And Loki in His Prison
Ada Palmer’s new Norse Mythology novel series debuts June 2027 from Tor Books.
In Greenland, a settlement on the edge of starvation despairs of Christ and makes sacrifice to the old gods.
Ongoing Podcasts!
2026 brings a burst of podcasting. Beforecast is happening weekly, Ex Urbe and A Short History of Saving The World are happening monthly.
Beforecast
With historian Ada Palmer · Season One: The Real Machiavelli. A podcast about the past that explains the present.
A Short History of Saving The World
Angus Hervey and historian Ada Palmer explore the moments humanity faced destruction – and the ideas, technologies and unlikely people that helped pull us through. Part conversation, part historical detective work, the series reveals history not as a timeline of collapse, but as an ongoing story of human ingenuity, adaptation, and resilience.
Ex Urbe Ad Astra
Teaming up with my good friend and fellow author & history-lover Jo Walton, we talk with fellow writers, historians, researchers, editors, & other friends about the craft of writing, history, food, gelato, and other topics, with some episodes of just me and Jo having the kinds of intense writing or history discussions we enjoy.
Recent Publication
Trace Elements
Long ago, in the 1920s, a conversation started in the letter columns of pulp science fiction magazines. Fans began debating what this stuff was, what it’s doing, how it’s different from other genres, why we like it so much, what we should call it, and whether robots could actually juggle. This conversation continues, and in Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Jo Walton and Ada Palmer both engage with it and trace elements of it across time.
Censorship & Information Control In Information Revolutions
An exhibition and video series at The University of Chicago
Why do people censor? For ambition? Religion? Profit? Power? Fear? This global history of attempts to control or silence information, from antiquity’s earliest written records to our new digital world, examines how censorship has worked, thrived, or failed in different times and places, and shows how real censorship movements tend to be very different from the centralized, methodical, top-down censorship depicted in Orwell’s 1984, which so dominates how we imagine censorship today. From indexes of forbidden books, to manuscripts with passages inked out by Church Inquisitors, to comics and pornography, to self-censorship and the subtle censorship of manipulating translations or teaching biased histories, the banned and challenged materials in this exhibit will challenge you to answer: how do you define what is and isn’t censorship?
Sections of the Project:
- Eight public Dialogues among the participants, October 5 through November 20, 2018.
- Videos of the public dialogues, available streaming online.
- Museum Exhibit “History of Censorship and Information Control from the Inquisition to the Internet” in the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Library, open September 17 through December 14, 2018.
- A printed catalog of the exhibit, and further publications to come.
Music in Progress
My second Kickstarter campaign has funded two new CDs. The first CD “Stories & Stone” is now complete, and contains variant recordings of my Norse Myth music, to accompany the “Sundown Whispers of Ragnarok” Cast Recording. Thanks to a stretch goal, a second CD “Friend in the Dark” is now in progress, the first album with myself and my vocal partner Lauren Schiller performing as the duo “Sassafrass: Trickster & King.” The album is up for digital pre-order, which gives you eight finished tracks now and a complete download as soon as the CD is released. Check out the Kickstarter Campaign.
