Interview with Ada Palmer

[mrissa]

Today I am hosting an interview with Ada Palmer, the latest stop on her blog tour for her new book Too Like the Lightning. I’ve attempted to avoid spoilers in both interview questions and review, although both refer to the contents; you can read my thoughts on the book here.

1) Are you in some sense a dual-vocateur, or is only one of writing and

Comments

[sartorias]

That was fascinating! Thank you so much.

I'd never thought of trying to place myself in a Hive. Hmm... Yet when I think about it, the leap is to Cousins.

[rushthatspeaks]

Good interview.

The Hives are one of the few fictional classification systems I've ever run into in which I simply could not find an obvious self-classification-- I might have wanted or tried to join any of several of them as a teenager, but would have left literally any of those later in life. Eventually I decided on either graylaw or blacklaw Hiveless, but I'd really need to know a lot more about their legal system to figure out which one.

Also, not a Utopian. Really, really not.

[mrissa]

That's one of the places where I am not very nerd-typical: I will say, "Nerds love taxonomies," because I recognize the behavior in almost everyone I know and like, but other than the Dragaeran houses*, I tend not to self-classify like that. I just know that others do, and the behavior fascinates me. I probably would pick a Hive as the one that approximated best because I am comfortable with approximation, but there's a reason my reaction to most online personality tests that classify people in this fashion is, "I'm a tree." What Harry Potter house are you? What Myers-Briggs are you? What gemstone are you? I'm a tree.

*Tiassa. Obv.

[landofnowhere]

I certainly think that the Utopians are the coolest Hive, but I'm not sure I'd fit in there -- I'm not sure I'm sufficiently future-oriented. (But I'm not sure I have a good enough sense of them yet to know?)

I'm impressed at how the book made the Humanists both appealing (the boots!) and disturbing (the weird cult-of-personality stuff, also, on second thought, the bit about boots made from hides of animals killed by the wearers, though I'd want one of the Utopian-designed ones anyway) to me.

I also imagine that I'd be enough different if I lived in a bash' that it's hard for me to tell what choice I'd make

[ashnistrike]

First choice Cousins, no question. My methods might be a Utopian, but my ends are Cousinish, plus I like their form of government. And I don't think I could carry out my methods very well wearing a visor.

[whswhs]

Now that I've read this