when you come and say Indigenous people were doing managed forestry for hundreds of years, let’s get back to the original primordial natural managed forestry. Then the same people who said no are suddenly saying yes. Because the British one is is framed as let’s start doing a thing that is new and the other one is framed as let’s return to doing a thing that is old.
So even that is about construction of past and future, as well as what is domestic versus what is enemy, right? Very, very interesting to see how, here are two examples of managed forestry, they do a whole lot of the same stuff. But if we prevent this managed forestry as coming from population A, it is negative, from population B, it is positive, how can we analyze why? One of them is tainted with ideas of interference and harm, and the other one is idealized with notions of authenticity and primordial-ness.
Speaking of the past versus the future, one parallel that I’ve grown really interested in recently, and you discuss it in Inventing the Renaissance, is the printing press as sort of the social media or smartphones of its day in terms of just how massively disruptive it was.
There were heresies, the Hussites, the Albigensians, there were heresies in Europe for centuries, but the heresies after the printing press spread really fast.
And people sometimes think of new communication technologies and the printing press in particular as inherently kind of progressive, but the witch-burning movement was also a product of the printing press, right?
Yeah. They accelerate how quickly something can spread. Accelerants are good and bad. They just accelerate it.
I also think people tend to think about the printing press as if it was one thing that happened once, so then suddenly everyone has the printing press, right?
If you’re playing Civ and you research a tech, the bonus for having that tech instantaneously kicks in across your empire the instant you have the tech. But in real life, it’s like, okay, the city where it was invented has it now. And then it rolls out every decade to another set of cities and then after X many years it has a new implementation, and then another new implementation. And suddenly it’s there.
Which is why people are not realizing that we’re living in the middle of one information revolution, the digital information revolution, and it’s having multiple phases, of which the computer is one and the internet is one and the cell phone is one and social media is one. They’re all iterations of the same tech revolution in the same way that printed books and then pamphlets and then pamphlet networks and then newspapers and then magazines were iterative consequences of the printing press. They were all part of one tech revolution that has many stages over decades, a century and a half
And we’re in another. This tech revolution is going to have many stages over decades and a century and a half. Everyone’s like, “unprecedentedly we have had 10 tech revolutions in the past 30 years!” and I’m like, no, you’re having one tech revolution. This is normal for a tech revolution. It keeps having iterations. What you’re having is the iterations as it saturates. And when people see that, they realize that the world we’re living in is much more precedented than people think it.
There’s a lot of idea that somehow we’re in unprecedented times. We’re in pretty precedented times. History doesn’t literally repeat. History rhymes. But we have an information revolution. It has phases and rollout. It has its political tumults as a consequence. We know how this works.
And I must say, reading about the Borgias in your Inventing the Renaissance felt very very similar to the current family in the White House, particularly the opulence and corruption of the Borgia pope Alexander VI. Fortunately none of the current president’s sons seem as formidable as Cesare Borgia.
I mean, all the Borgias are much, much smarter. But the sort of shamelessness, yeah. They’re attempting familial regulatory capture.
Yeah, and the norm-breaking. They’re just like, yeah, I don’t care if the Pope never does this. The Pope is now doing this. That feeling of, I will do whatever I feel like for my own family’s power.
But also the fact that it’s building upon earlier Popes having expanded those powers, right? Obama did a much quieter version of expanding the executive powers of the White House because he had an obstreperous Congress that was stopping everything. And so he found ways to do stuff by executive order. that would not have been done by executive order under an earlier president. He was super cautious and he was super careful and he was trying to be on his best behavior and so he did so quietly and subtly and gently, but he did create these precedents. In the same way you don’t get the Borgias way exceeding executive power without the precedents of Popes Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Innocent VIII, each exceeding it a bit. And then someone else saying, well, now there’s a precedent for exceeding precedent. I’m going to exceed precedent by more than the others exceeded precedent.
So that is also a contributing factor. When you expand executive power, you create a precedent for expanding executive power. In many ways this leads back to the universal political principle: If you create a power, it will be reused in future by people you disagree with during a crisis you cannot anticipate. Don’t create the power if it would be terrible if it were misused by your enemies in the future, in a crisis you cannot anticipate! Because it will be.
And it is in a way, to me, deeply comforting, that idea that we’re living in precedented times. I often find history, even or perhaps especially the history of terrible things, sort of strangely comforting just because it shows that all that happened and humanity got through it and we survived and even thrived. There has still been, since all the terrible stuff that has happened in the past, mRNA vaccines and space telescopes and mass access to cheap calories and all the great stuff that’s happened recently.
We’ve even seen the tragic corruption of a republic many times before, from the classic example of the Roman Republic to the Renaissance Florence that you write about.
You’re making me think I should write an essay sometime this summer with the title, “We Live in Precedented Times.” I just think as an essay title, it would be provocative.
It’s become a cliche. “We live in unprecedented times.” And it’s narrowly true. Like humanity hasn’t done this exact same thing before. But in the broader scope of what they want to say, it’s not really true.
There are many patterns that have shown up previously several times in our history.
Yeah, why do we reach for the claim that we live in unprecedented times? Why is that the claim that our instincts want to advance? Why aren’t we content with accepting that we live in complex but precedented times?
We’ve even dealt with, several times, catastrophic climate change. Humanity survived the end of the last ice age. There was the flooding of Doggerland.
I remember at one point seeing, I think it was when Twitter was still alive, some people were posting some doomerist stuff.
And you and I both know that we respond to doomerist stuff with, “Here are examples of hope! The doomerist position is factually wrong!”
But this person responded instead with, “Yeah, you guys think you’re so special that even though everybody who’s thought the world was ending has been consistently wrong for 5,000 years, you’re the special generation?”
Yeah, try the Copernican principle that you’re not the center of the universe.
Yeah. And that made me think about it differently, right? That it isn’t just a question of facts and factual refutation.
It’s also a question of why do people want to feel like everyone else has always been wrong that the world was ending, but we are finally right that the world was ending. Making me return to Eugene Webber’s brilliant book, Apocalypses, which is a history of our 4,000-year romance with the end of the world and how every time an end of the world is disproved or passes by, we immediately come up with a new end of the world. Because humanity loves fearing the end of the world. It’s very emotionally satisfying. And people find that counterintuitive. But it’s also just perfectly true.
And also, and I love this one just because of how clear a dichotomy it is, in the early 2020s, the world’s media turned on a dime from saying “due to population growth rates, there will soon be far too many people and it might cause the end of the world,” to “due to declining birthrates, there will soon far too few people and that might cause the end of the world.”
Well, remember, before that, they flipped the other way. In the 18th century, they think the birth rate is too low and the world is going to depopulate. And then when you get to the mid-19th, it’s, oh no, overpopulation is going to get us. And then it flips back again.
Yeah! Like, was there not one day that the consensus was that the population was doing OK?
Historically, there was an idea that humanity was under-breeding itself into non-existence because they were getting the numbers from Herodotus and believing them and believing that the population of antiquity was humongous.
Yeah! And I was like, wait a minute. If the conventional wisdom was worried about too much population growth in the past and too little now, was there any one day at any point where we felt it was an acceptable rate?
I wrote an article saying, actually, human population is pretty okay. Some people did not like it.
What do you think? China’s population has been shrinking since 2023. There’s been a massive shift in human populations. Do you think we’ll evolve towards that sort of pointillistic urbanism of Terra Ignota where there’s a range of city-states amid vast swathes of rewilded land? We’re already seeing abandoned suburbs and former farmland in some parts of Europe.
We’re definitely going to see a reclaiming of suburbs into other stuff. And farming is getting more efficient, so we need less land for it.
I do think we’re at a point where the population increase is slowing, but I think it’s going to still increase. The highest cause of slowing down population increase, the number one correlation with slowed population increase, is women’s education.
Yeah, women’s rights.
No! Not women’s rights! Not even abortion access. It’s women’s education! Even when legal rights suck, and abortion access is limited, if women are educated, they will make a plan and the birth rate will go down.
Everyone expected it to be abortion access or rights and discovered that it was in fact education, that even when rights suck and abortion access is limited, if women are well-educated, they will make a plan. And they will work at it and the population, the birth rate will go down. It’ll go down more if there’s easy access to rights and birth control. And it’s sure hard to stop women’s education these days. It’s got so much momentum, right?
I often think about, the founder of the One Laptop per Child program, his brother for a number of years was the first U.S. Director of National Intelligence, and later U.S. Deputy Secretary of State. And the two of them used to joke with each other about having a bet on about which of the two was changing the world more.
Which is such a brilliant debate to have. It’s just a neat way to think about it. This is the question of which is more powerful, power in the present or the creation of vastly more power in the future.
What else would you like to share that we haven’t covered that is really important?
We’ve covered a lot. I don’t think any other interview I’ve done recently gotten me talking about that interesting flip from Christian to other or from organized religion to solo religion. Everybody wants to talk about Machiavelli. I made him a protagonist of the book. Everybody’s been asking about him. People have not been asking about that as much.
And I think that revisiting that facet of that world-build and the thought process behind it is extra useful in this moment where indeed once again we are seeing atrocities being done in the name of a fringe bit of Christianity that therefore moves into the spotlight and is making people more uncomfortable and alienated.
Fascinating.
The increase in the pagan-identifying population has also been part of the same structure, right? Because this is the effect of, you’re a kid in America, you have myth storybooks, and you also get access to whatever the books are of the dominant Abrahamic religion around you. Some people it’s Christianity, some people it’s Islam, some people it’s Judaism. Then, as you grow up, especially if it’s Christianity, it embarrasses itself and becomes nasty and you don’t want to be part of it.
What do you then reach for when you still want to have a meaningful spiritual life?
There was a year when I was around 12, 13, when I tried to live by the precepts of every major world religion for a few weeks each. I remember when I tried Confucianism and said I would strive for filial piety, my parents were like, wait, the thing you’ll change is that now you’ll listen to us? What were you doing before?
But yeah, I think people are deeply attracted to new sources of meaning. I’ve actually written a few articles on my personal Substack wondering if the rise of neo-paganism in general might be adaptive in the age of AI and the climate crisis.
That’s one of the reasons I’m pursuing the Norse myth book project. By the way, the title has changed. The title of the first one is now going to be “And Loki in His Prison.” And the series title is Hanged God’s Game.
Awesome!
I’ve been thinking a lot, and one of the reasons that I’m working on that project and excited to work on that project right now is this. The Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity and Islam, prepare us very badly to think about climate change. Because they present an all-powerful creator who planned this is and who made the world for a higher end to which the world is just a means, right? The world is temporary eventually. We won’t need any more. It really gets talked about as if it’s the jar in which the caterpillar is living before it turns into the butterfly that is the immortal soul in heaven. Earth is disposable. If Earth has fragilities, that’s not actually the fragility. It’s part of the plan.
And we struggle to think in terms of the importance of being custodians of the Earth. None of that is in Christianity or Islam, right? Both of them say, if the Earth is failing, that’s the plan, or it’s a test, and the all-powerful father can intervene at any moment.
Which is not helping us figure out how to cope. We need to be able to think about the fact that the earth is fragile and is in our hands.
In Norse mythology, Midgard is a very unique, fragile, climate world surrounded by a universe of ice and fire in which the giants, which are personifications of heat and cold and storm, crash upon us. In which the gods have to work hard to defend themselves and defend the Earth. The gods need humans to team up with them to protect the earth against ice and fire and storm.
This is a perfect metaphysics for us to imaginarily visit to think about climate change more effectively.
Oh, yeah.
That worldview is really good for us to visit, to imagine. Enter a space in which we can engage with a metaphysics that helps us think about climate change in our custodianship, instead of making us want to shirk that and say it’s all on the omnipotent father figure.
And it’s different from the white supremacist gaze, which wants to imagine strength. But when you go to the real primary sources, what’s distinctive about the Norse gods?
It’s that they can be wounded.
It’s that they’re all maimed and beat up.
It’s that they have to make hard choices.
It’s that they’re constantly on guard against an enemy, and that enemy is storm and harshness. They aren’t like the Greek gods that are powerful and live in serenity. The Earth is fragile and as we feel ourselves to be fragile, nonetheless we’re part of the team that must maintain the fragile world where it exists.
So I think it’s an incredibly healthy thing for us to let ourselves enter the imagination space of the Norse cosmos. Not just to play around with these characters like Loki who are inevitably fun, but to actually enter the metaphysical world view and explore what it means for even the gods to be fragile and to need us.
That is amazing! I cannot wait to read this!
It’s for anybody who, when they were young, had D’Aulaire’s Norse Myth and loved it.
I had that!
This is that, I want it to feel that awesome, but at a grown-up level. So that’s what it is. We have millions of people who are saying, eh, I’m burnt out on the normal religions around me, but I really liked Norse stuff when I was a kid. Hopefully it will hit that niche and help a lot of people spend some time in an imagination space that helps us think of ourselves as custodians of our world.
This is incredible. This interview has been more than I could have hoped for. Thank you so much, Professor Palmer. Ad Astra!
Lifespeed.
Good grief, you get to interview all the absolute legends, Sam! (I'm starting to think you may be one yourself.)
My brain is still chewing on all of this and I'm still reading, but I already love the optimism shining through with both of you. Cheers to that in abundance.
As an enormous Ada Palmer fan, this was a superlative interview. Thank you.
My one slight complaint: I think you were inconsistent in using bold for questions and plain for Professor Palmer's replies—there were a few bits that were mislabeled, anyway. For instance, the paragraph beginning "I’d read the Aeneid well before I ever read Terra Ignota, and that’s explicitly Odyssey fan fiction." isn't in bold, but it seems like the interviewer, not Prof. Palmer. Perhaps a quick check might be in order?