Hello. Jo Walton is undoubtedly the most celebrated writer of science fiction and fantasy of her generation. Over the last 25 years, she has written well over a dozen novels, which have collectively won her the Hugo, the Nebula, the Mythopoeic Award, the Locus Award, the Otherwise Award, the Prometheus Award, the Astounding Award, the Skylark Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award, not to mention a slew of other nominations. But she never rests on her laurels, for each of her books is radically different from the last, ping-ponging from epic fantasy to alternate history, to dragon romance, to magical realism, to historical thriller, to metafiction, and beyond. As such, she has one of the most diverse bibliographies of any modern genre writer, not to mention her wealth of essays and blog posts about the history of fantasy and science fiction. I just finished Lent, her heady theological time-loop novel about controversial Renaissance preacher Girolamo Savonarola, and it is immediately one of my top reads of 2026.
Ada Palmer is a tenured historian at the University of Chicago, specializing in the Italian Renaissance and the wider history of ideas. She is renowned and beloved amongst her students for arranging a complex role play every school year that simulates the infamous papal election of 1492. She is a musician, performing with the a cappella group Sassafras, and wrote a complete choral reinterpretation of Norse mythology. She founded tezuka-in-english.com, a fan site dedicated to the proliferation of Osamu Tezuka's work in the Anglosphere, and a key resource in my own manga hipsterdom today.
She is an activist who fights for wider recognition of chronic pain and other invisible disabilities. In 2016, she published her debut novel, To Like the Lightning, the first volume of her Terra Ignota tetralogy. This hyper-ambitious, sprawling tapestry of philosophically dense science fiction is my single favorite work of contemporary sci-fi. I'm a huge fan of both Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, and I ranked books from each of them very high in my favorite reads of 2025. Their literary careers have long been intertwined, and years of mutual friendship and support blossomed into the podcast about science fiction and fantasy that they host together entitled Ex Urbe ad Astra. And now, their friendship has led to yet another collaboration, the essay collection Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, published by Macmillan. To discuss their book and other topics of genre literature, they have joined me today. Welcome.
Thank you. Hello. Lovely to be here. Was that spiel too long? I'm like, I have to include every...
I got to cover all the bases. You're just both very accomplished people.
It's fun to hear it, and it's fun to hear what people pick and choose and highlight and how they phrase it. So, always fun. Thank you for having us. This is a book that is itself a conversation, so it's extra fun to have conversations about it. Yeah.
Yeah, let's please. I noticed that something you bring up in the book a lot is the idea that this isn't meant to be a capping stone of any sort, right? This is just something that is meant to spur conversation, and hopefully it'll get more people talking about sci-fi and fantasy. I know for me personally, a lot of the terms and topics you talk about has given me a lot of tools to discuss genre fiction in the future, like the idea of, you know, imprint versus external science fiction or the idea of genre as furniture, right?
And that's one of the things that we were hoping for was that we would define these terms and talk about them and that they would be useful for other people, so that other people could build on those using these tools. Yeah. The term imprint SF especially, which we use to talk about SF that comes out from a science fiction press or in a science fiction magazine written by people who read science fiction for people who read science fiction in an ongoing conversation, in contrast with when mainstream authors who have a mainstream literary background and mostly read mainstream literature choose to write something which has the furniture of science fiction in it, like a time traveler or an alien, but doesn't use the tools and isn't responding to the internal conversation of imprint SF.
Is a difference that, you know, many times I've been in a conversation where people say, you know, I read this book and it's science fiction, but it feels weird. Why does it feel weird? And often that's the answer to the question. What are these two categories of SF coming from this long conversation and SF coming from outside of it, but bringing new stuff, bringing in elements from different genres and different practices. Often very stimulating, but palpably different, and to be able to give a name to that palpable difference.
Sort of like Kazuo Ishiguro writing like Never Let Me Go or The Buried Giant.
Never Let Me Go is actually a very interesting example because Ishiguro had written historical fiction in addition to mainstream fiction. He'd written several things that are historical fiction actually. And he does read science fiction. So Never Let Me Go is more science fictional than most external SF.
But nevertheless is not really part of the conversation. It's a great book. I love it. I really like Never Let Me Go. But it's interestingly poised in a particular place.
Yeah, on the edge between imprint and external SF. Yeah.
Yes, and I kind of remember angry. If he'd sat down with any one of us, we could have fixed all the things that are wrong with that book in 10 minutes. And then it would be a much better book.
Yeah, and I think kind of part of the reason why he gets into conflict with Le Guin is he's sort of insisting, I think it's Buried Giant, right? Where he's like, 'Oh, this isn't really a fantasy novel.' You know, and she's like, 'Shut up. It is a fantasy novel.' And like it might not be engaging with the history of fantasy as much as imprint fantasy, but you are writing fantasy.
Yeah, her beautiful line that he's like somebody falling off a tightrope shouting, 'I hope nobody will think I'm a tightrope walker.' And then that's nobody will think I'm a fantasy writer.
And that's also the constant conflict with Margaret Atwood, right? Is that she's also like, 'I'm not writing science fiction.' And then you look at Oryx and Crake and you're like, 'This is most definitely science fiction.'
Except that that's one of the great spaces where we can say it's using furniture of SF. It's using elements of SF. But it's not using many other elements of SF that it doesn't share. And when we define a genre by its furniture, right? We say, 'Does it have rocket ships? Therefore, it's science fiction.' We can lose the characteristics that make something palpably feel like SF. And one of the essays in the collection talks about how we associate dystopian literature with SF. And often dystopian literature involves some element of speculative technology. Orwell's view screens are at the time a speculative technology. But all the major ur-texts of dystopia, the ones that are shapers of the genre that people think of when they define what is dystopia, were not written by science fiction readers. They were written by mainstream authors who wrote this one book with the furniture of SF in it. This is true of 1984. This is true of Brave New World. This is true of Zamyatin's We. This is true of Handmaid's Tale. This is in its complex way true of Hunger Games.
And that raises the fun question, is dystopia a science fictional genre? Now there is lots of dystopia also written by science fiction writers within imprint SF. But none of them is the shaper maker of that genre. They're usually responding to it. And some of them are responding very sophisticatedly like The Dispossessed or Double or Nothing. Others are, you know, reiterating, let's have a fun dystopia and then blow it up. But the genre originates from outside SF. And then as SF adopts it, works with it. But whenever it renews itself, the new transformative ur-text is always from outside, not inside.
That's also why that is one of the science fiction genres that mainstream writers do best because it's coming from mainstream tropes and mainstream ideas and shapes. So Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and also Never Let Me Go, which is a dystopia if anything ever was, where they are dystopian or utopian, they work really well. And where they're trying to use science fictional techniques, but they're not as familiar with how they work, they work less well.
So Piercy's He, She and It, British title Body of Glass, which I always think of first because that's how I first read it out of the library. But anyway, that book, which is trying to be straight cyberpunk set in the future science fiction, Piercy is much less successful with than she is with Woman on the Edge of Time, which is a dystopia, because dystopia works better with this.
But we wanted to use these terms, imprint SF and external SF, because we're not saying it's not science fiction when somebody from outside the genre writes it. We just want to have a way that doesn't sound negative to say this is a different thing. This is an interesting thing. This is somebody stepping into the genre and doing a thing, rather than somebody within the genre doing something that's part of the conversation. So we tried to make those terms sound neutral, because people will sometimes use the word mundane to mean people from outside the genre, which sounds negative even when it isn't intended to be.
Yeah, well, a question I have, this is just a very general question when it comes to a collaboration such as this, this book. I think this is technically Jo's third essay collection, right? After Informal History of the Hugos as well as What Makes This Book Great. So this book is a collection of essays that both of you have co-written together as well as various essays that you have written on your lonesome which neatly fits into the wider project of the book. And so I guess my question is what was the process of crafting these co-written essays? Like are you going back and forth? I tried to distinguish who wrote each section. Sometimes it's very obvious like the extended sidebar in the first essay about Jacques the Fatalist and I'm like, 'Okay, this is the Ada paragraph, right?'
Oh, wow. Okay. We love a lot of the same books. So a lot of the co-written essays, one of us wrote a beginning, gave it to the other, the other added paragraphs, and expanded, and then it went back and forth. And often, you know, I would have the beginning of an idea and I would have three examples of it and then I would give it to Jo and Jo would put in eight more examples of it. And then Jo would expand a thesis briefly and then I would nuance and expand that thesis so that it had more robustness and they would just go back and forth and grow very organically each time.
Yeah, and sometimes we would do this where we would write some of an essay and when we were getting tired or stuck, we'd hand it over to the other one and the other one would write some more and then likewise pass it back when they were getting tired of it. And so we would come to it fresh and exciting to write some more and rework the earlier part. So most of the ones that have got both of our names on, you can't actually tell who wrote which paragraph because we both wrote...
Right, because the answer is somebody wrote the first draft of that paragraph and then the other person expanded individual sentences and inserted individual phrases to it so that every paragraph, no matter which of us originated that paragraph, was then expanded and nuanced by the other.
Some of the essays you can actually kind of see this because they started off as pretty short things that I wrote on tour.com years ago. And then we took that nub of my little short thing and expanded it together one at a time passing it to and fro into the nuanced, longer, much more interesting essay that's in the book. And so even some of the things that have just got my name on like the 'Why I Read' essay, Ada still had a big hand in the way that is shaped in the book compared to the I think it was four little essays that I made that out of. Oh, sure. And I revised it a lot but also Ada revised that but not enough that it felt like we would put both of our names, only particularly because that one is so first person.
Yeah, it is. Exactly. Of your experience and your thoughts reading it.
Yes, it's about Jo's reading habits specifically, not Ada's. Yep. Yeah. But very, very much we both worked on most of the things that are in there. And even some of the things that just have your name on I worked on too. And I'll say, 'Hey Jo, I need more examples of this thing.' Do it as I have them. Who else did this particular thing? And I will always have things to do it. Yeah.
Ada wants to say that every science fiction panel at a convention ought to have me on text so that they could have a lot of examples. Yeah, you can imagine going to sort of panopticon of videos of all of them with a headset and then be like, 'Beep beep beep.' And be like, 'The example of that is this and the date was that.' And it'd be really fun. Yeah. I said on Blue Sky that Ada has lots of good ideas and I've read a lot.
Oh, no. No, no. What I said was that I'm a literary historian and I've read a lot of books. So, this is my qualification.
But that makes it such a winning combo, you know? It's like peanut butter and chocolate.
I would say that one of the highlights of your collection is the extended section in the middle discussing chronic pain, which has long affected both of your lives and influenced your respective work. The interweaving of Ada's blog posts and memoirs with Jo's poetry was extraordinarily affecting to me. One of the dominant trends in genre literature for the last decade has been an increased demand and supply of diverse viewpoints and experiences, right? Especially regarding race, sexuality, neurodiversity, and so forth. Nevertheless, in modern fantasy and science fiction, the representation of chronic pain and disability as a whole is shockingly limited. In your reading experience, are there any works of genre literature that have done a good job of representing chronic pain and disability? And how do you think authors seeking to achieve due diligence on these topics should be approaching them?
Well, that last one is very hard to answer. The due diligence, it's very difficult to answer that. You can find people who have those conditions and talk to them. You can find them where they are talking on their own blogs or in their own voices, a lot of them, not just one person. And go for that. That's what I do when I'm writing a disability that I don't know about. As for who's done it well, Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books, I think they did really well with a chronic and degenerative condition with Miles. There are some problems, but I think she does it extremely well generally. And it really feels real.
But when I wrote a person who has my disabilities in Among Others, I wasn't actually expecting the sort of positive response that I got and the kind of own voices response that I got where people felt represented. Because I've not written about it before and unlike Ada, I'm not an activist. I am disabled, but I'm not out there. I don't feel like it's an interesting thing about me. I don't think it's a thing that I want to spend more time thinking about and working on than I have to.
Because it sucks. It just sucks.
Very hard for me to be positive about it. It just sucks.
Well, and I think a big part of why I do disability activism is that I'm a teacher. Right. And I'm very aware how much of a difference it makes to my students in the classroom to make them aware of it. To let them have a conversation with a role model figure who to them is in a position of both power and success who then also has this challenge. And it's out of the experiences and rhetoric that I've used when dealing with it as a teacher that my online presence addressing it has also developed.
Well, whereas I felt at the beginning of my career that if I made a big deal out of it at all, it would be the only thing anybody ever talked to me about. That I would get pigeonholed as just that, and that I wouldn't get invited to do things that I wanted to do and talk about things I was interested in talking about, and I would only be talking about that. So, I do actually have quite a lot of disability in quite a lot of my books, but it's just quietly there as a thing.
Yeah. Well, and that's similar to how this discussion is just hidden in the middle, right? Of a book that is otherwise entirely about science fiction and fantasy. Because one of the most important types of representation activism is talking about a marginalized group in a normal context as if that's a perfectly normal thing to do. Because there is a ghettoization of, you know, it happens a lot in history. For example, I work on Renaissance humanism. And there's a bunch of books about Renaissance female scholars. And they're only written by gender studies people, and only gender studies people read them. And when I go to the Renaissance Society of America conference, they're over in the corner having their mini conference that only they go to, and the normal scholars who are working on humanism never go to those panels and never read those books. But if I write a book about Renaissance humanism and I discuss some women alongside the men and don't draw attention to it and just normalize it and say, 'Of course, we're talking about these 15 scholars. Three of these 15 scholars are female scholars. That is just the case, and I treat it as normal.' It reaches a different audience.
In the same way that, you know, first wave, second wave, third wave feminism have different power. We're at a moment in which there's a lot of literature now which is focusing on the identity group. And here is a queer book, and here's a disability book, and here's a gender neurotypical book, and here's a trans book. And that has great power, but so does here is a big ideas SF book. It has a character who's disabled in it. It would never be on the cover of the back blur, but it's just normal because disabled people existing is normal. And has a trans character because trans people existing is normal. And it has queer people because queer people existing is normal. That has a different persuasive power and it reaches a different and larger audience that kind of needs it more than the preaching to the choir of a book where it's on the front. And that's one of the reasons Jo and I decided, 'Hey, let's write a book about science fiction.' And then these are our essays where also portray ourselves as people. Let's put the disability section quietly in the middle, not on the cover, not in the title, not forefronting its existence because then people who would never have picked up a disability memoir will experience a disability memoir and connect with it.
Well, I didn't have a disability essay. And I did have these two terrific pieces that we wanted to include. And then when we were talking about it, we realized that I did have a lot of disability and pain poetry. And that if we put those with the piece that they're in, that made both parts more powerful. And also, my disability poetry that's in the book was written between 2003 and 2023, which is where we compiled the book. So that is actually 20 years of writing poetry about pain and living with disability, which in itself makes a point, that it doesn't go away. It doesn't get cured and it doesn't suck less. It sucks exactly the same amount.
It just gets so boring. It goes on with time.
Yeah, I think that in itself makes a sort of interesting point about that without actually coming out and saying that. Just the fact that the first of the poems that are in there is from 2003. By 2003, I'd already published three novels. It's not like it's juvenilia.
Yes. Though on the topic of juvenilia, in your respective, you both have essays about how you end up becoming published for the first time. And let's see. In your respective essays about your paths towards authorship, you both mention unpublished but completed novels that you wrote prior to your debut works. For superstar authors like Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson, there is a significant demand for their early trunked novels to be published and released to the wider public. Have you ever considered going back to your own early works and repurposing their content for future novels either partially or in full? Now, Jo, I think you might have actually released your original novel as an ebook, but I'm not sure if it's on the internet anymore.
It's not an ebook. I put it on my LiveJournal a long time ago. I mean, it's still floating around the internet. I never properly made it an ebook or tried to sell it or anything. I just put it up so that people could read it during a spot where some people were saying nobody should put work online for free.
Oh, sure. Back in the like late 2000s, right?
Yeah, that's right. And I just put it up during that and there's still copies of it bumping around. But when I, I mean this is in the essay, but when I submitted that to Patrick Nielsen Hayden and all, he said, 'This is the kind of book that people write where they're going to write good things later. Don't try to fix it. Write something else.' And I took that advice and I still don't think that fixing it would necessarily be productive. Though there is one thing in it that I might use for something else, cannibalize for something completely different. Nobody will notice if I do this even if they read it.
Whereas Ada's is quite different. Yeah, so I mean I have, I took notice that To Like the Lightning is the fifth novel that I wrote. And of the earlier ones, the first one is a really good world-building, really good story, and I do intend someday to go back and rewrite it. Probably much tighter. I had imagined it as four books. It probably just needs to be two. And but still using the same world-building, which is great, and still using the same characters and details, just with better sentences and better paragraphs. Telling the same story. The second one, I used most of the powerful concepts and issues that were at stake in it later in Terra Incognita. So if I were to return to it, much of what was exciting within it I've done better later.
Yeah, you've already ripped the guts out.
I'm not returning to that one. Even though as written, except for the beginning, it's better than the other one, but the other one is more worth going to. And then the third one was kind of light. I don't think I would return to it. I have more serious stuff to do, but it's neat. The fourth one, similar, it was sort of my 'could I write YA' experiment. It has really cool POV. I might return to it at some point. If I do return to it, I would probably write it as a single book instead of the two books that I had imagined it as, right? So, each of them has unique different... Well, one of them I wanted to harvest the best stuff from or already did harvest the best stuff from. One of them absolutely on my list to do. The other two optional projects in my copious spare time.
I would really love if you wrote a YA novel or series with the density of Terra Ignota.
It wouldn't... Well, that's the thing. Then it wouldn't be YA. One of the things YA has is a quite a strict formula about the level of density, the breadth of density that's allowed. Because it is for young people. I mean, the whole idea of YA is a certain smoothness of reading. Which is not to say that I wasn't reading incredibly dense things when I was that age, but never the less reading the smoother things.
YA as a genre is its own thing separate from the intended reader.
Yeah, but you know, that story has a plot which could be a YA plot, but a point of view from a narrator who's narrating it from a different hypostasis of reality. It is not a YA capable narration structure, but the narration structure is at the heart of the story. So, it needs to be told even if by a just summary of events, you would say that could be a YA plot. It can't be a YA book because it can't work with an ordinary POV, or at least it wouldn't excite me. It needs the POV it has.
So, my next question is aimed more towards Ada, but you know, if I aim questions towards one or the other, you know, I would love anyone to jump in. But a constant theme of your appreciation for anime is that due to different cultural assumptions between Japanese and Western society, Japanese science fiction often uses unique themes and trope formulations that are totally unknown within the traditional parameters of Western sci-fi. One of my favorite aspects of Terra Ignota is how you elaborately smuggled in tropes from Mobile Suit Gundam into the later volumes. So, what are other examples of your favorite Japan-exclusive genre tropes that you think Western science fiction and fantasy should try to integrate?
Well, so to importantly to start, I do not believe it's the case that Japan is specially more unique than all the other language and culture groups out there that have their traditions. This is important to get across to the viewer, right? It's just that it's the one that because so much of it is being translated, we have access to. And because anime and manga are popular, many of which are SF, huge amounts of Japanese SF and fantasy are translated into English compared to how much francophone SF or Brazilian or Portuguese SF or Chinese SF or Finnish SF or anything else is translated, so we have more access. And one of the challenges that SF faces as a genre and that all anglophone genres face is that masses of stuff are translated out of English because it's a hegemonic language into every other language in the world. And then people in all those other languages read it, write cool things in response, which never get translated back. And so, we have a one-way conversation almost always. And Japanese is the one where it's closer to being two-way.
And you see the influence of this in work far beyond mine, and mine is more visible partly because I dive deep in anime and manga, and you see influences of nerdier anime and manga things like Gundam. And older ones like Tezuka's work and the influences of and references to Phoenix and Astro Boy. But one thing that there's an essay on, for example, is how the robot fiction tradition in Japan was very different from the robot fiction tradition in the Anglosphere for a long time because Anglophone robot fiction in Golden Age SF and its immediate aftermath usually used robots to explore anxiety about labor uprisings and slave rebellions. And the robot was a safer foreign standing for anxiety about oppressed laboring classes upon which the other class depends for...
Or is the idea of a robot apocalypse, right?
And so, you know, what are robot laws? In English, it's the laws you program into a robot to prevent the robot rebellion. In Japan, a completely inverse way of looking at robots and what they represented develops out of Tezuka's Astro Boy, in which the robot is a proxy for the oppressed groups targeted by fascists, genocidal things in World War II, and are used by Osamu Tezuka and others early on to explore racism in a culture whose censorship practices and taboos would not allow direct discussion of racism or direct discussion of fascism after the war when there was a lot of censorship. But you could write a story where a dictator called Hitlini is trying to purge all of the robot citizens from his country, and in which Astro Boy travels to the US to meet with black activists to learn how to organize a civil rights movement and face KKK robe-wearing anti-robot hate groups to explore this. So that birthed a tradition in Japanese SF where we identify strongly with the robot. The robot is oppressed minority group with whom we have a duty to have empathy. And when you say robot laws in Japanese, you mean the robot civil rights act passed in Asimov to give robots freedom, banned owning and trading them like chattel, and give them the right to vote, which is exactly the opposite of what robot laws means in English.
And in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was very little robot fiction written in English. There was a period of paucity. There was much more interest in cyberpunk and cyberintelligence, very little about robots, about two decades. Partly because improvements in the way we think about equality meant that people didn't want to tell these stories about anxiety of the laboring classes. Laboring laws are important, need to be empowered. Didn't want to tell stories about scary slave rebellions, but about the importance of empathy. As more Japanese SF was translated into English and a new way of using robots to explore something that we still love instead of something that we find politically uncomfortable, there's now a blossoming of new robot fiction again as of the 2010s written by people influenced by Japanese stuff coming in. And that's an example where a trope went, changed, came back, has changed us and is going out again, and robots now mean all sorts of new exciting things, and we're having a new renaissance of robot fiction.
Yeah. And it's interesting that of course now we're also seeing a proliferation of AI fiction. And how does AI fiction differentiate from robot fiction?
Well, and the propagandistic stealing of the word AI to mean a thing that isn't at all what AI...
Yeah, so well exactly. It's like we shouldn't, when we, it's unfortunate to conflate AI with the large language models that are just kind of ruining all of society.
And even ruining the word. One of the first reviews of the collection had somebody said, I did a double take and it took me a moment to realize they were using AI the old way. When they talked about AI in the book because the book was written before that word was being used for machine learning gen AI LLM stuff. And is sort of squatting on the word so that the word is ambiguous. I have drifted toward using the word cyber intelligences when I'm trying to talk about what I used to use the word AI for. Our degree of empathy with and so on civilizational questions of cyber intelligences because I think that makes clear what we're trying to talk about as opposed to LLMs and gen AI algorithmic machine learning things which are not yet and are not likely to become cyber intelligences. Other parallel technologies may. But what's that wonderful Cory Doctorow phrase? An LLM is not going to become a cyber intelligence. That's like thinking you can breed faster and faster horses and one of them will give birth to a locomotive. But other technologies based on the larger category within which LLMs are an example are exciting things.
Yeah, I hate being opposed to AI because I've, you know, I've wanted AI all my life.
Yes. The history of AI rights movements. Yeah.
On the topic of empathy, there is a great essay towards the end about how the empathies of science fiction and you've mentioned this a couple of times already in this call, but how the empathies of science fiction keep expanding, right? It's like how, you know, robots were once completely othered and now they're kind of like considered people and aliens are completely othered and now they're kind of considered people and basically the groups that readers can empathize with have just naturally blossomed over the last century due to the effect of science fiction as just a tool of... I don't want to say empathy again. I'm going to say empathy again.
And fantasy. Yeah, yes, and fantasy.
And so I guess my question is what do you think there is a big new frontier of, of like some sort of, trying to think of how to phrase this. You know, is there some sort of like group that hasn't been empathized with in genre fiction yet that you think is still on the horizon?
So I think we're constantly seeing new things be explored and an important factor about humanity is that we will need to constantly always be still expanding our empathy sphere. And, you know, one tiny background detail in Terra Ignota is we hear a little bit about the history of the octopus rights movement. And R. Neela's Kingdom of the Sea, which has been written since, is very empathetic to octopodes.
Octopus rights movement. Yeah, it basically well, in a way. Sort of, yeah.
And Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is doing spiders about and let's have empathy with spiders, you know. So, but you can draw a direct line from Black Beauty to Children of Time widening empathy sphere with animals. And the same with octopuses and I think that if we could see the thing that was being excluded that we ought to give a point of view and that we ought to sympathize with and do it, we'd be doing it. We'd be... At this point, it's not like people are excluding, you know...
I think that was, you know, when I was asking the question, I was struggling to think of what an example would be, but like spiders and octopi are like perfect examples of just like beings that have their own intelligence that just like don't normally get counted on the same level of humanity for whatever reason.
So, in Samuel Delany's 1980s autobiography Motion of Light in Water, he's writing in the late 80s, I think it's 86, about his experience in the 60s as a gay black science fiction writer. And he says at one point, he says, 'You don't get people like me in fiction.' And a friend of his who is into BDSM said, 'You do get people like me in fiction, but we're always the villains.' You can only have somebody who's into BDSM in the 60s in a book as the psycho villain. And I think that we are expanding that so that that's no longer the case. And we're looking at more kinds of human cognition and mental ways that people can be in empathetic ways. And that is something where there's been a lot of push recently in recent years. And a lot of people are saying no, you can't have a character be like that and make them the bad guy without more nuance.
Who characters who could have un-nuancedly and without any problem been the bad guy 10 years ago, even. So I think that's the area where that's happening. Yeah.
On the topic of Samuel R. Delany, I once made an informal survey of my favorite authors and I discovered that how highly I esteemed a writer's themes and prose directly correlated with how big a fan they were of Chip Delany. So, both of you naturally ranked very high in both categories and that has me ruminating about how important an author's writerly influences are on their later output. If a young person wants to be a skilled writer, I think we can all agree that the best reading advice is to read widely and voraciously. But, if someone was just dipping their toes into genre literature, who should they be prioritizing on their reading lists? In short, which science fiction and fantasy authors do you think everyone should be reading for creative inspiration? Which authors do you wish would be read more often?
So, I think there's a problem in asking the question, if you're just dipping your toes, what should you be reading for creative inspiration? Because you should not just be dipping your toes if you're reading for creative inspiration. Those are two very different kind of thing.
I agree with that, but I'm just asking as for the hypothetical person who's like, I want to write fantasy. I have only read, you know, Lord of the Rings and like what should I try to look for next?
There was a newspaper poll done in Ireland about 15 years ago that was just demographically polling people about everything. Do you own a car? How far do you live from work, etc. One of the questions was, do you write poetry? One of the questions was, do you read poetry? Substantially more people said yes to do you write poetry than to do you read poetry. And a challenge that the genre especially faces is that a lot of people consume science fiction and fantasy stories via either video games, television, or film. Naturally want to reply by creating a story in response. And then turn to prose because one cannot by oneself sit down and create a film or a TV show or a video game in the same way. And will then try to produce in prose a response without consuming prose. And as a result, we'll have really interesting ideas often. But struggle at the structural questions of how to make a story have beats, how to make, you know, the thing advance. To which the answer is, read some stuff, any stuff. Read in the medium. Right? Read in the medium you intend to produce in.
I look at a lot of amateur fantasy writing and I find like a pretty consistent flaw is they're like, you know, like I'm writing fantasy. Like this is my power system and it's like this isn't really fantasy. This is really shown in anime, right? This is just like replicating the tropes as shown in anime because that is the main thing that is being consumed, right? And as a result, it's what's being exported even though it's like, well, you know, it's like if you want to be reading fantasy, you should be trying to, if you want to write fantasy, you should be reading fantasy and so forth, right?
Well, and more specifically, if you want to write books, you should be reading books.
Yeah, which is a simpler, broader step, but if you consume in audio-visual media and then try to produce prose, you're not going to have skill at producing prose.
Yeah, if I'm faced with a specific person who says, 'What should I read? I've only played video games or I've only read Lord of the Rings like your example.' I would ask them what they like and then I would recommend specific things that are like the things they like only better. Or more complex. Or more interesting and that will be a step from where they are to help them get towards having a broader reading. I've recommended in recent years that a lot of people read Sofia Samatar.
Oh, okay. That's, she did Alif the Unseen, right?
Yeah, that's right. A Stranger in a Strange Land, but also she's written some really great short stories. And Isabel Kim and Theodora Goss who are all writing right now and are writing on interestingly different edges of fantasy. And then there are a lot of classic fantasy things that I would recommend people. And I keep raving about Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet.
Yeah. Okay. I have the first two Long Price Quartets and I am still trying to find the other two books.
You should totally. Worth it. Yes. Because those books are doing something genuinely different and genuinely interesting while still being centrally fantasy and really great. And so there's loads and loads of things that I might recommend to a person depending what they'd read. I might say go read Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist and Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword. Go to the pre-Tolkien great things and see what you can do. If it was somebody who loved poetry and things that are poetic, I might recommend Greer Gilman who's got a third book coming out really soon.
Really. Yes. The sequel standalone in the world novel coming out. It's finished. She's got a publisher. It's wonderful.
I have like Moonwise on my very short-term TBR and now I think I might need to speed it up even faster. We're getting our first new Cayn Reed novel in 30 years. We're getting a new...
You're going to love it. If Terra Ignota is your favorite thing ever, you're going to love What We Are Seeking. It's another grown-up novel. It's also, like Terra Ignota, it's a wonderfully traditional science fiction novel, like the science fiction that's always been written, but with a sensibility that it could not have been written anytime before now. And I love that in a book. That combo of having read the earlier things,
Building on the earlier things, reaching back to sort of Bester and the early science fiction, but going forward from it and using what we've really got now. It's great.
Again, this is deeper than dip your toe, right? So, if someone says, 'What should I read?' The first step is what you like.
You can just forget the dip your toe framing. Just recommend whatever. I just want to hear all of this.
Let's recommend things that are like what you like, yeah, but that are doing... Another thing that I think is very important when people really want to seriously create an entry in the genre and respond to the conversation, is to make sure you've sampled the conversation over time, and that you're not reading only stuff that's brand new or only stuff that's golden age or only that's too. So, one thing you can do, especially if you've already read, let's say, five or ten fantasy novels that you like, that were like the stuff you like, is to take your birth year and look at the World Fantasy or Hugo finalists for every decade that ends in the same digit, and pick the one that seems neatest and read that. So, that you're making sure you're checking in with the history of the genre once a decade to see what it's up to and what's changed.
And some of those books you might not like and some of them you might not even finish, but you'll realize how the conversation has advanced. Because one problem you sometimes get in both science fiction and fantasy is somebody who's using a piece of the furniture, but doing the 101 level of something that the genre has been at this for a while. We've already explored a whole lot of stuff. You should be doing the 303 level of this. It would be so cool. You don't need to do the basic level of this.
What if the knight was a girl?
Yes. A little while ago, a few years ago I read the first issue of a debut American comic book that was doing 'what if there were a robot girlfriend?' Woah. No one's ever read Chobits before.
Social moments and awkward power dynamics and make the main character who has the robot girlfriend think about whether this was a responsible or irresponsible relationship as if no one had ever written a robot girlfriend story before. And I was like, can I introduce you to 300,000 robot girlfriend stories that have done the interesting... And he was doing interesting, serious examination of it that would have been really sophisticated in 1966.
But I would love to see that same author look at the things that have happened since and then get to do the more in-depth, I can skip over these basics and jump straight to this.
The birth year decade thing is a really great idea and also you can use my history of the Hugo books to find these books. But if you were to do that and you were to read, you know, ten books, that wouldn't be a terribly onerous thing to ask somebody to do. It's not saying you have to know the whole history. It's taste each decade once or twice. If you said that to somebody and they said, 'Oh, I couldn't possibly read ten books, one from each decade of the last hundred years,' they are not really somebody who wants to be a writer.
So this next question of mine is aimed towards Jo. I was pretty shocked to learn that your work did not find print in the United Kingdom until the release of Among Others, especially since all of your early work had such heavy British themes and motifs like Arthuriana and King's Peace, Victorian society and mores in Tooth and Claw, Blitz in the Small Change trilogy, etc. As someone who has significant experience with fantasy fandom on both sides of the Atlantic, would you say that Brits and Americans have different priorities in terms of what they enjoy in their genre literature and what ends up getting published? And if so, what would those differences be?
I don't think it's that at all. I think it is British publishers think they know what people like. And what they think people like is things that are very ironic and cynical, basically.
More like the K. J. Parker, Tom Holt... I actually love K. J. Parker, but no, more like China Miéville.
Charlie Stross, China Miéville, Lavie Tidhar, people like that. And indeed Alastair Reynolds and Adrian Tchaikovsky. There's a lot of great people who are writing things that are a little bit cold and a little bit detached and a little bit laughing at the reader. Don't want you to care. A little distanced. Or indeed they do want you to care, but they're sort of ironic. They're sort of carefully ironic. And that is the tone that British publishers think the British people want to read. And they may or may not be right. They were not right about me, but also I emigrated.
I used to work part-time in a science fiction bookstore in Lancaster in Northwest England. And I knew what was being published in the UK. I knew what was being published in Interzone. We also imported books. I knew what was being published in the US. I knew what was being published in the US magazines. I knew that what I was writing and what I wanted to write did not fit into the British market in any way.
Whereas there was a space for it in the US market. Lois McMaster Bujold has not been published in the UK since Komarr. That is the last of her books that had a British release. I was only published in Britain with Among Others, and I am no longer published in Britain. I was published in Britain for a very short little time. I am way more published in France and Germany and Spain than I am in the UK. I'm just not writing things that fit in the space that is what the editors and publishers there think that they want. And you'll notice they did publish Terra Ignota, which is big idea science fiction. And if I was writing big idea science fiction, they might be more interested. It's not that nobody is publishing any women, but fewer women are being published in the UK than elsewhere. And the ones who are being published tend to be writing this same kind of ironic kind of thing. And some of them are great. But within this sort of narrow bandwidth.
But I mean, there's an association culturally between cynicism, irony, criticism, and being intelligent and prudent.
Yes. When movie reviewers give more bad reviews, they are taken more seriously than when movie reviewers give a lot of good reviews because the negativity and criticism is associated with intelligence and prudence. Enthusiasm and warmth and passion are associated with naivete and foolishness. You get this in the rhetoric that's fashionable in journalism. You get this in the rhetoric that's fashionable in review writing. This is true on both sides of the pond. It is more true in British media than in American media. And when you read just the tone of an op-ed in a British newspaper, the degree of cynicism and irony and coldness is on average higher than in the US even though there's plenty of irony and cynicism and coldness in a lot of US journalism. And so the expectations around that crafted taste, the taste of, oh, you know, science fiction readers want smart books. Smart books are cold and judgmental. Is stronger in the UK not as a characteristic of UK science fiction but of UK journalistic voice.
This is a bit of a light question, though it brings in the idea of the 7-10 list from Terra Ignota. For anyone who's watching this who might not have read Terra Ignota, would you care to explain what that is, Ada?
So it's an annual newspaper thing in this imagined world in which once a year all the top newspapers, and in fact other newspapers, but people may pay most attention to the top ones, list who they think are the ten most powerful and influential people in the world. And it gets journalistic discussion and coverage in the same way that Time magazine's Person of the Year gets discussion and journalistic coverage. And it's called a 7-10 list because inevitably the top seven will be the leaders of these big seven political groups. So, those are always predictable and the question is in what order will they be? Will people think that group A is now more powerful or less powerful than group B? Will there have been shuffling among those leaders? And so, the top seven will be the same seven in a different order. And then the extra three at the bottom will be much more unpredictable and different newspapers will make a point of picking somebody unexpected or different or how they're ordered is more surprising. There's betting on it. But the idea of it is that it is a purely journalistic exercise that all the newspapers in the world do on a particular day that then gets a lot of reflection in the same way that people would think about the Nobel Peace Prize winner or think about the Times Person of the Year or 30 Under 30 or these other journalistic listings of celebrityness, right?
One of the joys of Terra Ignota is I think you get the whole table of the 7-10 lists pretty early, like chapter three or four, and it is like so dense with like names and factions that you're like, 'Oh god, what am I doing here?' And then like slowly throughout the book you like digest all of these different characters and factions and then by the end you can like flip back and then you understand perfectly like how all of these different like newspapers, like their political standpoints, just by how they are ranking these different figures. But anyway, the reason why I bring up the 7-10 list is I think that it just makes for a very fun question format, which I don't know if anyone has asked you before. Anyway, I just want to say to both of you, what would be your 7-10 list of best gelato flavors? You don't have to list ten or even seven flavors.
So, I have very particular tastes in that I have the opposite of a sweet tooth.
I like the very tart flavors and most of my favorite gelato flavors are therefore flavors many people dislike because they are so tart. So, my top gelato flavors are red currant sorbet, sour cherry sorbet, pomegranate sorbet, sour mandarin sorbet, watermelon sorbet, which is less tart and is really fabulous. Frutti di bosco, which is a mixture of berries with red currant but also blackberries and blueberries and so on within it.
How many is that? Is that...
Yeah. So, you know, many of those are distinct and unusual that some people would just never... I would never recommend some of those to most people. A good solid red currant gelato is so sour and so acidic that if you have two scoops of it, you could get blisters on your tongue.
You probably have difficulty finding a lot of those flavors in the United States. So, you can't find most of these flavors in the United States. You have to either buy a gelato machine and get the fruits from a farmer's market and make them yourself.
Oh, wow. Do you have a gelato machine? I didn't know that was like a consumer good.
We both certainly have gelato machines.
Oh my god. What the heck? If you're going to live in North America, what are you going to do, you know? How much is a gelato machine? I'm now like debating, you know, like what my finances for the next couple of...
Yeah, but it's so worth it. I'm a great fan of an unusual flavor, which is olive oil gelato, where instead of a couple tablespoons of cream to chemically stabilize the mixture, you're using olive oil. So, milk with a little bit of olive oil that gives a very interesting flavor. One time when I was at the International Gelato Championship in Florence, where you get to taste all the competing flavors, there was one gelato booth that made six batches of olive oil gelato with the same recipe but different olive oils from different parts of Italy. And it was so amazing tasting the rich, almost nutty, almost peppery subtleties in each of them, right?
I guess this is kind of a dumb question, but it makes sense now that I'm thinking about it. Is there an extensive sort of sommelier culture for olive oil, where it's like the different soil compositions lead to different qualities of olives?
Yeah, very. How much volcanic soil is there? How old are the trees? It's a whole thing. And for anyone who's listening to this who wants good olive oil, the tidbit that Americans need to understand is that the pasteurization requirements for importing olive oil are such that if you get imported olive oil from Italy or Greece or Spain, it's been through a chemical process that greatly reduces its actual flavor.
So, it's better to get California oil. Because California oil has not been through that process that is only mandated for imported olive oil. So, even though if you're in Italy, yes, the olive oil is better than California olive oil, but within America, California olive oil is the best olive oil you can get in America.
However, if you're in Canada, you can get imported olive oil from Italy and Spain and Greece that has not gone through this process and is good. So do that. Don't buy California olive oil if you're in Canada, only if you're in the US.
Yeah, and if you want an American olive oil recommended, California Olive Ranch. Very, very good American olive oil brand. It's reliably high-quality flavor stuff. You can get a subscription to their eco-size.
I was going to do the porcini oil.
Yeah, The Olive Tap. They do the best flavored olive oils that I've found in the US. They do an extremely good porcini oil. They also do a staggeringly good tart tangerine balsamic vinegar.
I was going to ask like what are the typical flavorings you would find in a flavored olive oil?
Usually it's going to be either citrus or an herb like oregano.
