Perhaps the Stars: Terra Ignota

Too Like the Lightning was shortlisted for a 2017 Hugo Best SF novel, and Ada Palmer won the John W. Campbell Award in 2017.

Ada Palmer is an author, historian and composer. She did her PhD at Harvard, teaches History at the University of Chicago, blogs at ExUrbe.com, composes close harmony folk music and performs with the a capella group Sassafrass.

To smooth our vision of the impact of technology on our society, I can't suggest a better guide than the Ada Palmer series of Renaissance historians and science fiction writers
PRAISE FOR ADA PALMER: 'More intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall' Cory Doctorow. 'Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent' Ken Liu. 'The kind of science fiction that makes me excited all over again about what science fiction can do' Jo Walton. 'Incredibly ambitious and groundbreaking... Palmer writes gloriously lush prose stuffed with asides, allusions and nods to the reader' Guardian. 'Part novel, part series of nested essays, part project, The Will to Battle is much greater than the whole; an exercise in both narrative flexibility and philosophy... It's a powerful expression of what the genre can do'