Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy
An essay collection by Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, coming from Tor March 24th 2026
Publisher’s description: “From two of the most acclaimed writers in the field today, a groundbreaking look at how SF and fantasy writing—and reading!—work.
Jo Walton and Ada Palmer are two of the most innovative and insightful writers to emerge in the SF and fantasy genres in this century. As writers of fiction they’ve each won multiple awards. As commenters on SF and fantasy in print and in visual media, they’ve both sparked new conversations that expanded our imaginations and understanding of how SF 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.”
Our description: Long ago, in the 1920s, a conversation started in the letter columns of pulp science fiction magazines. Fans began debating what this stuff was, what it’s doing, how it’s different from other genres, why we like it so much, what we should call it, and whether robots could actually juggle. This conversation continues, and here Jo Walton and Ada Palmer both engage with it and trace elements of it across time. These essays, written together and separately, and brought together here for the first time, consider (among other things) genre, using history in fiction, writing and disability, publication, pacing, protocols, the history of science fiction publishing, Delany, Le Guin, Yu-gi-oh, Diderot, why science fiction and fantasy might be disguised as each other, and what reading is for, no, really. As well as writing award-winning science fiction and fantasy, Ada Palmer is an intellectual historian and Jo Walton has read a lot of books. They bring this experience together in this collection of essays that are erudite, thought provoking, and also a lot of fun.
