I’ve talked, particularly in the heady and weird days of late 2023 and 2024, about the “project” of science fiction and fantasy. I’ve talked about the importance of that conversation in that project, using science fiction and fantasy as a lens to investigate itself and the world. And, it should be hastened to say, the problems when that lens is dimmed or diminished. Particularly when Tibet is mistaken for Nepal. Or one can look at Gary K. Wolfe’s idea of the “science fiction conversation”, a long-standing science fiction project that stretches back to the dawn of science fiction and continues today. SFF is a genre that interrogates itself in order to understand itself.
In Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ada Palmer and Jo Walton gather together previously written and a significant new set of essays on the selfsame project of the science fiction conversation. The project of science fiction and fantasy gives Jo Walton and Ada Palmer a wide and large remit for their collection of essays and pieces.
So what’s here? Plenty!
The collection opens up with a brand-new essay, “Integral to the Plot: The Author-reader contract”. Here, Palmer and Walton together discuss the unspoken contract between authors and readers: the set of expectations that various genres and subgenres make with a reader. Palmer and Walton tease out the differences between the contract and expectations, and how the latter can be subverted, but the former does not work so when it is.
Like many of the pieces in this book, “Integral to the Plot” is amazingly literate and diverse in pulling together ideas and references. This one, for example, goes to the 18th century Diderot book Jacques the Fatalist and his Master as a epitome of the author-reader contract. In classic fashion, and in a theme of this entire book and all of its essays, the essay shows how Diderot’s work itself, in deconstructing those expectations, is yet at the same time in conversation with Voltaire’s Candide and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. And then it warps forward to show how the author-reader contract works in John M. Ford’s The Final Reflection, which is a delightful Star Trek novel, and yet so much more at the same time.
Further essays continue these conversations, discussing Imprint (ie, Big Five) science fiction, a discussion of genre itself, and much more. Thanks to it being full of essays by each of them separately and some of them together, there is a wide range of topics that they cover. There is some mixing here and there, since many of the essays are previously collected, and thus some overlap. There is less overlap and cross connections between the essays than you might think, but there is enough to help form the web of the collection.
I learned a lot in the process of reading this book. There is a lovely essay on the history of science fiction publishing that goes all the way back to the history of printing and publishing and how the rivalry between Catholic and Protestant Europe helped shape that. There is an essay on the history of Manga and Anime that completely opened my eyes on forms that I have very little experience with, but now I understand at the 10,000-foot level as what they are trying to do, what they are and why they developed the way that they did.
And my reading list exploded thanks to this book. It’s not so much that they recommend particular books, but Walton and Palmer do what I like to do in my own genre work, and amp it up to 11 and bring in references, ideas, tangents and parallels. It’s not just science fiction and fantasy, as we see above with Diderot. I have learned that for all that I understand and enthuse and contribute to the science fiction conversation, in some ways, compared to these two worthy authors, I am only an egg.¹
But they aren’t being exclusionary, gatekeeping or telling you, the reader, that you are callow and unworthy of that conversation. This is a training manual, in some ways, through the essays, on the science fiction project and to help hook you into it better and to show you how enthusiastically fun it can be to take part in it and make your own insights, observations and connections. There are some tips and tricks and ideas immersed into this book to help make you a more nuanced reader. Like, for example, their exercise on predicting the beats in a genre novel can help you better understand when the genre contract is being fulfilled, when expectations are being met, subverted and so on.
I think this volume really targets that sort of reader, and perhaps, readers who want to be able to critically understand and engage with their subject matter. Fan Writers and reviewers are thin on the ground these days; in a world where blogs are hard to find and everything seems to be microblogging and quick interactions, this book is a manual for learning how to engage with genre books better, so that you, too, can and will be part of the genre conversation. (At one point, emphasizing the point, Walton and Palmer specifically say they are looking forward to extending the genre conversation with *you*). So again, Walton and Palmer are being exceedingly and openly welcoming, hoping to add the reader of the volume to their genre conversations and ideas.
And, in a bit of surprise, interspersed here and there throughout the essays and pieces are a few pieces of poetry both by Jo Walton and Ada Palmer. These serve both as palate cleaners between some of the pieces and also extending the genre conversation in a different form. “By Their Spaceships Ye Shall Know Them” is in memoriam of Arthur C Clarke. “Somebody Will”, which I have heard Palmer perform with Sassafras, is a paean to the science and science fiction project, that the new science fiction future is there…but it will be built, and must be built, piece by piece. It’s an incredibly optimistic and forward-thinking poem in a time and world where forces seem to want to halt or reverse progress on all fronts. It is the last piece in the volume and in the tradition of wanting a strong anchor to round out the collection, Palmer’s poem is an excellent way to close the volume.
Trace Elements as a collection, thus, shows off the nonfiction sides of Walton’s and Palmer’s contributions to genre, and in itself, is now part of the genre conversation that it celebrates within the essays and pieces in the volume. And it serves as a beacon for those who want to join the great Science Fiction Project, too.
Walton, Jo and Palmer, Ada, Trace Elements (Tor Books, 2026)
¹There, a not so obscure genre reference for you. Or maybe these days it is getting more obscure.
