Ada Palmer is an author, historian and composer. She did her Ph.D. at Harvard, teaches History at the University of Chicago, blogs at ExUrbe.com, composes close harmony folk music and performs with the a cappella group Sassafrass. Her novel Too Like the Lightning was published in the UK at the end of July by Head of Zeus, with its sequel, Seven Surrenders, following in January, and kindly answered some email questions from Paul Simpson…

Too Like the Lightning has been described as “The Iliad meets I, Claudius mixed with the enthusiasm of The Stars My Destination and Gene Wolfe style world building.” Of that quartet, which have you read, and which, if any, do you, as author, feel were an influence on your creation of the series?

Yes, those are four of my very favorite books, and definitely among those that have influenced Terra Ignota the most.

I Claudius was the source of my structure, the idea of writing a political novel as a family history, by having the story be presented as a document being written by a character who is on intimate terms with the others whose story he is telling, while their actions shape the political fate of empires.

Gene Wolfe, specifically The Book of the New Sun, was my model for world building, for how densely layered and historically real an invented future could feel, and also for how complicated the psychology of a narrator could be and how that would enrich the reader’s experience.

The Stars My Destination was a childhood favorite, and I love Bester’s energy, how many of his scenes are saturated with a kind of manic excitement, and how his characters are so strong-willed to the edge of madness—he definitely influenced my characters, and my ways of writing action, and suspense, and party scenes and affluence.

As for the Iliad, that engages two different ways. I love the Robert Fagles translation, the way he uses language, and especially the strong iambic rhythm of his English prose—English tends to form iambic meter quite naturally, as Greek does dactylic meter, so Fagles gave me a sense of how English sentences could be formed to have a slight verse-like rhythm even without being verses. Thus the line-by-line prose is strongly influenced by Fagles, more so than Homer himself. As for the actual Iliad, the themes of the book comment on the Iliad, more and more as the series continues, using Homer as a tool for looking at themes of heroism, war, fate and so on, since the Iliad has so strongly shaped western and, more recently, global ideas about epic and narrative and war and such, so commenting on it gives me a palette of references to draw on that resonates with many other thinkers, and many readers.

And given the distinctive narrative style of the book, were any of them a conscious influence on that?

Fables and, separately, Homer certainly were conscious influences, as well as unconscious—what I mean by that is that sometimes I intentionally write a homeric simile, but separately you can’t reread something as many times as I’ve reread Fagles’s Iliad and not sponge up some of the style.

But most of the distinctive style of Mycroft’s narration comes from something altogether different: Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Diderot. In that book Diderot’s fascinating narration has this uniquely intimate, direct address to the reader, which really makes you feel as if Diderot the author cares about you the reader, as if you have a relationship with each other, in a wholly different way from any other book I’d ever read. It doesn’t feel like reading a book, it feels like a time capsule preserving a conversation with Diderot.

I wanted to create something like that in Too Like the Lightning, where the narrator wasn’t someone you related to or identified with, or imagined yourself as, or a camera you watched through, but where the narrator was a person you got to know, and who got to know you too, and with whom you had a close emotional relationship. It’s hard to describe without experiencing it, but Diderot does it, and, with a lot of work, I did it too. I can’t recommend Jacques the Fatalist and His Master highly enough to anyone who’s interested in narration and structure, and wants to be exposed to mind-blowing new ways an author can structure a book.

What was the genesis for the book originally – an idea of the society? One of the characters? Or a specific incident?

It had many separate geneses. When I’m world building and I come up with an idea—for a character, or a place, or a technology, or a situation, or a social institution—I always go to the world I’m building most actively and ask myself if that person/culture/thing could exist in that world. If they’re compatible then in it goes, and I then look at all the consequences of that element being added in and mixing with the others. If it doesn’t fit, I try the next world, or the next, since I’m always building several at once, so there isn’t a long gap between series, the next world is being built the whole time and ready to go. So many elements of Too Like the Lightning had many different origins.

Probably the biggest source for the Hive system was living at an international research institute in Florence in a community of scholars from around the world. Many of them were E.U. citizens but international families, with a mother from one country, a father from a second, whose children had been born in a third where the parents were for university, and now the kids were growing up in a fourth. I listened to those parents having discussions of citizenship, of how their kids would have the option of four different citizenships when they grew up, and the different factors which might make it valuable choosing one over another. It made me think about the possibility of a world where everyone’s path was like that, where everyone grew up surrounded by people from many other nations, moving from country to country experiencing lots of places and lifestyles, and in the end choosing a nation, not by chance of birth, but because its values and government reflected what you also valued. I started to brainstorm how a system like that could develop, and kept working on it and working on it until it became, not just a world, but a history of a world, how we got from those E.U. international children to the world people like that would make if that came to be the norm.

What is it particularly about the Enlightenment period writers that speaks to you personally – not just the key Enlightenment writers, but those who criticized it, such as Thomas Carlyle (whose influence seems to be quite heavy in terms of his Great Man theory of history – which today would be Trump and Putin, I suppose)?

Cramming a lot of history and nuance into a few words, the Enlightenment was the first period when a big social and cultural movement tried to completely remake society, changing education, law, social class, initiating a new age when every person would be shaped differently from childhood and produce a future wholly unlike anything before, and who would in turn reshape the next generation, and the next, so that the process of change would be constant forward, on and on. The Renaissance, for example, had tried to remake the world, but in the image of ancient Rome, aiming to recreate that specific world, to get there and, then, to stop there—the Renaissance had never imagined constant progress, nor had they imagined a transformation which would affect everyone, every farmer and spinster and scullery maid, they only imagined affecting the learned elite, remaking cities to be grander and more classical but not wholly different on the social front.

This is a long way of saying that the Enlightenment is the earliest era that, in my view, shares the mindset of science fiction readers, our idea that human society will constantly change and develop to be different, that every generation’s experience will be unique, and that major things we do at different moments could spin the Earth off into many possible futures. The Enlightenment is as far back as we can go and still find authors and people who were asking the same kinds of questions science fiction often asks, and even using the same means sometimes—Voltaire wrote science fiction too, Micromegas, a First Contact story with aliens who come to Earth and talk to humans about Providence and the design of Nature; 18th century questions for an 18th century alien but parallel to our own.

I wanted to explore the same kinds of questions, to use the much more sophisticated palette of science fiction tools the genre has now to reexamine Enlightenment questions, about Providence, and the design of Nature, and humanity’s space in a cosmos they had just discovered probably was not designed for humankind—to look at those questions again, but to lend Voltaire all the tools of modern SF (flying cars, moon bases, genetic engineering, robots) to explore it further.

As for Thomas Carlyle, for all his insistence that Great Men were the agents of change in human history, he still believed that change was a fundamental and constant factor in human history, and that if we better understood the mechanisms of historical change we could use that to shape a better future. Though for me Thomas Carlyle serves more as a reminder of how prone we are to returning to the Great Men mindset, that even though we now have a much more subtle understanding of history (one that takes account of cultural trends, economic forces, butterfly effects, and the fact that everyone has agency in change not just famous leaders) we still generate lots of narratives, and interpretations, which go back to the Great Man attitude, ascribing agency to heroes and villains instead of the subtler and more complicated causes we now recognize are often more important. Heroes and Villains are easier to understand, and easier to tell stories about, whether you’re a novelist, or a journalist, or an historian, so we keep returning to Great Man, or Great Person, type narratives. Thus when I think about Thomas Carlyle I use him to remind myself that Great Person thinking, and Great Person narratives, have to be balanced with our understanding of group forces and un-famous individuals.

And if you keep track in Terra Ignota, there are frequently moments when the force behind some big event, the “who” of the whodunit, turns out to be no one we’ve ever heard of, or a big mass of people acting together. Moments where we aren’t watching Great People do things, we’re watching the leaders whom it’s easy to think of as Great People try to grapple with being tossed on seas of change far larger and more powerful than they are. It’s a harder story to tell, since “an anonymous person you don’t know did it” isn’t the expected answer to a question in a story, nor is “the hero was powerless, the people did it” but it felt worth the effort trying to tell that kind of story too. And I hope that, as our news cycles remain obsessed with simple narratives about Trump and Putin and others who can be made into Great People by stories, stories like mine which show world leaders buffeted by the more potent agency of their people can help us remind ourselves that those Great Person narratives are often deceptive. And that one of the facts they most erase is that we have power too.

How much of the worldbuilding did you need to do before setting “pen to paper”, so to speak or did much of it arise organically during the writing because of your knowledge of the period?

All of it was done in advance, or nearly all. I plan very thoroughly and spent five years doing world building before sitting down to outline the series—not just the first book but the whole series. Outlining took six months, and only after that did I start the first chapter. Occasionally ting nuggets of world building need to be added as I go, details such as characters having a meal and suddenly making me realize I hadn’t worked out the ratio of corn consumption to wheat consumption in that region, or which form of Mexican food has become most prominent globally, so I have to work that out before I can say whether to say the tortilla is wheat or corn. But in general I find it very important to have everything planned at the beginning. Not only does it give me more to work with, and prevent accidental contradictions, but having it all done in advance means that, if some part of the world suddenly comes up in the course of a chapter, I’ll always be prepared to include it, I’ll rarely if ever say, “Oh, no, I haven’t decided how X works…” and be tempted to write around X to avoid doing the extra work. The work was done first.

Did you map out the entire tetralogy before starting – and if so, how much did actually living in the heads of these characters, with their contradictions and very different society, alter your plans?

I outlined all four books chapter by chapter before I began. As I work through it (I’m still writing the fourth one) I practically never deviate from the outline even a hair. Frequently I try to, I come to a chapter and think, “This doesn’t need to be here, I can cut this and skip ahead to that…” and then I’ll try it and it won’t work very well and after a week of banging my head against it I’ll realize Past Ada was right after all and I should have listened to her. But sometimes between the outline and now I’ll have forgotten the specific reasons that a particular thing had to happen at a particular point, and I’ll only rediscover those reasons as I write it and realize it needed to be that way, usually not for the plot, but for the emotional arc, that that encounter, or that discovery, or that confrontation had to happen now for the reader to be in the right emotional space when the next part starts.

Too Like the Lightning is available now from Head of Zeus.

Thanks to Blake Brooks for help in arranging this interview.