Ada Palmer is an American historian and writer and winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her first novelToo Like the Lightning was published in May 2016. The work has been well received by critics and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Following a stint at Texas A&M University, Palmer began teaching at the University of Chicago. As a scholar, Palmer researches and teaches about the Renaissance period. She teaches a class on the Italian Renaissance wherein students enact the 1492 papal election, complete with secret meetings, betrayals, and a final vote conducted in full costume. In an interview, Palmer discussed her experience with the class, suggesting that students have a lot of favorable biases about this period despite its darker underside. Palmer co-authored The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy in the Renaissance: A Brief Guide with James Hankins in 2008. Her own first book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014. Palmer holds that the Lucretius poem "De rerum natura", rediscovered in the Renaissance, could be the first document offering a profane worldview; that is, the possibility to describe how the universe works without any divine influence. This theory has implications for the development of political science as well as other secular worldviews. Palmer and Hankins also argue that Lucretius' ideas directly influenced Niccolò Machiavelli and utilitarianism, because of the ways in which his theories helped them create an ethics working per se, without any external, godly influence.
Fictional work
''Terra Ignota''
Palmer's first novel Too Like the Lightning, the first of the Terra Ignota series, was published in 2016, and was a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Awards. It has been described as a rational adjacent book, a work influenced both by science-fiction and historical genres, a fact the author has confirmed. The novel won the 2017 Compton Crook Award for the best first novel in the genre published during the previous year. The series currently has three novels, with a fourth and final installment planned for publication in the first half of 2021.
