Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy

From two of the most acclaimed writers in the field today, a groundbreaking look at how science fiction and fantasy writing—and reading!—work.

Jo Walton and Ada Palmer are two of the most innovative and insightful writers to emerge in the science fiction and fantasy genres in this century. As writers of fiction they’ve each won multiple awards. As commenters on science fiction and fantasy in print and in visual media, they’ve both sparked new conversations that expanded our imaginations and understanding of how science fiction and fantasy work, and what more it could be doing.

Now, in Trace Elements, Walton and Palmer have come together to write a book-length and supremely entertaining look at modern science fiction and fantasy, at how our genre is written and how it is read, that will join nonfiction works like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night, Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud on the short shelf of titles essential to all readers of our genre.

Subjects covered include the nature of genre itself, the history of science fiction publishing, the implicit contract between author and reader, the ways science fiction and fantasy disguise themselves as one another, what SF&F can learn from outside influences ranging from Shakespeare to Diderot to anime, the role of complicity in reading, the need to expand our “sphere of empathy”, and finally the need for optimism, the importance of rejecting “purity” culture, and the fact that the human story for centuries to come will be composed of hard work.