Ada Palmer | On How Speculative Worlds Can Help Us Demand A Better Future

Yes, a lot of people think of studying history and writing science fiction as being opposites, because one is about the past, the other is about the future. But actually, there's nothing more similar to the future than the past. It's a long period of time in which things change. We watch how societies are transformed by events, by people, by new ideas and technologies. So I always, from my earliest childhood, wanted to write science fiction and fantasy. I became a historian because I realized how well that synergized with wanting to write science fiction and fantasy. And so my love of the imaginary and future worlds in which the stories that I always read and then wanted to tell took place is the same as my love of these past eras in history when people really did live in a different world, or at least believed they lived in a different world from the world we believe we live in.

Because it's not just a difference of how people's houses were built and what people ate and how people's work was organized, but also the cosmos they believed they lived in. And when you come through history, you're actually looking at multiple different ways the universe could be. And we believe the universe is the way we believe it was, but different people at different points believed it was different other ways. The two vocations are one in a lot of ways, at least for me. So I wanted to write and was always practicing writing, and then studying history to make the writing richer and deeper.

I mean, I grew up on science fiction. My father was a big science fiction fantasy reader. The books that were around on the shelves that I could grab when I was small enough to have to be on tiptoe to do so were often science fiction and fantasy books.

My father was very chaotic in the books he left around, of the books he gave me access to. There are a lot of things that I read when I was much too young to understand. So I was very young when I first tried reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which is one of the hardest and most complicated works of science fiction ever written. And I don't know if you actually understand much less of it when you're nine than you do when you're 39, because it's such a complicated and dense and opaque text that you don't even understand what's happening until a second pass. But I think that by being a small kid and picking up and reading books that are what we would call above your reading level, you're experiencing an important kind of learning, this very authentic childhood, because childhood is the experience of not understanding how the world works and hearing people have conversations about names and places and things that you've never heard of and trying to piece them together from that conversation. And a lot of the way worldbuilding is seeded in the most fun and interesting science fiction and fantasy is the characters have conversations about places and peoples and things that the reader, of course, speaking from a different world, doesn't know, but you piece them together from the conversations in the same way that a child pieces things together without context. And I think there's an important continuity between the way children experience a world that we don't understand yet, but we know that we're picking up puzzle pieces and clues and that if we put them together they'll fit, and the way a reader has to piece together worldbuilding. Most people who seriously read science fiction fantasy start doing so young and keep doing so, and a lot of people who try to take it up as a thing to read in adulthood struggle with that exact skill set, struggle with gathering the puzzle pieces, keeping track of them even though they don't yet fit together, and then waiting for the fun moments when they fit together. And I think that's a skill that grows out of childhood and out of reading things above your level moving forward from being a kid. So I read Asimov and I read Heinlein and I read Gene Wolfe and I read Delany and I read all sorts of random things that Dad had in the house, and I also read Tolkien and I read Anne McCaffrey and I read just older and newer fantasy books as well that were all in a jumble, and I was never aware which of them were recent, which of them were old, which of them were intended for kids, which of them were intended for adults. They were just all books.

Putting on my historian hat as well as my sci-fi and fantasy hat, I think that because we live in a world where we're saturated with innumerable alternate worlds — other ways that the world could be in the present, could have been in the past, could become in the future, or completely different worlds that have been invented and that are based in some ways on ours but completely different — that's something that is one of the major things that differentiates how modern people think from how pre-modern people think. I spend a lot of time studying the Italian Renaissance, and the Italian Renaissance includes an interesting movement in which a number of intellectuals, inspired by Petrarch and others, want to sit down and say, 'Okay, our world sucks. We want to transform it for the better. How can it be better?' But the only images they have in their mind are images of Earth's real past. And so they say, when we're trying to change the world for the better, what do we want it to resemble? We want it to resemble the best part of the past we know about. And for them, that is idealized histories of the Roman Empire and the movement of neoclassical cult and art that they push a lot of, which is about political hope — that can we create a more stable world like the stability of the Pax Romana. The only things they have to look at are their own known history or their neighbors. And so they can look at how the Florentine Republic works, how the Venetian Republic works, how their notes on the Athenian Republic work — that's basically their lists of republics — how the Swiss Republic works, how the Genoese Republic totally doesn't work at all. And they can look at the monarchies that they have around, and they can look at past eras. But it means they have maybe two dozen different other ways the world could be set up that they believe themselves to be comparing to. And when they try to make their world better, they have two dozen examples of very similar systems to then choose among, and they choose the one they think is the best and then try to make it. But when we look around and say, what are other ways the world could be, we have hundreds of different things to look at — some of them from histories, because we have more histories now than they did then and we studied larger parts of the world, but also innumerable better ones, worse ones, terrible ones, utopian ones, lots and lots of alternate ways the world could be set up. This is a process that begins over the course of the early modern period, and one of the things that's fun is to look, for example, in the 17th century, when in the wake of Thomas More's Utopia and Bacon's New Atlantis and discoveries and the idea of setting up, you know, new towns and new places, you have a burst of 17th-century utopian fiction where lots and lots of people are writing their ideal of how a city or a small country could be set up, most of them based on a specific wacky version of Protestantism, because this is part of the aftermath of the Reformation. But it's neat to watch moving from the 1400s, which I'm used to, they have effectively two dozen examples of how the world could work, and then starting to imagine a few more, and then getting as far as the 17th century where they were imagining dozens, and then bursting into the 20th-century world aisle of science fiction and fantasy where we have hundreds upon hundreds. And when someone says, 'What if things turned into a terrible capitalist oligarchic dictatorship?' we have hundreds of versions of even that to look at the fine grain and compare themselves to. And when we say, 'What if voting works differently?' we have hundreds of examples of how voting could work differently instead of a dozen examples of how voting could work differently. Malka Older, who's a wonderful SF writer, and some others who talk about this often use the phrase 'speculative resistance' — that when you are speculating about and describing different ways things could be, it makes you more willing to demand change and broadens the palette of things that you want to ask for and the things that you want to demand. And I think that having hundreds and hundreds of examples to use for speculative resistance, both of the fail conditions of what could go wrong if X occurs and of the better conditions of what if society were set up this way, makes people in our era demand change in a completely different way from the way people demanded change in the past, and makes us willing and eager to demand things that have never existed but that we can imagine, discuss, combine, and envision, which is just so different from the world of my idealistic and desperate Italian Renaissance people who really want to change, but the only things that they can reach for are a few things that exist in their past and present.

I think we use it in many different ways. We certainly use the warnings. Every time a new technology is on its way, we get a nice burst of science fiction horror stories about how this creates The Blob that eats the world. And those are helpful because it means that implementation is a little bit cautious, right? And I remember a few years ago when a gardening company had made a robot whose job was to go around your garden, find slugs, and then squirt salt on them and kill the slugs. And instantly upon the release of this, there were discussions of, 'Wait a minute, this is the first time we've created a robot whose job it is to hunt and kill living things. Do we want to be extra cautious with that?' And that conversation being so quick and us being so ready to ask that question was important. I think that occasionally the warnings can get so far ahead of the science that you get rejections of technologies more so than they deserve. I've been thinking about this a lot lately with genetically modified foods, because there are a lot of people — or not just genetically modified anything — because we were absolutely correct to warn, we need to be careful messing with life. What if we make a thing that turns into a bad thing? We've seen this happen with invasive species, and movies about making the giant kudzu blob that eats New York are useful warnings, and it means that the government demands a lot of care and looking at GM stuff. But it's also gotten so far that, like right now, we're trying to reintroduce chestnut trees in the US, which were almost completely wiped out by a plague, and we've genetically modified one by one to be resistant to that plague by subbing in a gene that gives them specific resistance to that specific plague so that they can live and exist. And we know very well what that gene does. We've mastered the science that's taken from another plant. And yet when you post online about, 'Isn't this great, chestnut trees?' people are like, 'We don't know what those genes will do. Those chestnut trees will turn into mutants, so they will destroy everything.' So well, if we had not listened to the warning that we need to know what the genes do, then yes. But we listened to that warning. We did. Like we were SF writers, we were correct that we need to know what the DNA does. So we made sure we know what the DNA does, and now we're putting it into a tree which has two options: it's be dead and not exist, or have this slight genetic modification where we really thoroughly looked at what it did. And that's an interesting case where the warning, when interpreted by people who don't understand the science, creates too much anxiety about a thing. Which gets at the — we use these stories to make sure we're having planning in advance, science fiction that lets us have our moral battles about technologies before we implement the technologies. And you know, the first artificially intelligent robot to be given citizenship was given citizenship in 2003, long before there were — or are, because there still aren't any — artificial intelligent robots. This was the ceremonial citizenship given to Astro Boy in Japan, because Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy, as far back as the 1950s, started conversations about will artificial life have rights. And think tanks and people, and especially people in Japan, have been thinking hard about that for a long time and come down on the side of yes, when we have artificial intelligence robots, they will not be unfree ownable property, they will be citizens and they will have — and they will be able to vote. And the government wants to declare this is so, so they issue a birth certificate for Astro Boy on the date that the fictitious robot comes into existence as a pledge of confirming we have fought this moral battle in advance and we are extending these civil rights even though we don't actually have the thing we need to extend the civil rights to yet, but we are ethically prepared. So this is one of the things that science fictional and fantasy worlds help us do. But another thing they do is just broaden the range of what we ask for when we ask for change. When we think about problems like low voter turnout, which is something that happens a lot in the US — has a voter turnout problem, it's a deliberate voter turnout problem, engineered low voter turnout — we can compare it to other countries that have higher voter turnout like Australia, but we can also compare it to fictitious worlds. And in my Terra Ignota system, one of the nine major polities that I explore in detail has a very rapid, we have 48-hour turnover of a polling thing where everybody has an app on their phone who's a citizen of that government and they can vote incredibly fast. And people bring that up as an example of why doesn't voting work like this. And there are various answers to why voting doesn't work like that, but by imagining and describing it, it goes into the palette of what people talk about. So they don't only talk about how voting works in the US versus Japan versus England versus Australia, they also talk about how voting works in the Humanist Hives of Terra Ignota and can ask for things that haven't been implemented.

Because the demands of science fiction writers have been, don't do the thing without thoroughly understanding the science, but we're at the 'we thoroughly understand the science' stage of it.

Yeah, I think both Malka Older's Infomocracy and my Terra Ignota involve imagining a bunch of different plural future systems of government, all of them different from what we have, that also coexist geographically. And both of these are works that are interested in either non-geographic or flexibly geographic systems, because right now we very much have these entrenched blots of color on a map, and you can get a globe, but you can see this is this region and this region's government has to all be the same system. And there is regional variance within nations because there will be policies that affect urban spaces and policies that affect rural spaces, but fundamentally we have one system of government per one geographic unit. And when things change within a geographic unit such that it does or doesn't make sense anymore, the process of changing how the geographic unit to government ratio goes — war, revolution, etc. — are our main systems to this, and it's extremely uncommon for there to be peaceful transitions from 'okay, this has been one country, it's going to be two' or 'this has been two countries, it's going to be one.' Both Malka and I imagine systems in which voting itself will mean, okay, these people have decided they want to be part of this other government right now, they will be part of this other government for an amount of time, and then they'll vote again, and they might be part of the same government as before, which is something that makes more sense in our world of fast transit and diasporic community formation via digital communications. And I think that everybody is aware that if you made a list of the 50 people you communicate with most in life, only a few of them are geographically near you, and others of them are in another city or even in another country, but we're connected to them digitally, and they're friends who live far away, they're family who live far away, they're co-workers who live far away. If we look at why polity equals geography, it evolved in a world when geography dictated who we were connected to, and it made sense that all of the people who share X characteristics therefore will share one government that they might share because they have the same interests, they use the same languages, etc. All more and more of our communities are becoming diasporic, and that's a really important thing to be thinking about when we look at apparatuses of what shared interests people have, what shared needs do people have, how do people help each other, how do people not help each other. COVID was a really vivid instance of this in which suddenly both the 'oh, this is the actual neighborhood I'm in, the people who can deliver me medicine and I can deliver them medicine' or where a pop-up community help thing is geographic, and how different that is from the online communities of people with whom one is communicating by voice and video and text throughout most of one's day. Our governments don't have very much of a way to look at those two types of communities — what is my geographic community or what is my online diasporic community — and have them integrate into government and governments in any significant way. But it's possible to imagine worlds like mine or Malka's that do. And one of the things that imagining a world where everybody chooses the government they're part of based on preference rather than geography is that it makes you think, should our geographic government implement some more things that are specifically based around micro-geography or specifically based around diasporic communities and their needs, etc.? Why are the systems still by legacy assuming that the people you interact with are going to be the people right next to where you are?

Exactly, yeah. I don't — yeah, it does tend to excite a lot of people. I guess it depends, because if you have one world government, then if it has lots of pluralism within it, the way a federated government can, and there can be both of these things. But classic depictions of one world government have generally been — depictions of, when we're looking at the 1970s and 1980s, have generally been depictions of one homogeneous culture swallowing up all of the cultures and getting rid of variation within it. And I think a lot more people are being wary of that as having a legacy in some of the grimmer parts of the last few centuries.

Yeah, one thing that's complex as we think about science fiction, and I think this is something that's been ongoing mostly around and since the year 2000. Science fiction of the science fiction Golden Age through the 1980s, really more through 1985, made a lot of promises about things we would definitely have in the near future. And we have a whole generation or several generations who saw the images of the Jetsons and science fiction book covers, and it was very clear that by the year 2000 we would have robot butlers and moving sidewalks and flying cars and kids in school taking field trips to the moon and Mars. And this was just on the edge and coming indefinite to the degree that when you look at science fiction written before 1980, there are almost no examples in which it's substantially into Earth's future and Earth is still mostly on Earth unless there's been some sort of horrible disaster. It's either we have a new Dark Age and therefore we're still on the Earth because we nuked ourselves into oblivion, or we're way out into the stars having a Star Trek-like multiple solar system giant cool space empire. There's almost nothing that imagines that by the year 2020 we will still be mostly on Earth and mostly dealing with Earth's problems. And when the year 2000 approached and came, there was a kind of a trauma of this broken promise of the city of tomorrow that had been showcased at world's fairs and at Disneyland. There's a couple of books about this. There's Brian Fies's Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, and there's Naoki Urasawa's brilliant manga 20th Century Boys, both of which are about the trauma of growing up expecting the city of tomorrow and then hitting the year 2000 and having it look the way it did, in which lots of new technologies were there, but they didn't look like a science fiction book cover. And right now, as we look at tensions about what the shape of the future is going to be, we're seeing a lot of tension that is specifically about the aesthetics and promises of city of tomorrow. So when people gripe about why are billionaires investing money in goofy-looking cars and bizarre space projects and building weird bunkers in strange places, all of those things are achieving the promises of what science fiction said would be true by the year 2000. And there is a kind of trauma of that and a wish for the output of technology to resemble that, whereas the real output of technology doesn't look like that aesthetically, but is really impressive and has done amazing things that society has wished for ages. Right, we're making these enormous strides with malaria right now, which is something that we should be celebrating up to the skies all over the place, but we're too busy dealing with crises to worry about them. But the R21 malaria vaccine rollout is the biggest life-saving thing all of humanity has ever done in the entirety of human history. A few months ago we celebrated the eradication of malaria in Egypt. They started trying to eradicate malaria in Egypt in 5000 BC, right? And so here is the current leadership getting to make the speech of, 'We've been at it for 7,000 years and we've succeeded, we've eradicated malaria in Egypt.' That is incredible. And when I look again at my — putting on my historian hat — my Renaissance people, they are imagining a world of stability and political lack of tumult. They're often imagining empire. They're imagining something in which there will not be wars between neighbors, in which there will be a strong central authority that will bring peace, because they're desperate for greater peace. Right, this is an area with very low life expectancy, huge amounts of strife and tumult, and the thing they think can be improved is government, because that's the thing that they see people having control of. In many ways we've made less progress in stabilizing government, but we've made tons of progress at the city fire brigade, so that the city doesn't burn down with giant fires every single time there's a lightning storm, because we now have lightning rods and giant fire trucks and all these things so that our cities don't burn down all the time. We've made enormous progress with disease, which is something that Renaissance people didn't even have the apparatus to hope would occur. And I mentioned before Petrarch, who was the most famous of the orators who called for, 'Hey, let's revive the ancient Roman Empire, let's try to regain this golden age of the Pax Romana.' He was a major vocal spokesman for that, and he talks a lot about if we change government this way to be more like Rome, if we change education this way to be more like Rome, if we raise our leaders and movers and shakers and merchant elites on the books that shaped Cicero and antiquity so that they behave more patriotically and more virtuously and put the good of the people before the good of their family or their pride, we can achieve better situations in terms of war. Well, he talks about disease, he has no hope. And there's a very moving passage in one of his books on how to endure the slings of fortune, Remedies Against Fortune Fair and Foul, where he talks about the plague, which he lived through, the main Black Death epidemic as well as returns of it. And after having this long book full of consolation — are you afraid of war? Here's how to have hope in the face of war. Are you afraid of being conquered? Here's how to have hope in the face of conquest. Are you afraid of poverty? Here's how to have hope in the face of poverty. Are you afraid of dying of the disease of an epidemic? And he says, if you're afraid of that, good, you should be. And if the grief and pain you fear are pity for the human condition, then yes, you should pity yourself and your neighbors. And if you feel more terror of dying in an epidemic than other death, just remind yourself that you should not...

Fear more to die with lots of company than you would fear to die alone. That's all he has. That's all he has in terms of hope or lack thereof for disease, just that it will always be as bad as it is, and our only consolation is maybe we and our friend will die together. And to tell him we eradicated malaria in not only all of Italy but also Egypt, and we've got treatments for the plague that you're scared of, so that it's only a very minor rather than a major global disease now, and we've cured all these other things, and life expectancy has gone up from, you know, what life expectancy was in Petrarch's day.

18, 18 years old. This is average life expectancy when Petrarch is alive, 18. We've gotten that up into the 70s or 80s. He would just cry, but it's not within his imagination of what could be, because his imagination of what could be is his past, and he imagines that humans have power over our politics and almost nothing else. We understand that we have power over a lot of things, and we have power over health, and we have power over disease. But a world without malaria doesn't look any more like a science fiction book cover than a world with malaria. It looks the same. It's so much better, and millions of lives are saved, and it's amazing, and we should all be running around in circles so excited we are that that's happening. But it doesn't look like a science fiction book cover, and so it doesn't help treat the trauma of, did the year 2000 come and break its promises? And the answer is it broke some of them, but boy, do we have a lot of other things.

And when we talk about the necessity of having hope right now, bad news gets shared and rehashed a hundred times more than good news. I've been working a little bit in collaboration with a company called Fix the News. I love Fix the News. Everybody should go to Fix the News' website and sign up for their free newsletter, where once a week you'll get in your inbox a roundup of all of that week's good news that got underreported, and it's global news from all over the world, and it covers science and disease and politics and civil rights and environment and technology and climate victories. And there is so much good news. The solar rollout has exceeded what anybody ever imagined over the past couple years by eight times over our highest possible expectation. It looks like we are past peak carbon, and global peak carbon is probably going to be going down, not up, from now on.

We've had huge strides in enshrining civil rights and protections in countries all over the world. There have been major democratic victories. We don't see this because we see them back. And sometimes the science fictional thing is just to remember that a realistic world is a mix of good things and bad things. And sometimes people have this attitude of things are bad, and to talk about the things that are good is somehow negative or destructive or disingenuous or trying to hide from the grim reality by talking about these fake small good victories when the real thing are bad. There's nothing fake or small about eradicating malaria, and there's nothing fake or small about exceeding eight times over our highest hopes for how quickly the green power transition would go. What's unrealistic is to say all news must be bad, because that is what lets you despair, and despair is really easy. Despair is really emotionally satisfying, because in the state of despair you don't have to do anything. We're already doomed. Nothing that we can do matters, so you can sit back and do what you want to, and you don't have any responsibility. The emotionally difficult thing is accepting the 50/50 mix of here is terrible news and here is really good news, and here are these victories that we actually had because we worked hard and it worked, because if you admit that, then you have an obligation to work hard.

There was a really great study that Fix the News reported a few months ago. It was a mega study of 350, I think it was, some number in the 300s, conservation efforts over the past 30 years that have been conservation efforts focused on one species, save the tiger, right? And any conservation effort like that usually actually saves a bunch of species because they're interrelated and their ecosystem is being protected for the name of the charismatic species in the middle. But this was just looking at, okay, these are 300-something efforts to save species. How well did they do? And the answer is two-thirds of them succeeded, and two-thirds of those species are now way healthier, way more numerous, fine, in good shape, on track to be saved, and are okay. And one-third of them didn't, and those species are still struggling, or in a few cases they became extinct. That is good news, but it's really hard good news to accept, because it means, yes, we have an obligation to work this hard. Yes, we have an obligation to work on these things. Yes, we can succeed. We should pour our lives and labors into these projects. They do bear fruit two-thirds of the time. One-third of the time they'll fail, and all of the efforts that we poured in will happen to have rolled badly and be the ones that don't succeed. And that is a very emotionally difficult thing to face, because it means accepting that your job is to work really hard and try, and you might fail, but we have to do it, because if nobody does it, then none of the species are saved. If we do it, then two-thirds of the species are saved. And this is exactly how we need to think about human efforts as well, right? And we push for a political change, and sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we fail, and therefore we have an obligation to keep pushing and succeeding. And we especially have an obligation to remind each other of the successes that happen and the good legislation that passes and the other stuff, because if we don't, we create the artificial image of a world of only bad news, in which we therefore have the ethical option to give up and not try. People love going straight from climate denial to climate despair, because in both of them you don't have to do anything. It's admitting that actually we're doing a pretty good job, and the hard work we're doing does matter. That is the difficult thing to accept.