Science fiction often has asked contemporary questions of an imagined future. In the four-volume Terra Ignota novel series, author Ada Palmer has reflected this tradition back upon itself, exploring the questions the brilliant world of 2454 might ask when faced with its own unknowable future. After citizenship and religion, family and language, law and freedom have been utterly reformed over half a century of war and three centuries of peace, where do the denizens of a near-Utopia turn for answers when their world order faces upheaval? A notorious criminal genius is the historian of the world’s remaking; a mysterious spiritual counselor seeks truth in a world that has atomized religion; carnality and high politics join to preserve the old order as a rumored god, an omnipotent child, a celebrity assassin and a living myth struggle to shape the future as a rediscovered orator calls for inevitable war.