Alyx Dellamonica: The Nature of a Pirate

Alyx Dellamonica joined us to talk about her book, The Nature of a Pirate, which came out last December. It's the third book of her Stormwrack portal fantasy trilogy. Part of it takes place in San Francisco, and part in the world of Stormwrack. The main characters are trying to find out whether Stormwrack is an alternate Earth, a future Earth, or another dimension. They believe there will be a scientific explanation, though the character Bran will have to study to find out more. Alyx told us she sometimes pitches the series as "Narnia for environmentalists." The moon of Stormwrack seems identical to ours, but so much land is missing from Earth (most of Asia, for example!). The main character, Sophie, can't figure out where the Himalayas have gone. Alyx told us there is a faint thread of plausibility in the Stormwrack scenario that you can learn by reading the trilogy...

In Stormwrack, curiosity is considered a cultural flaw or defect. Alyx says we forget that the scientific method isn't a "cultural gimme." Some cultures believe that if God gave you something, it's impudent to ask questions about it. Stormwrack has 250 island nations, each with proprietary spells suited to its particular climate, trade, and war. You don't pry, so you don't question others' practices. Interestingly, and problematically within the story world, "others' practices" includes chattel slavery.

A world with 250 nations seems very large and potentially very involving in terms of worldbuilding! Alyx explained that she figured out before writing the books which nations would be featured in each book. She also explored using shorter stories, such as "Losing Heart Among the Tall," which features Gale and Garland parrish, and appeared at Tor.com. She either uses research to construct the nations and their cultures or imaginative explanation from her own personal experience. She says she based the Verdanii on her own experience of the prairie, and grain farmers, growing up. The nation of Erinth is medieval Florentine, with a volcano much like Vesuvius that is contained by magic. Alyx estimates that about 30 nations are mentioned, and seven or eight get play in the books. She says she was disappointed not to be able to go to Verdanii in the books.

She says, "I love worldbuilding." [No wonder I loved having her on the show!]

Alyx told us that she has spent time in San Francisco with a little locus of family, and she has also taken tours to Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland, which helped with her research for those regions.

We spoke a bit about language use in Stormwrack. She says the main idea is that the people of Stormwrack speak many languages, but all share "Fleet Standard" which ends up being used in translation in the books. The main character, Sophie, gets magically taught how to speak Fleet, but she must then learn to read and write. She's often a better speaker of Fleet than the locals, for whom Fleet is a second language (since their first is the main language of their island nation). People in Stormwrack "weaponize" their speaking of their native tongues for the purposes of keeping secrets.

The language of Sylvanna had a big influence of Fleet. There's an Italian-like language, and a Russian-like language. The pirate nations draw a bit from French. Alyx says she was very glad to have a bilingual copy-editor for a previous book. We remarked that dictionaries are the last places where you would expect to find official notice of ongoing language change, and are naturally very conservative.

The ships of Stormwrack are biological - one very intriguing aspect of the world! I asked about the magic system, and Alyx told us that magic takes ingredients from local microclimates. People write spells on parchment, turtle shell, or other localized items. The spells are like works of art and must be perfectly worded and lettered, with ink, quills, or other tools. Each unique magical artifact is like a contract with reality. The letters will glow and magic will happen. For example, in Erinth, there is a statue made of volcanic rock with a spell written on it, and it is that artifact which holds back the volcano. The physical destruction of the magical artifact will break the spell.

People in Stormwrack preserve the environment around them to maximize spell opportunities. There are some jurisdiction questions between islands. Invasive species can also be a problem.

Sophie is a diver and videographer in our world, but she is the only scuba diver on Stormwrack, and she is very bothered by this because you are not supposed to dive alone.

We wound back again to the question of the ships. The idea of unique magical spell artifacts is relevant here because the vessels are magical, and have biological characteristics. The Verdanii use whale-based ships, which are mammal on the bottom and forest on top. There is also a type of immolator ship which is designed to burn other ships. Temperance is the name of a big battle ship, which has a spell that allows it to sink any ship if they know its true name. Generic things can't be enchanted; they must be unique.

We spoke briefly about magic systems. Although they generally need restrictions, Alyx told us that she can't stand restrictions on magic that seem artificial. That's why in Indigo Springs she wrote about magic that was almost limitless, but would destroy Earth if used to its full extent.

In Stormwrack, names are very important. It is possible for people to secretly change names.

Alyx told us that there is no political correctness in Stormwrack. There is lots of racism, and no respect for disability culture. Mermaids will woo people in wheelchairs to become mermaids because they believe the person would better off as a mermaid.

The magic of Stormwrack does alter people. If you have an ability created by magic, but you are not visibly altered by it, you are "enhanced." If you have become a mermaid or have any of a particular set of visual and functional alterations, you are a "transform." If you have undergone extreme changes in appearance, you are considered an "oddity."

At the beginning of The Nature of a Pirate, a creature is used to sink a ship. I asked about this. The creature is something of a doppelganger, called a "fright." The skill of fright-making was banned on Stormwrack. Usually the frights are human-like, but sometimes they are animal. The people of Stormwrack thought they had burned all the spells and materials that would allow fright-making, but someone has resumed doing it. Frights are less like transforms or even oddities, and are more like automatons or zombies.

We spoke a bit about racial distinctions on Stormwrack. Alyx told us that skin colors, epicanthic folds and other physical features we associate with racial distinctions are mixed up so that they don't fit our own models. Verdanii have copper skin, straight dark hair, and dark eyes. Her idea was that they had an aboriginal population which was colonized. Stormwrack has a history of constant raiding, so there has been a lot of genetic mixing.

Morgan asked Alyx to give us more details on spells. The spells need to be very controlled rather than natural. Alyx described them as "artisanal." People who do magic are those who are meticulous and have beautiful handwriting. Alyx told us about a quilt she inherited which had perfect stitching (and then got ripped by her kittens, aigh!). Spells in Stormwrack can also be recycled. Because Sophie was enchanted to speak Fleet, her tongue could later be used as a translator. If someone has teeth enchanted to create light, their skull could be used as a lantern. In some sense, this creates a black market for enchanted body parts.

Alyx told us that Fleet, the language, was created to combat pirates. Stormwrack has had 100 years of peace, but it is breaking down due to piracy, population growth and resource pressures.

This is a fascinating world worth exploring. The novels in the series are:

1. Child of a Hidden Sea
2. A Daughter of No Nation
3. The Nature of a Pirate

Thank you so much for joining us, Alyx! Next week, April 19th at 10am Pacific, we'll be discussing Working Animals, and the following week, April 26th at 10am Pacific, guest author Megan O'Keefe will join us to talk about her Scorched Continent trilogy. I hope you can all attend.

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Maurice Broaddus and The Voices of Martyrs

It was a real pleasure to have Maurice back on the show! This time we were discussing his new short story collection, which was released a couple of months ago (now) through Rosarium, and features short stories he wrote between 2006 and 2014. He said he hadn't considered putting a collection together until someone suggested it a few years ago. Maurice told me he doesn't think about writing in genre, just writes the piece first and figures it out later. Because some of the early stories in the collection deal unflinchingly with slavery, they were sold as horror pieces. When he was asked to put together a collection, he tried to figure out if there was a theme he could draw on because he's written so much in so many different genres, but he arrived at "considering the African-American diaspora through the lens of history, past, present, and future."

Maurice tells us he loves worldbuilding. He likes to build a world and then go back and revisit it. The first story in the collection, Warrior of the Sunrise, takes place in ancient Africa. He also has stories set in a science fiction world of the future. He really likes returning to a character he loves.

The story "Rite of Passage" is told from the perspective of a white captain on a slave ship, and features some really fascinating self-justification by the captain about why, even though he's obviously in the business, he's not as bad as other members of his crew. The prose is really historical and wonderful, and the captain's language contrasts in really interesting ways with the speech patterns of his first mate, Hawkins, who is much more honest about the business that they are in. One of the other stories has a soldier as a lead character, and another has a lady working on a plantation.

I asked Maurice how he developed the historical voices he uses in these tales, and he said "I read a lot of collected stories of emancipated slaves in that era." He wanted to take in as much of the language as possible so he could learn how to use it in the way they would, to reflect their thoughts.

The story "Family Business" takes place in Jamaica, and language use is very interesting there. Maurice said he was paying attention to his family to learn the language style, where people code-switch (change language or language style) depending on who is in the room. Maurice explained that his mother came from Jamaica, Maurice himself grew up in London, and his siblings grew up in America. "I'd just put a recorder in the middle of the dinner table," he says. Apparently, everyone would be self-conscious for about five minutes but then start speaking normally. Listening to the recordings gave him the opportunity to consider slang, how each person speaks, and how their use of language changes. He said he also recorded his son's slumber party once, and it was great to hear their use of slang, what topics they discussed, and what boys think about. He later asked the boys what they had talked about, and found they didn't remember everything accurately. "They had no idea they'd spent a half an hour discussing farts."

The key is talking with people, capturing conversations, studying rhythm and word choice.

I had to ask Maurice about the story that very obviously references Parliament Funkadelic. He said that "The Electric Spanking of the War Babies" was originally published in the Glitter and Mayhem collection that featured disco and roller-skating. He explained that he co-wrote it with Kyle Johnson after an evening discussing ideas over gummi bear flavored vodka while playing Parliament Funkadelic.

I also asked him about the universe featured in Pimp My Airship. Maurice has written a number of stories in that setting, including Buffalo Soldier, which is at Tor.com and features the origin of the Starchild (a clone of Haile Selassie) and his guardian. We got to see some book covers (so check out the video if you're curious). Desmond takes the child so that he can live his own life and not be a pawn of politicians, but is being pursued. The child represents technology, but they head into the Nation-state of Texas and territories on the West coast. In this world, the United States uses steampunk technology, but Jamaica and the First Nations have explored technology that is not steampunk.

The origin of the Pimp My Airship universe was Twitter, where Maurice tweeted as a joke that he was going to write a Steampunk story with all black characters and call it "Pimp My Airship," and suddenly editors were very interested! The question he had reading Steampunk was "Where are all the Black people?" A lot of Steampunk erases them.

When he wrote the story "Steppin Razor" he was asking "Where does Jamaica fit in all this?" In this universe, America lost the Revolutionary War and is still a British colony. In this universe, Jamaica kept all its resources, as did the First Nations, so they have their own technology. Steampunk tech is not the "height" of technology.

When Maurice looks at where he stands in a particular genre, he wants to write stories that he could have grown up reading. Tonya suggested he write a story about Nanny and the Maroons, and Maurice said in fact that he was going to write a tale of young Nanny for the Hidden Youth anthology, but the idea hasn't become a completed story yet. When he studied Nanny's character for "Steppin' Razor" he discovered there was a lot there.

I asked Maurice if the process of putting together the collection influenced his overall thoughts about his writing and his career. He told me that he thinks deeply about what he is doing with his stories. When he has a new job in the community, he gets to hear new stories. He mentioned that the results of the election have been weighing heavily on him as he considers what they means for him as a black man in America, for his community, and ofr him as an artist. He strives to control the narrative of his own community, and thinks a lot about what that should look at. He says he's politicizing his art. His latest stories take place in the same community in Indianapolis with magical realism. He's developing interconnected short stories within the community, considering the diversity of what it means to be Black. He's also looking at how Africa is portrayed and trying to get away from the dominant image of starving kids, controlling the narrative to show a variety of voices. Eventually, he says, there will be another collection of stories all in this one community. He also has enough stories he could do a Steampunk collection.

Thank you so much for being there, Maurice! I hope to talk to you again about more of your work. Thanks also to everyone who attended, and let's all look out for the novella Buffalo Soldier, coming out from Tor.

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Pronouns

Pronouns are little words - just little pieces of grammar used to refer back to some preceding referent in conversation or in text. But they are super, super important and they have a lot of possible implications. We're of course familiar with them from contexts like this:

The girl walked into the room. She...

In this case, she is referring back to the noun phrase "the girl." If you don't start out with a noun phrase referent, but a bare pronoun, then the reader is forced to construct an implied referent based on what they know via the pronoun. This can be an important part of constructing point of view, for example.

The pronouns I and we are referred to as "first person" pronouns, singular and plural respectively. In English, first person pronouns are non-gendered. However, this is not true in all languages. Japanese uses the pronoun "boku" exclusively for first person males, for example. Japanese pronouns carry a lot of information, and there are a lot of them, but perhaps the most interesting thing about Japanese pronouns is that people hardly ever use them. "Pro-drop" languages allow pronouns to be dropped from the front of a sentence when their reference can be derived from context. Japanese and Spanish can pro-drop, but French and English can't. That said, I'll note that recent changes in English due to the presence of internet icons have made pronoun-dropping a lot more common.

Since I and you in English are non-gendered, but third person pronouns are, the result is that you  need to be aware of other people's genders before your own.

If you are working in a fictional setting and you want to play around with the pronouns, go for it, but be aware that there are pitfalls. The simplest problem you can run into (a grammatical rather than a cultural one) is to cause ambiguity without meaning to. This can happen if you collapse singulars and plurals into each other, or if you choose to collapse other distinctions. However, we already have to work against ambiguities that occur when we have two people of the same gender in the same scene and need to draw distinctions between them, so this problem is not insurmountable. Ann Leckie managed to keep all-"she" characters disambiguated through three books!

Charlie Jane Anders' story "Love Might Be Too Strong a Word" does some fascinating things with pronouns. The society has castes, and each caste is distinguished by different sexual aspects, and each uses a separate pronoun system. How does she keep the pronoun systems from becoming confusing? Basically, she uses pronouns that have some very basic-level similarities to our pronoun system, altering the beginnings of the pronouns but keeping "m" as the final letter in a third-person object pronoun, and "r" as the final letter in a third-person possessive pronoun, for example.

Much as pronouns are "small words," they are also extremely important and extremely personal. Misgendering, or calling someone by the wrong gender pronouns, is very bad. Why? Because in our societies, gender is so very very important to identity and to social consequences for behavior. Because gender is in the third person pronouns rather than the first (in English), you end up having to rely on other people to cooperate with your sense of self when they talk about you.

Ann Leckie's Ancillary books are often cited as groundbreaking for their use of pronouns, because she creates a society where the main language does not distinguish gender in its pronouns. More than that, the English pronoun she chooses to use as a translation for that alien-language pronoun is "she." Note: She doesn't erase all socially charged pronoun distinctions, because ancillaries (human bodies connected to an artificial intelligence) are referred to as "it," or as non-people. Okay, so what is so great and groundbreaking about this? In English, if we are referring to a group of people whose genders are non-specified, we use the word "he." "He" is considered the unmarked option (standard, default). This is likely one reason why we tend to imagine oh-so-many males in fictional contexts. By choosing to use "she" instead, the marked option, Ann is deliberately dislodging us from our standard expectations. Readers know that not everyone must be female, but now that everyone is described as such, they have to think through gender more carefully, and Ann confounds us even further by having descriptions of appearance and clothing that don't conform to our gender expectations either.

We spoke briefly about using the pronoun "one." It sounds archaic, but is non-gendered and can be useful depending on what effect you are looking for. It always reminds me of the Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon, because the translators have typically gotten around the pro-drop tendencies of Japanese by translating Sei Shonagon's diary using "one" wherever the reference is generalized.

This was an involved conversation with a lot of details that don't lend themselves very well to written report, so if you are curious I'd encourage you to check out the video. We came to the end of the discussion feeling that we should return to the topic of pronouns to cover aspects of point of view in writing fiction.

This week, Dive into Worldbuilding meets on Wednesday (tomorrow) 3/29/17 to talk about Mental Illness. I hope you can join us!

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Gardens

Gardens have a lot of extra meaning. They are often used as metaphors, or vehicles for a philosophical world view. They are not just setting. They also have a lot of cultural meaning, as with the grow your own food movement and the victory gardens of the World Wars.

Even decorative gardens come in all kinds of styles. The English garden reflects the value of pastoral life. Japanese gardens try to look utterly like nature but rely on extreme control for the maintenance of this appearance. French formal gardens have yet a different style. Gardens reflect culture, money, and the relationship of people to nature. There are also water gardens, greenhouses, and special gardens like the Orangerie in France, which was designed with walls to provide frost protection for citrus trees.

Gardens say a lot about class. Do you have a gardener? Or do you garden yourself? What kind of things do you grow? Are those things for show, for eating, for sale? Are they for medicine, as with the herb gardens possessed by monasteries and convents? Some specialized gardens are for cacti, or for poisonous plants. Morgan has written a story in which a main character identifies the doctor's house in the village by noticing the herb garden outside.

What about lawns? What makes them so appealing? People use them for sports. They are incredibly popular but also very water-intensive, and in California's recent drought many people moved toward xeriscaping, or intentionally designing a garden for very low water.

The location of a garden, and the climate in which it is being maintained, influence the content of the garden. For foreign plants, special steps may need to be taken. Foreign plants may become invasive because they don't fit into the local ecosystem, as with bamboo and kudzu - but they also tend not to have the same pests that a native plant would.

Soil quality varies a lot. So does the amount of labor required for land cultivation.

Gardens and plants can be very important for symbolism in a story. Dune by Frank Herbert used palm trees to show the wealth and wastefulness of the Harkonnen family. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind used the contrast between Nausicaa's indoor fungal garden and the outer toxic jungle to great effect. Gardens (like hers) can be used for science. In fact, a great deal of science has come out of our own gardens, such as Mendelian genetics. There is also grafting in fruit trees and roses.

Who are gardens intended to feed? Some people have grafted fruit tree branches onto public trees in order to feed the homeless. Sometimes, however, people are hassled for growing food instead of display plants, especially in front gardens. Nowadays we see more and more rooftop gardens. Hydroponic gardens are a favorite in science fiction, as are tower gardens. A museum in Paris has a garden that is its entire front wall.

Gardens on a spaceship are for oxygen as well as food. Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Summer Prince used algae gardens to great effect.

Where is the sun? The direction and quantity of sunlight is critical for a garden's success. In my own garden I had to move a huckleberry plant that was frying in the sun to a shadier location and plant it with peat moss to improve its health.

In The Martian, the protagonist grows potatoes on Mars fertilized with "people poop from space toilets."

A garden can mean different things in different contexts. My own house has a very large garden, but new homes in the area are getting much less land space. When I lived in Tokyo, the apartment I lived in had a garden that was advertised as part of its appeal, and it was a 4'x6' space with tiny hedges. At my homestay house a year earlier, in Kyoto, they had a back garden and also a tiny garden in an interior courtyard of the house, too small to walk into. Different cultures do different things with interior versus exterior gardens. Windows can be designed to frame the garden.

In my own fictional world of Varin, the people live in cities underground, but rich people can import soil and plants will grow in the light of the atmospheric lamps that provide daylight. They also use rock gardens. Where there are openings to the surface, they have agricultural towers to maximize the production with the limited light available. The city level just under the surface also has water gardens. Surface farming can only happen in small "islands" because clearing farmland is not possible.

Terraced fields are common in places where there are steep slopes, including South America and Southeast Asia, for example.

Will agricultural robots come to replace farm workers? Will bee robots help with pollination?

Plant life cycles and seasonal cycles influence what happens in a garden. People can design gardens to attract bees or butterflies or hummingbirds, or other creatures. They can also design gardens to resist the grazing of particular species like deer. Weeds have been fought for a long time, but what counts as a weed is different depending on context.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for sharing their thoughts!

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Colorism

This was a very interesting discussion, and I was really glad we delayed it so we could have a more diverse group of discussants. Thank you to everyone who attended! Che Gilson, Morgan Smith, and Sarah Kaplan have attended my show before. Kate Johnston and Sumiko Saulson were attending for the first time, and I want to offer them special thanks for adding their insights. I also want to thank Sumiko for her patience in sticking with us when our Google hangouts connection was being unreliable.

Colorism and racism are not quite the same. We discussed colorism because we wanted to look at biases that exist between different skin tones within racial groups across the globe as well as issues like whitewashing, and even consider how the use of color shows bias in storytelling.

Bias against darker skin tones shows up in a lot of places in fiction. Discussants mentioned that we have seen things like the whitewashing of Ursula K. LeGuin's world of Earthsea when it has been adapted for TV or film. We have seen how the racist internet blew up when the character of Rue in The Hunger Games was cast as Black. More complicated situations arise when you look at things like The Girl With All the Gifts. In the book, the teacher is black while the child is white. This choice turns the usual teacher-as-savior trope on its head. However, the movie reverses this, and when the zombie child gets called a monster, etc. that contributes to the trend of horrible insults aimed at Black people.

I remarked on an article I had recently read talking about how diverse stories tend more often to end in tragedy, and how we need to move away from this and have more diverse people allowed just to be heroic.

Skin color and culture are not congruent.

The essential content of colorism is the idea that the lighter you are the better. Black gets associated with bad and scary, and white gets associated with good and waifish. There is a continuum, not just categorization into black vs. white. Even thesaurus dictionaries are full of these word associations that impute bad meanings to darker colors.

On some level, it makes sense for early hominids to be afraid of darkness because of the dangers of the night. However, there is no necessary logical link to tie that to skin colors in human beings.

In Europe in the middle ages, freckles and tan were associated with field labor, and thus to be avoided because people wanted to be seen as members of the leisure class. A similar thing happened in the caste system in India, where pale people were higher caste and darker people worked in the fields.

When you are working with people of diverse skin colors, it's worth asking "How do I describe people in ways that aren't food?" Particularly if you are working in a secondary world, it's worth doing some work to avoid this, because of the intimate/vulnerable connotations that come with food descriptions.

Even Jesus was whitewashed.

So, when we write, do we push back against the culture of colorism? How do we do this, and where? We can use non-food descriptions that have more positive connotations. Or we can try to dissociate skin color from real-world value judgments in the culture of our secondary world. In my Varin world I try to do this, but it requires an extensive amount of work, both to dissociate the traditional values and to reassociate skin color with a different cultural significance.

When you are writing, the choice of skin color for your protagonist is political. Say you are writing a story with a dominant woman and a submissive man, the impact of the relationship on the page will be drastically different if the woman is white and the man black vs. if the woman is black and the man white. We have to be very careful about the choices we make in this regard.

We talked quite a bit about Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry wanted to protect audiences from actual race on one level. He had blue and green races. The green women were sexualized, and so it's possible to ask whether they represented a stereotype of black women. However, in representation of actual women, he put Uhura on the bridge in a position of power and respect. He had the episode of the society where people had black and white faces and talked in this way about the arbitrariness of color distinctions. He also featured the first interracial kiss on TV between Kirk and Uhura (in our live discussion we made an error and spoke as if it had been Spock and Uhura).

One of the things we can do in science fiction is to engage people's metaphorical sensibilities in a helpful way to make people examine their own expectations and biases. But we can and should do more.

It's all too common to have a large group of white characters and one black character. Kate asked, "Where are the inversions of that?" She wants to see all black characters and one white character. So far, we are not seeing all the possible stories.

In stories, you can use societal stratification and dig into how society treats visual difference as a reflection on how people deal with particular differences.

We spoke about colorblindness. Colorblindness seems to have been the idea that the 1970's considered ideal when it came to anti-racism. However, it is deeply problematic because of the way that it erases people's culture. It essentially amounts to a form of strict cultural assimilation, allowing people to assume that another person's background is the same. However, you can't erase the cultural history and trauma associated with appearance. It doesn't make sense to assume everyone is going to be white and able-bodied, "unmarked" or congruent with the default cultural power narrative. Ignorance of other cultures is only safe if you are powerful.

We talked about fiction plots where a black person dies and that brings the white people happiness. This happens in Uncle Tom's Cabin and in The Stand (as well as other contexts) and is deeply problematic.

People internalize the bias that surrounds them. The colorism bias happens within communities of color as well as across them. It appears in the US and Europe, but also in Asia and many other places in the world.

When we are writing, we need to think about what words we can use to describe skin color, because there are already many which are associated with particular cultural groups, time periods, etc. "High yella" for example refers to a particular color but is very American Black and has a raft of connotations. There are complex terms for skin color differences within a community. When people use words they have heard but don't have deeper knowledge of the context and implications, it's wrong and can be harmful.

In the days when white Americans enslaved Black people, having more white blood meant that you would be worth more money when you were sold. This has had lasting implications for the complexity of Black identity, especially for light-skinned folks.

As an author of science fiction, you can write futures of color, but who will publish them? We're seeing some improvement on this front, but there's more progress to be made. The same can be said about cover images.

There are a lot of amazing Black writers out there, and you should seek out their work! They include:
Nnedi Okorafor
Sumiko Saulson
Maurice Broaddus (Link to our discussion last week)
Malon Edwards (Link to our discussion here)
Nalo Hopkinson
Nisi Shawl (Link to our discussion here)
Octavia Butler
N.K. Jemisin
Tananarive Due
Kate Johnston
(This is a sadly incomplete list, so keep your eyes open!)

This week on Dive into Worldbuilding we'll be talking with guest author Alyx Dellamonica about her forthcoming book, The Nature of a Pirate. I hope you can join us!

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Tonya Liburd - Through Dreams She Moves

Author Tonya Liburd came on the show to tell us about the worlds she explores in her many short stories. She was very excited because she has just heard that the Book Smugglers will publish her story, "A Question of Faith," this coming July.

Tonya began by telling us a bit about her personal background. She's a Canadian raised in Trinidad, and, she says, "When I get angry my accent comes out." This background influences her writing. She says she loves to read postcolonial fiction, and lists V.S. Naipaul, Michael Anthony, and Merle Hodge's "Crick Crack Monkey" among her influences. She says she discovered fantasy fiction when she was 20 years old, via a Dragonlance book, and dived right in, but that Romance is not her genre. She also mentioned that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was important to her.

"I use language a lot," she says. She explained that the language of the English Caribbean is called "Patois" while the language of the Spanish and French Caribbean is called "Creole," and that these are distinct dialects. The Virgin Islands have their own dialect with distinct names for food, etc. A story of hers called "The Ace of Knives" appeared in Postscripts to Darkness involved code-switching, and she was honored when Nisi Shawl used it in a workshop.  She also had a story called "Shoe Man" at Expanded Horizons, and Akashic Books published a story called "Home Again Home Again Jiggety Jig." "Through Dreams She Moves" appears in the Uncommon Minds anthology.

Tonya doesn't give up on her stories. She described a story that she had put away for years, after it was rejected, but that she found a new theme for and now wants to find home for. She told us about discovering a book called The World is Sound in a New Age bookstore, and how the book gave us ideas about commonalities between Indian music and jazz, such as the concept of a mentor teacher. She also says she wanted to write about ancient Egypt, so she brought that in. Her mother had given her a book on ancient Egypt when she was very small, and she has loved it ever since.

I asked Tonya about poetry, since she doesn't just write prose, and poetry is evident in her short stories. "I don't really think of myself as a poet, but poetry comes out of me anyway," she says. She's had success with it, as when she took 4th place in a writing competition about the perceptions of mental illness. She explored dealing with family who want to tell you how to live but won't do research on your condition. She says poetry intersects with her short fiction because writing is lyrical, and music is her thing. She wanted to be a singer/songwriter.

Tonya has several stories in set an alternate Toronto in which every person develops a special "gift" at puberty. These gifts ary widely, and societal systems are in place to help people with their gifts, such as if they need to leave their homes, etc. One guy's gift allows him to charm them with words, and so he becomes a politician. One woman doesn't have a gift, and that makes her a freak ("Superfreak"), and also causes her to be a target for harassment and abuse. Mental health and abuse occur often in Tonya's work, in part because of abusive elements in her own family background. She's very passionate about talking about these topics.

Tonya told us that her story, "Through Dreams She Moves" was inspired by "On Being Undone by a Light Breeze" by Vajra Chandrasekera. It inspired her to try using a combination of first- and second-person narration. Her story was longlisted for an award but she's had a hard time finding a home for it. One of the other features of Tonya's story is that each scene starts with a poetic envoi of three lines. I asked her what the appeal of this world with its people and its "gifts" was, and she said "it lends itself to plot." She told us about another forthcoming story in which a person goes to a hostel and breaks down, with all of their belongings in garbage bags. Each story allows her to explore different elements of this same world, such as homelessness, trauma, cultural isolation, code-switching, self-harm, etc.

"Through Dreams She Moves" arose from asking how people who are sick in this world get healed.
"A Charmed Life" arose from asking what it would be like to be in a position of leadership in this world. Sometimes the gifts can intersection.

"Shoe Man," she says, came from an idea she had when Tade Thomson shared a picture on social media of a shoe with teeth. It turned into a vignette that needed to be expanded, looking at homeless and mental illness.

"Superfreak" features a woman with no gift at all. Tonya apparently felt her way into the story before deciding what the protagonist's gift was, and only quite late realized she didn't have one. That reversal makes her a freak, and Tonya asks, "How would you survive?"

Tonya told us the abuse and mental health themes have been part of her own life for a while. A story of hers called "The Sweater" appeared in the Malahat Review (a Canadian literary magazine); she said "that was the first time I put my life on paper." She told us that she asked people "Should I put this out there?" but got some excellent advice that yes, she should.

Our discussant Wendy Delmater joined us because she is a huge fan of Tonya's work (and editor at Abyss and Apex). She urged Tonya to tell us about her upcoming novel. Tonya started by telling us that the Caribbean is a bona fide Afro-Centric society. "We eat roti the way everyone else eats pizzas." She suggested we go to Trinidad if we wanted to see a real melting pot. They have a distinct language (several, in fact) and distinct folklore including vampiric creatures called soucouyant. They can go through keyholes. To become a soucouyant, a woman makes a deal with the devil, hides her skin, and flies off in a ball of flame. She looks for babies to suck their blood, or in her story, sometimes animals. If you surround your bed with salt, she gets stuck having to count every grain.

The protagonist in the novel is a soucouyant. She meets an East Indian woman who was turned into a Western-style vampire. They live together and cause trouble, but the soucouyant develops a conscience and forms a grief counseling group to help the victims of the vampire, who went on a killing spree. One of the characters is a rape victim who wants to have her memories erased, but this is not as simple a question as it sounds. The soucouyant gets mixed up with more powerful supernaturals who want her to step into line.

It sounds like Tonya has got some super-exciting things coming up, and I urge you to look for her stories (some of which are linked in this post).

Tonya, thank you so much for joining us at short notice! It was a pleasure to talk with you about your work. Our next hangout will be today at 10am Pacific, and we will be discussing Colorism. We have quite a number of discussants lined up for this, but if you can't get in, you can always watch our YouTube live stream. I hope you can make it!

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Fonda Lee and Exo (Out now!)

We had a terrific group for this discussion! Fonda lee joined us to talk about her new book, Exo. She said it was born out of random thoughts during shower/dish time about how there aren't enough aliens in YA. And she wasn't talking about friendly or sexy aliens, or not-so-friendly aliens!

Essentially, Exo is an alien story without either first contact or invasion in it.

The story starts when aliens are already here, and they govern us. Humans and aliens coexist in many contexts, but there is still violence. Some people have bought into the coexisting system, and others don't. Fonda said she really wanted to make sure that nothing was black and white, but that moral issues were subtly shaded.

Her main character is intended to turn tropes on their heads. Donovan is a young human soldier whose job it is to fight human insurgents. Fonda says she wants to see if she can make you root for a character on the "wrong side."

Culturally, the book sounds fascinating. Fonda told me that part of this was deliberate and part unconscious. Her editor apparently came to her and said how great the main character was as a metaphor for a second-generation child with mixed identity. This was something of a surprise, but it was definitely there, and she had an opportunity to strengthen that aspect of the story while working with the editor (so, awesome!).

Donovan is an EXO, a human who has been modified so he has body armor. Because of this he's considered alien to humans, but human to aliens. It's a major identity conflict, and some of Fonda's resources for portraying him no doubt came from her experience as a child of immigrants.

She wanted to make Donovan's experience personal. Writing is personal, she says - even when you are working on pot structure. The personal is what sustains interest and drive.

The setting of the book is Earth after it has been "reformed" by aliens among us. She asked a question I've never seen asked before: Why would aliens show up in a major city, i.e. a place so "infested" with the local inhabitants? Her alien cities are therefore in areas like Patagonia, Mongolia, and the border between Wyoming and Nebraska. Humans then migrate to those areas to interact with the aliens, which means suddenly you have a metropolis in the middle of grassland. North America is split into west and east.

I asked Fonda about her research. She said she picked a few locations to research, using the criterion of high altitude - the kind of spot that makes for a good observatory - because she thought aliens would want to have enhanced ability to communicate with home. These places also had to be sparsely populated and have access to water. She used population maps and looked up the locations of actual deep space antennas. She said she related to the location she used for the main city because she grew up in Alberta, and is familiar with cold prairie land. She also attended the Launchpad Workshop, which is a crash course in astronomy for science fiction and fantasy writers hosted by the University of Wyoming.

Fonda told us, "I discovered I really love designing aliens." Most important to her was that she didn't want them to look like us, since she didn't have to have them portrayed by actors on TV. However, they also needed to be capable of living alongside us, and for that she wanted them to be land-dwelling, and to have a vocal language.

The aliens are the Zri, who are called "shrooms" by the humans. They have domed bodies with six legs and six eyes. Their limbs have fingers. They have musical speech. The languages are incompatible in that humans can't produce alien language, and the aliens can't produce human language, but they are mutually comprehensible.

Fonda mentioned that one of the challenges of space travel she dealt with was radiation. The space-traveling aliens have body armor that allows them to resist this radiation, and so do the humans who are altered to have body armor.

One of the worldbuilding details she told us she liked was how the two groups can understand each other, but not perfectly. They have translation machines to help with the process, but the machines translate the alien language as a deep male human voice.

I asked her about the gender of the aliens, and she said they are hermaphroditic, but "they have male voices." Apparently the aliens deliberately chose to render their voices as those of human males in order to prey on human patriarchal expectations. Fonda notes that humans will also do that, as when female CEOs will deepen their voices.

Fonda likes to ask, "What's the logic behind that?" when she is worldbuilding. She also asks, "What from this world is relevant?" The aliens couldn't be sentient plants or light particles. All alien stories, she says, are human stories. We use the lens of Other to examine ourselves and ask, "What is human?" It's very important to look at humans interacting with the strange and unknown.

She told us about the book Story Genius by Lisa Cron, who says we are wired for stories because we are testing ourselves in preparation for actual scenarios.

Fonda says using aliens is a relatively safe way to portray the Other because it doesn't involve projecting Other onto other humans.

Donovan, the main character in Exo, is a member of the Global Security Forces. He gets abducted by a terrorist militia, an anti-alien human group. Because Donovan is the son of a political leader, he is perceived as a bargaining chip. However, things go wrong. Donovan understands the stance of the militia but at the same time is loyal to his father. Fonda says this is "not a good guys versus bad guys" story, but happens in a moral gray zone. We love the rebel versus the evil empire, Katniss, etc. but in many places, America is the evil empire. She wanted to ask "What is a terrorist?" "What is the justification that opposing sides use in conflict?"

Fonda also says that teens have a better sense of the world's complexity than we think. They can handle nuance in a story. She told us about a high school visit when she learned that teens are still reading "classics" which were written as adult works. We noted that YA is a new genre. Fonda says she's comfortable there because she loves the transition phase. We can still be coming of age until age 40, she says.

Sarah asked whether Fonda had done much digging into different Earth cultures. There is not so much of that in Exo, but it does nod to other areas of the world and how the alien occupation played differently there.

Khaalidah asked about Fonda's writing process. Fonda said that every book is different. Her first novel, Zeroboxer, took 6-8 weeks of research and a year for the first draft and revisions. Exo, she says, started as a "trainwreck NaNoWriMo."She tried to "pants it," or just write it without planning, and stalled out after 30,000 words, so had to delete it and try again. The second time she re-envisioned it, and rewrote it more. Exo has more layers to it, and needed more drafts to bring it into focus. Fonda says there will be a second book to follow Exo, too. An idea can marinate for months or years, but she estimates two months for research and outlining, five months for the first draft, a break, and then two and a half months or so for revision. When she uses an outline, it hits major plot points, and notes on character arcs. She sold the sequel to Exo on proposal with an outline and three chapters. Having an outline, she notes, doesn't necessarily mean anything once you start writing. She quotes Lin-Manuel Miranda saying some "ideas are Moses," in that they lead you somewhere important even if they don't make it into the final book.

Lastly, we asked about the gender of the main character. Fonda says that she's written young men so far because that's "the character that pops into my head." She's had people say "you like to write teenage boys," but she says she likes to write others, too.

Fonda, thank you so much for coming and telling us about this exciting book - it's out now, so go read it! Thank you also to everyone who attended and make the discussion so fascinating.

Next week, 2/8/17 at 10am Pacific, we'll be speaking with guest author Alec Nevala-Lee about his story, "The Proving Ground." We also have a discussion of Colorism scheduled for February 15th at 10am Pacific, so please let me know if you would like to participate.

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