Ada Palmer

American historian and science fiction author — University of Chicago professor of Renaissance history — author of the Terra Ignota series (SF starting with Too Like the Lightning) — expert on the history of censorship, heresy, and early modern thought.

Creates the most intellectually serious recent science fiction world-building in the Enlightenment tradition — Terra Ignota imagines a 25th-century world organized around Enlightenment principles and then subjects them to stress tests, informed by Palmer's scholarly knowledge of how those ideas actually developed historically.