Hello! Ada Palmer AMA "Perhaps the Stars" Terra Ignota series complete at last waaaaah!!!

Good morning, 4/Fantasy!

This is Ada Palmer - author of Terra Ignota, also musician/composer of Viking-themed a cappella music, also anime/manga specialist, also historian of the Renaissance, radical thought, censorship, atheism & all that jazz, except it's not jazz yet in my period so we could say all that radical polyphonic a cappella that kids those days were listening to and making their elders frown and shake their heads (seriously there was a phase when a moral panic was afraid that Renaissance polyphony was ruining kids these days!)

It's still hard to believe it but "Terra Ignota" is complete at last with the whopping finale "Perhaps the Stars!" It's so fat I keep just picking it up to cuddle it and see how fat it is. (Secretly it's fatter than it looks - book 4 is fully 2x the length of even the longest of the other three, but looks not quite so big because they gave it smaller print and smaller margins!) But yes it feels like my whole universe has had a tectonic shift now that the series is complete! It's also a fun little detail that I finished writing Perhaps the Stars in October 2019, well before COVID, but many things in it resonate with our COVID experience and lots of people are shocked to hear it was written before not after. It really is just that I was thinking about universals of how crisis affects us, I wasn't expecting a real one!

So anyway, can't wait to talk with everyone in this great community again, and please ask me anything! I'll answer intermittently throughout the whole day, so keep them coming. But above all PLEASE PLEASE DO USE SPOILER TAGS FOR PERHAPS THE STARS QUESTIONS!! It hasn't been out long and supply chain things mean some bookshops don't have it yet.