HISTORY LESSON

The Golden Age is not so gleaming in Ada Palmer’s Hugo Award-winning Terra Ignota series

The winner of the John Campbell Best New Writer award at this year’s Hugos, Ada Palmer has channelled her work as a historian into her Terra Ignota quartet. Set in an apparently utopian 25th century world that has been divided into seven “Hives”, it centres around genius convict Mycroft Canner and enigmatic teenager Bridger.

“The series is divided into two pairs, so the first two books – Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders – fit very tightly together, and the second two are more separate,” Palmer tells Red Alert. “Mycroft says that he is going to describe the ‘days of transformation’ which have changed the world, so over the first two books we see the events and revelations that trigger the transformation, and at the end of Seven Surrenders we understand why this world can never be the same.”

Third instalment The Will To Battle and the fourth volume focus the consequences of what has happened. “We see the many characters, do what has to be done now that the gears of history are turning and cannot be stopped,” teases Palmer. “In it, we see how people conduct themselves in a time of crisis, and watch the birth of the new shape that the world will take.”

Too Like the Lightning is out now. Seven Surrenders is published on 30 November and Will To Battle on 19 December.