Dance

Dance is so much fun, and such a cool topic. One of the main things you may run into in fiction is how to make it relevant to your story, but fortunately, there are a lot of ways of doing that! Dance has social meaning, and personal meaning, and cultural meaning, all of which make it a really awesome thing to integrate into your worldbuilding.

Dance features in a lot of fairy-tale type stories, like Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella, etc. Che mentioned the book Aria of the Sea, by Dia Calhoun, which is about a ballet school. There was a story in Asimov's where children with perfect foot turnout were cloned so they could be great ballet dancers. (It was told from the point of view of a police dog protecting an aging ballerina).

Cliff mentioned "The Funeral March of the Marionettes" by Adam-Troy Castro, in which aliens called marionettes or spiders have a yearly dance in which 100,000 of them dance to the death. The story features ambassadors watching the dance and discovering a human dancing in the group. Most of the choreography is implied.

Choreography is an interesting issue, because you want enough of it to give a feel of the dance, but lengthy descriptions of choreography will feel very clunky. It's actually similar to action scenes of other kinds, like fight scenes and sex scenes. You need to figure out why it would be important to include choreographic details, and connect the significance of those details to character development and the overall dynamic of the scene.

Kate talked about how dance is a language with meaning, and communicates something. When we describe in narrative, we often focus on what is being conveyed rather than how many millimeters an eyebrow was raised. You can describe the dance physically, as well as describing what it means.

We have many reasons for dancing, including just-for-fun, for social reasons, and for ritual reasons. Father-daughter dances at a wedding, or group dances like the hora at weddings, have specific kinds of significance beyond the choreography of the dance.

You can dance for yourself, for a specific other partner, for the purpose of cementing community (as with weddings, funerals, mass courtship, etc.), for performance, etc.

Many dances have a codified repertoire of motions. Noh dance, hula, and ballet are examples of these.

Culturally embedded movements can be exoticized. Be aware that such movements occur across all cultures. We don't want to exaggerate Otherness unless it is an explicitly recognized facet of the point of view character.

What is the performer feeling? What is the audience feeling?

Does describing the movements distance you from the narrative? It depends on which point of view you are describing from.

You can describe the music, the tempo, the legs, arms, eyes, face, fingers, etc.

Kat mentioned Lois Bujold's mirror dance. What is described? One character can be teaching the other.

In The Sound of music, there is a scene where Maria dances a traditional Austrian dance with the Captain, and it represents how their relationship is changing.
In Little Women, there is a ball. The focus in this context is not on choreography but on the social meanings being conveyed. Slippers, how tired people are, who is asking whom, etc.

Stardance includes choreography of a zero-g dance.

As the writer, we get to decide what is important to convey about the dances in our stories.

Clothing for dances can vary a lot, particularly between practice and performance.

Some children learn to dance by standing on their parents' feet (either facing them or facing outward, depending on the dance). Some learn by watching. Some children can learn at a surprisingly early age.

Think about where people get taught to dance. Do you go to a dance school? Do you simply attend public functions and get taught by people there? Do you mirror someone's movements? Do you watch as a bystander? Do you stand behind the dancer you're imitating?

There is specialized language associated with different forms of dance, and depending on the dance's origins, this language can be imported from another language. Ballet, for example, has its roots in France, and the words we use to describe its moves are in French even though they have been imported/converted into English.

If you are writing a historically based story, it's really valuable to do research on the kinds of dance used at the time, its origins, its moves, and the language used to describe it. If you try to use an anthropological voice to describe it, you'll typically be using an outsider viewpoint.

Some dances are not permitted to outsiders. There are limits to how much of this kind of dance can be witnessed and described. This applies to some extent to geisha and also to Native American and other traditions across the world. In the story "Time Considered as  Helix of Semiprecious Stones" by Samuel Delany, the singers' activity is not allowed to be described; one could treat dance similarly.

Cliff told us about his experience learning Argentine Tango. When he was learning it, the ratio of men to women was 100 to 1, so most of the men learned by dancing with other men.

We thought it would be intriguing to have an ambassador to an alien species learning to dance... or to have the negotiations executed by means of dance.

Kat pointed out that many of the words used to describe physical motions, like gyrate, writhe, etc. are loaded with (potentially problematic) connotation. Depending on the dance tradition you are imagining, its origin and its place within society, that could also be the case for you... or not. But it's important to pay attention to how these value judgments adhere to our descriptions.

Different dances emphasize different body parts. Some entirely ignore parts of the body. Irish dancing focuses mainly on the feet. American dances usually don't assign any significance to the movement of the eyes.

Kate urged us to think about how the dance grows out of a culture, and how it in turn influeces that culture.

Morgan pointed out that precision is necessary for some dances but not others; some dances rely on joyous chaos.

Call-into-center dances are another type of dance. How do you know if you are allowed to take the center spot?

What is the appropriate social context for the form of dance you are exploring?

Cliff told us that capoeira originated with enslaved people in Brazil, who needed a way to defend themselves but could also keep the defensive purpose of the movements secret by describing it also as dancing.

Kat talked about how Eastern European dances were sometimes a form of physical training for young men. The Ukrainian and Russian dance traditions are gender-segregated, and extremely thigh-intensive.

Kate pointed out that there can be important gender differences in how people are allowed to dance.

African dance draws energy from the ground. Ballet relies on the sense of floating on air.

What else might dance be a form of training for? Can we imagine spaceships dancing? Can the motions of caring for someone become a dance?

The sequence of moves is critical to dance, but may be more or less restricted.

Che told us about a news article she'd read about a dance in Japan that was to teach people what to do in a tsunami.

Kate told us how when she went to Africa, she had to teach without speaking, so it came out like dancing.

You can enjoy dances without knowing the forms of symbolism that they employ, but if you are designing a dance and intend to depict its practitioners as coming from inside the culture, you should really know what its symbolism is.

How does disability affect dance? There are differences in mobility, but you can dance in a wheelchair or with almost any other form of physical restriction. Kat noted that where dance is valued, people find a way to do it regardless of difficulty. Be very careful to do your research if you want to deal with questions of how disability might affect dance.

We do make assumptions about how one's physiology might affect one's ability to dance.

Does your dance have the expectation of a special floor (like ballroom or flamenco, for example)? Does it require a stage?

What is the overall style of the dance? Stately? Chaotic? Measured? Stiff? Flowing? A dancer's physical movement can vary greatly on and off the stage. What areas of the room are considered appropriate for which kinds of movement? Is the center for fancy moves, and the outside for fast movement? Or are the edges safer for beginners?

Think about the negative space formed by a dance.

Are you supposed to interact with your audience? With other dancers? Why or why not?

Dance schools have subcultures.

Dance can be a form of acceptable touch in low-touch cultures.

Do you need to have a minimum number of people for a dance to be performed?

How do you manage crowding? How do you manage appropriate or inappropriate touch when there is crowding?

Some dances can be deliberate to send a political message. Some dances can have built-in instructions on how to do the dance (hokey-pokey?)

Some dances start out as scandalous but then over time grow to be considered conservative.

Thank you to everyone who attended this wide-ranging discussion.

Dive into Worldbuilding meets today at 5pm with author Laura Anne Gilman to talk about her Devil's West series. I hope you can join us!

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Garbage

You should be thinking about garbage. If you're not, the world you're designing will have some serious flaws. Wherever people are, there's the possibility that they will leave things behind. In fact, it's one of the main ways we can tell that people have been in a place - looking for their leavings. Midden heaps featured shells, useless bones and broken pottery. These days we might see lots of plastic packaging. Leaf packaging, or plant fiber packaging, might last less well because it's biodegradable. There are also packages that are reusable, like tins or Japanese furoshiki cloths. (One of the reasons why we have so much packaging is because it is a method of advertising.)

Kat noted that in Japan there is a lot of packaging material, but the recycling there is very picky and precise, into as many as 28 recycling categories. The more you separate, the less work it is to recycle.

Neal Stephenson has written about molecular-separation recycling. That takes care of a lot of waste and renders it utterly unrecognizable! Star Trek replicators are similar. If you have a "matter box" that creates things for you, how do you feed it and with what?

If you have garbage that you want to get rid of, what do you do with it? Incinerate it? Render it into slurry? Separate it? Compost it? There are also ritual ways of handling trash.

If you can fabricate things with a replicator, it would mean you didn't have to mine for coltan or similar substances, or even recycle.

Do we care if something was made mechanically or biologically? Astronauts can't really afford to worry too much about the recycled water they drink and where it came from...

Spaceships sometimes will jettison space debris. Space makes a good environment for cryostorage of noxious ingredients.

The climate of the region you are working in will influence how garbage looks, feels, and smells. If it's humid and hot, you will get a lot more stink!

I described my own garbage sorting containers, which are large (above waist-high) plastic rolling bins: a smaller black one for trash, a large blue one for recycling, and a large green one for compost (including meat). In my area, this varies by municipality. The green waste is offered as compost by my town.

We talked about old galvanized steel trash cans, which are almost entirely unused in my area at this point.

When I lived in Tokyo in the 1990s, we were expected to put our garbage out onto the side of the street in plastic grocery bags. This meant it was very easy for crows to steal food out of the garbage.

In rural areas, sometimes you will see burn piles where people are incinerating their trash.

There are a lot of different ways to handle garbage, but figuring out the details of what is not wanted, what can be reused, and what happens to those discarded items is really key to getting the world right.

Kate told us she remembers when they used to collect horse poop in San Francisco, and people would show up with their car trunks lined with plastic to take the manure home to use in their gardens. Che noted that zoos also sell their animals' waste for fertilizer.

E-waste can be worth money because it contains small amounts of rare elements.

Kat said that in Sydney, there is a tradition of putting unwanted items out for other people to take Imported things would be more valuable for re-use. In the US, leaving things out is considered littering, even though we have started having a freecycling culture here as well. Kat remarked that her black friends refuse to do porch retrievals because of the risk of attack or people calling the police on them.

In the West, and particularly in America, we are trained to think of things as easily or instantly disposable. When you live on a houseboat, as Kat did, you can't just toss things. As with hiking, it's trash in/trash out, and leave only footprints.

Kat pointed out that in some cultures, trash can be turned into treasure. Sometimes, instead of stitching a hole closed, people will embroider a hole closed. Broken dishes can be repaired with gold.

Sometimes in stories, the hero will have nice new clothes, while the villain will have clothes that are cobbled together. This is stereotypical but not universal.

Is recycling considered a virtue in your society?
Are you allowed to repair things?
Do people sell spare parts, or is obsolescence planned?

There used to be traveling tinkers who would repair pots and pans and other items. That art has largely been lost. Corporations have a vested interest in you wanting to buy new things.

Repair cafés are a modern trend, as we recognize our global impact and turn more toward reuse and repair. There are also tool lending libraries.

Garbage-processing technology is an important piece of this puzzle. Is it done by machines? By people?

"Mud-larks" were children who used to pick up trash and bones and sell it to the ragged bone man. The ragged bone man would collect rags that could be made into paper, and bone that could be made into glue or into bone china. Bone china was 20-40% actual bone. This ties into the tradition of the poor making things for the rich.

Brian remarked that there are a lot of curse words and insults connected to garbage.

Poor or low-caste people tend to end up processing garbage because the job tends not to be valued. What would happen if it were valued? That could potentially lead to some interesting stories.

City of Ember put a lot of focus on recycling and reuse because it was cut off from the surface. (We noted, though, that canned food does not tend to last 200 years).

In The Gift Moves, battery trees were fed with garbage and grew batteries as fruit. The society was gift-based.

In Star Wars we saw the garbage compactor, and we saw trash being jettisoned. Did some of it get blown into the sun? Also, Rey is a garbage-picker in a very post-apocalyptic environment on Jakku.

If midden heaps are key to learning about the past, losing them means that there can be problems for reconstructing that past. You can lose them under water with changing sea levels. If you had 100% recycling, there would be no records left. Other forms of data about a society can also be lost over time due to damage of various kinds. Our recovery technology is improving, however. We only used to be able to dig out bones and learn from them, but now we can analyze the dirt surrounding them to see what was there.

If there is dust and grit on your floor, do you sweep it outside? Perhaps, if there is dirt outside. But perhaps not, if you are in a large building. In that case you might put it in with food waste.

What do you do with broken clothing? We need to return to a culture of turning it into rags, rugs, etc. Don't use a new dishtowel to mop the floor!

Cliff mentioned that in Michael Moorcock's Revenge of the Rose there was a world with long parallel hills which turned out to be made of garbage. The hills were created by cities on wheels which circled the planet and cast their garbage to one side.

Kim Stanley Robinson dealt with waste in a generation ship in Aurora. The ship needs 100% recycling, and the balance failed because there was no molecular rearrangement. Even the International Space Station imports things. What happens in a bio dome or other closed system?

Wall-E was intended to be a cautionary tale about the risks of not dealing well with garbage. The ship in the movie was not intended to be a generation ship, though it ended up becoming one.

In CS Friedman's The Madness Season, insectlike aliens conquer Earth, and they have hollow asteroid ships, where they put their garbage on the surface of the ship.

This was a really interesting discussion. Thank you to everyone who participated!

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Auguries/Telling the Future

People have been interested in telling the future since the beginning of human societies. In fact, astronomy was one science that led to people being able to tell the future - to predict the movements of the stars! But there a lot of less scientific ways to predict the future. In Japan, you can go to a shrine and pay money to shake a box, out of which a stick will fall with a message on it. When you report that message to the shrine attendants, they will give you a piece of paper with your fortune. Many different cultures have ways of casting omens. There are also many fictional scenarios that involve predictions of the future. The first one that occurred to me was the way that people cast omens in Ann Leckie's trilogy.

You can read entrails. Cliff mentioned that Roger Zelazny wrote a story where a dude that had been disemboweled to have his entrails read started critiquing the reading as he died. (Yikes!)

In fiction, the author is in control of the fortunetelling. You can decide whether the fortunetelling will literally be true in your story, and whether what is foretold in Book 1 will come true in Book 2, etc.

Prophecies are a mainstay of the fantasy genre.

Fortunetelling traditions exist all over the world.

What are the signs of being an oracle? They vary from culture to culture, but often a fortuneteller will have specific identifiers.

Priests can sometimes foretell. So can TV psychics.

Roma people are often portrayed (stereotypically) as fortune-tellers. There's also a "new-agey" form of fortune-telling that involves muddled cultural appropriation from various sources.

Often an oracle is a person who lives/works out of a particular place, like the Oracle of Delphi.

Sometimes people will tell the future by interpreting the behavior of birds. This was one of the methods used in Hild by Nicola Griffith. You can read bones. In Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, people use the i-Ching because everyone believes in its influence. People also read tea leaves, or look into crystal balls.

Science Fiction is sometimes perceived as being predictive, but often what happens is that it becomes inspirational, and thereby brings about aspects of the future that it imagines.

One of the basic ideas of fortunetelling is this: We can be informed by chaos and chance.

A key question to ask for your fictional story is, "Does the augury come true?" You can also ask, "Do the characters think the augury is true?"

Che asked, "Could a computer be a fortuneteller? What if there were something called OmenApp?"

One major science-fictional work which involved prediction of the future was Asimov's Foundation series. It had data-based augury. The author was then able to play with which aspects of the prediction came true and which did not.

Astrology and numerology involve ways to predict the future.

I speculated that you could "read" the fallen hair from a baby's first haircut and try to tell the child's future on that basis.

Going to an oracle often brings trouble. What if Oedipus had not gone to the oracle at all? What if someone asked, "Why are you going to the oracle? You don't need that kind of trouble in your life!"

In the Percy Jackson books, every book has a critical prophecy that must be interpreted but can't be truly understood until the end. Mistborn involves the question of what happens if the prophecy doesn't come true. What if the chosen one doesn't do the job and a friend has to do it?

In Dune, the Bene Gesserit "seed" a prophecy which isn't exactly a prophecy, but a cultural idea that will help them have the influence to put someone into power far later down the line, historically.

I mentioned Steven Universe. The Sapphires have the power to tell the future. I was particularly intrigued by the flawed Sapphire who had the ability to "foretell" things that had already happened. It seems like it would be a useless skill, but in fact she has been able to do some very helpful things and defeat my expectations. (I always love having my expectations defeated in this way.)

There's an instance of fortunetelling in Babylon 5 that viewers can watch play out over the course of the series.

Context is really the key to figuring out the meaning of prophecies, and as authors, we have a lot of ability to control that context.

Che would like to see someone avoid their fate.

Jim Davis once set up a situation where a version of Garfield was given Pandora's box and chose not to open it.

We talked about Chekov's "gun rule," which says that if you put a gun on the mantelpiece at the start of the story, that gun will be shot before the end of the story. This isn't always the case, but the attention we place on certain objects or events in a story is usually important in some way. Typically it's a good idea not to put irrelevant things in a story, which is why we tend to think the things we encounter will have relevance.

Our interpretation of prophecies relies a lot on our ability to sift through the context of our lies and find places where it is relevant.

We agreed that there is very likely to be some form of fortunetelling or augury in a world, so it's worth thinking through how people think about it, and how people do it.

In Krull, a cyclops gives up his eye to see the future, but only ends up knowing the moment of his own death.

Chuck Wendig's character Miriam Black can predict other people's deaths by touching them.

I highly recommend the story "Six Months, Three Days" by Charlie Jane Anders, which involves two seers falling in love.

Thank you to everyone who attended the hangout! It was a fun topic to explore. Dive into Worldbuilding will meet next week on Tuesday, June 19th and will feature Nebula Award-winning author Rebecca Roanhorse. I hope you'll join us!

#SFWApro

Kelly Robson and "Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach"

This hangout looks twice as exciting now that Kelly has gone on to win a Nebula in the meantime (for her novellette, A Human Stain)! It was a pleasure to have her on the show to talk about her recent novella, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach.

Kelly started out by telling us about how critical economics was to this story. She's passionate about economics! (And so she should be; worldbuilding without economics is flimsy.) She calls it "the physics of worldbuilding." She told us that when she was first writing historical fiction, she began with medieval settings because it seemed more straightforward to manage, but that since then, she's branched out into greater challenges. In this story, the historical portion is set in Mesopotamia!

I asked Kelly about where she found the entry point for this story. She explained that she and Alyx Dellamonica had just moved to Toronto when there was an exhibit about Mesopotamia at the Royal Ontario Museum, and they went to it four or five times. One of the things she learned there was that in 2000 BCE, Mesopotamia had a complex, centrally planned economy. Kings, priests, and priestesses kept a handle on how much grain was grown and distributed.

Kelly was also excited to learn that there was a king named Shulgi whose job was killing monsters. This was an official duty of his job, and he possessed weapons designed specifically for monster-killing. As she told us, "They knew there were no monsters." She asked what it must be like for this king who had this very specific duty and had never done it. How do you deal with that problem?

The second plot thread she told us about was the idea of someone with octopus arms for legs, which she had always liked. As it turned out, the story ended up being a "coming of age" tale for an old woman, finding her purpose.

Kelly said she really wanted to work with a future Earth that could have a connection with ours, but is not hours. One of her major inspirations in designing it was the book Debt: The First 5000 Years. One of the major points it makes is that we have this idea that barter was a standardized practice, but there is really no evidence for it in the anthropological/archaeological record. The book questions the existence of this practice that has been so mythologized, and illustrates how economic systems actually work, which is far more complex. The concept of debt is central to how humans interact, even on the level of courtesy and favors. It's not just about coins but about how we live together.

In Kelly's far future, all you can buy or sell is people's time. The giant companies are professional services firms. She named the primary company in the story after an environmental consulting firm that belonged to friends of hers. Robots do all manual labor, and everything is automated. Everything in a services firm happens because people make it happen. Robots must be programmed and designed by people. The year is 2267, and in a post-scarcity environment, the only thing of value is people's time.

People do not live on the surface of the planet in this world because Kelly decided she didn't want land to be something of value. In this version of history, climate change caused humanity to retreat underground because it was too difficult to deal with the bad weather, etc. The other advantage of the underground environment to Kelly was that it was a completely managed environment and you have to manage  your own waste. In comparison, our world makes it difficult to see the consequences of all the decisions we make (as when we drop trash on the ground).

The "Manhattan of this underground environment" is a place called Bangladesh Hell. Everything is cool there, and celebrities are there. Even there, it's a managed, closed environment. The word Hell is used in the Chinese sense, meaning just that it's underground. Kelly said she chose this to play with people's expectations.

The main character, Minh, is 83 years old, and working on reclaiming the surface. When she was a toddler in Sudbury Hell (Sudbury being a real place with underground pits in Canada), the world was having pandemics in a public health catastrophe. Minh lost her legs to a form of ringworm, which is why she uses the octopus prosthetics. Her generation is called Plague Babies. All of them had horrible medical interventions as children. There was a generational exodus, when the plague babies decided they want to get away from the doctors and colonize the surface.

Another key character, Kiki, is 23 years old, from the generation referred to as Fat Babies. They are perfect tank-gestated healthy human beings. Their bodies are not giving them abnormal problems. They were birthed by the Plague Babies because of the need for more people to feed the people-time economy, but the Plague Babies are still rugged individualists who want to do it all, and don't want to give up anything to the kids. It functions as a kind of parallel to the relationship in our world between the Boomer generation and the Millennials.

Here are some questions Kelly asked, which are great questions for any worldbuilder: What does our society see of value? What history do we have? What kind of generational values do we have? Kelly remarked that you can see these kinds of things in pseudo-hipster cartoons from the Regency era as well as in our own time. Kelly notes that as a member of Generation X she feels sandwiched between the antagonistic Boomers and Millennials.

I asked Kelly whether she had done a lot of research for this story. She said, essentially, no - but in fact a lot of her research had been done before she had the story come into her mind. She read the David Graber book three times. She simply reads nonfiction for pleasure, and nonfiction informs her understanding of how the world works. Kelly describes herself as a systems thinker.

I asked Kelly about the corporation that features prominently in the novella. The time travel corporation, TERN, is essentially the antagonist here. Kelly said it was a bit of an answer back to Connie Willis' approach to time travel, which she absolutely loves but thinks is unrealistic. Kelly made sure to stipulate that you can't influence the present by changing the past.

Kelly told us that she would love to time travel. "I would die to do that," she said. "I'd cut my legs off."

In this story, time travel is just for historical research purposes.

The different dwelling-places of the future setting she creates are called Hives, Habs, and Hells. They are essentially like city-states that compete with each other in quality of life. They compete to draw people to their area. Bangladesh Hell has the cool factor. Sudbury Hell has more space. The surface habitations include Iceland, Cuzco, and Calgary.

Other economic units include universities, vocational training entities, and think tanks. TERN is a division of an evil economic entity.

There is also such a thing as a "private bank." Private banks are actually people. If you are a genius who makes a unique contribution to society, the world government will let you act like a bank, and when you die you become a think tank, or a university, for as long as your economic principal exists. She created this concept because she wanted to make sure she could show that some people do make a difference. It also gives people something to strive for. "Someday I could be a private bank..."

TERN controls time travel, and is allowed to do so by the World Economic Council. They are worried about losing this control, so they are secretive and tell lots of lies about their technology.

Minh is a fluvial geomorphologist, or someone who studies how riverbeds change. (Kelly clearly loves the name of this line of work!) Minh also does snowpack management. She lives in Calgary, which is a self-contained Ziggurat habitat. The people there are trying to live lightly and restore the bow river valley. They have been working on it for 60 years and still have much to do. Minh planted a glacial seed in the nearby mountains. They have constructed wind baffles around the mountain to guide rain to particular valleys. Now, the river flows into the city and all of the water gets used. They want to make it so that some water remains to flow onward and support another city. Minh loves rivers and loves mountains, and will die doing her work.

Kelly said that while working in Vancouver she learned a lot of ecological restoration stuff.

We recommended to her a book by Simon Winchester called The Map That Changed the World, about William Smith and how he discovered the geological formations underlying England when he was traveling around trying to help people find coal. At the time there was no systematic way of finding it, but everywhere he went, Smith saw the same 15-layered structure in the earth, and helped people to systematize what lay under the ground.

Che asked why Kelly wrote a novella when she had this much worldbuilding to work with. Kelly said, "I don't know how to write a novel." She wanted it to be the story of Minh, and focus on "The most important thing that ever happened to a person, or that a person ever did." She said it would have to be a different story to be a novel. She told us she is currently writing a sequel featuring Kiki as the main character.

By the end of the story, Minh has learned the thing she'd been missing: that people matter, and not just to the economy, but to her personally.

I asked Kelly whether she had intentionally juxtaposed the concept of monsters with the design of the time-traveling characters, and she said that she hadn't done it intentionally, though she loves the idea of animal-human chimeras, which she also used in her story, Waters of Versailles. I asked this question because of the way that Kiki changes her appearance during the story, which makes her appear more mythological (SPOILERS are coming!).

In the story, Minh and Kiki have to win the work by responding to a Request For  Proposal (RFP) for sending scientists into the past to research the rivers and inform future restoration efforts. Kiki freaks out because she's an administrative assistant and is so excited at the idea of a non-boring project. She gets on the team writing the proposal. Kelly explained that she has done a lot of proposal writing, and that "you are going to win it by offering the client something they didn't know they wanted." In this story, the amount of stuff you can transport in the time machine is limited by volume. Because Minh is small and can fold up her legs, and another of her friends on the team is a little person, they would be able to maximize the volume they can bring back. Kiki wants to be on the team but is too big (she's 6 feet tall)... so she cuts her legs off, and gets a set of high-tech goat leg prosthetics.

Paul noted that Kelly's decision not to let the past influence the future solves some problems. He asked her how she came up with her theory of time travel. Kelly said she needed the time travel to behave in such a way as to allow her to tell the story she wanted to tell. She wanted to have its effect be only on the characters' experiences rather than the world. When you go to the past, there is no way to do damage. The question is what it does to you. Thus, she chose the simplest form of time travel where there would be no paradoxes that might cause trouble. The time travel timeline collapses as soon as you leave it, but it's still an interesting thing to do. The idea is thus that you can't keep going back to the same timeline, since it's gone the moment you are no longer in it. Kelly told us that if she could go back in time, she would cure Jane Austen and let her continue writing the book she was writing, then take the manuscript home, return to the same moment, have Austen read it and continue the work. She said that after 30 or 40 trips you could have a new Austen book! However, it would be a lot like a Groundhog Day scenario, and be incredibly tedious to figure out what you needed to do for the desired result.

Thank you so much for coming on the show, Kelly! It was a fascinating discussion. Everyone look out for Kelly's sequel to this story (which she's currently drafting), called, "Time, Trouble, and the Lucky Peach."

Today, Dive into Worldbuilding meets at 4pm Pacific to discuss Auguries and Predicting the Future. I I hope you can join us!

#SFWApro

Building Back Histories

This topic is another one I thought would be important for any list of basic worldbuilding topics. Essentially, it amounts to, "How did we get to where we are?"

When we are working on telling a story, the question of the past often springs up. Sometimes, we want to work on it before we even get started. Sometimes, we create an elaborate account of the back history of a story and none of it appears directly in the story itself.

Keep in mind, though, that nothing you do to understand back history is ever wasted work, because the things we know change the words we use when we write a story. Chances are, the words you use will reflect your understanding of the back history even if you aren't explaining it.

I asked each of the discussants about experiences they had with creating back history for their stories. 

Kat told us that she had explored one key event, what she called "a catalyzing thing in culture," which helped her with a story about a near-future Earth. She'd gotten stuck in the front-story because she didn't have enough information about what had happened earlier. Ethnography and history are important so that the pieces of your front story can fit together, and make sense in relation to each other.

Morgan said she likes to look at something in her front story and try to explain how she got here. She asks: "Why can't I explain it? Do I dislike what it [background] would have to be? Does it not make sense?" She says it's very easy to get caught up in a character's backstory. Once you know the background, what does it change? Can you use background to make your story make sense and be believable?

Cliff told us that backstory is like scaffolding you use to build your story, and then you take it down. Tolkien did it for his own enjoyment. Cliff himself wants to have the minimum scaffolding required to build. He spent time with his novel universe "bouncing around" for years, figuring out what was going on with the people at the top of society, but it never worked. Then he started working with the people at the bottom, and the story came alive. He says when he's working with a short story, he usually starts with an image, and has to figure out what it means. Backstory fills itself in as he figures this out.

Kat made an important point, which is that sometimes you can get so much data in your head that it's hard to set it aside to write the story. There is a danger in getting too enraptured by worldbuilding.

Here are a few basic questions to ask:

How did this character get here? Why is the character motivated this way? What are the background conditions needed for the story to work? 

Cliff is opposed to "killing momentum" by asking too many questions.

How much do you really need to know? The answer to that is very individual. Morgan feels she needs to know more, even though all the research may not go into the story.

How relevant is the backstory? How important is it that we understand why things work the way they do?

Kat told us about her sensitivity reading work. She explained that she has seen thousands of words invested in a work by people who have never asked about the premises or setup of the story. When it comes to critical social underpinnings (like for example racism and sexism), maybe some stories don't need to be told if the writer doesn't understand the context in a nuanced way.

I personally made a number of back history extrapolations once I decided that my Varin world was going to be racially diverse. I had to find a way to explain why people who lived underground, and all on the same continent, would show variations in appearance. This led me to an extensive backstory about the people's arrival in this location from another place where they had been spread across a much larger geographic area, but united by a shared religion.

As Kat remarked, monocultures shouldn't be considered forbidden, but we need to understand why non-diverse places are not diverse. Some cultures have grown up in isolation, like indigenous groups before contact with outsiders. Even in a monoculture group, there will be subgroups, however. Think about what kind of subtle differences might seem important in that context. 

In Europe, when Catholicism was widespread, there were all sorts of schisms and disagreements, heresies, etc. There will always be complexity in human groups. Think about the places where people will identify differences. Any time a single social group contains only individuals who run entirely true-to-type, you will have a problem with lack of realism.

Several of our discussants recommended this article: Race: The Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre. It brings up really important issues to consider when embarking upon a fantasy project.

Any time you have more than one character, you need to have variation. Character backstory is a bridge to worldbuilding. Consider the relationship between a character's personal history and the history of their world; the two are intertwined.

We talked a bit about naming. When you have characters in a story, in general people tell you to have their names start with different letters... but what if they don't, because their identities were established in a different story and now they have met? Kate remarked that in some cultures (read: America and others), people with the same name get numbered. Some cultures distinguish between two people of the same name with epithets like "the unready" or "kinslayer," etc. We don't tend to see quite as many epithets in science fiction as fantasy, but there's no reason a writer couldn't use them. 

You could consider providing family trees for the characters in your book, if it helps to clarify.

Putting together timelines can be a helpful technique. "How long ago did it happen" is a question whose answer can vary depending on which story you are writing at the time, and where it falls on the world's timeline. Story X can be 30 years before story Y, while story Z is 25 years before story Y, which makes it five years after Story X. These relations can be important to track.

Kat asked whether she would need to change her timelines due to cultural characteristics (possibly). Different groups track time in different ways, and create different structures to organize events. 

Kat recommended the Father Brown Mysteries, because they have a lot of amazing detail about Catholic histories. They provide enough information for people who don't know the history, and not too much for people who already do know that history.

It's always a good idea to think through what we do or don't need to include. Basing these decisions on our sense of who constitutes our audience can be critical.

Ask: What does your character care about? How much do they care about it? How does this affect the actions and the plot? How deeply in sync is this person with their surrounding culture, and why?

Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion. I hope to see you at Dive into Worldbuilding next Tuesday at 4pm Pacific!

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Henry Lien and Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword

It was absolutely fabulous to have Henry Lien back on the show! I'm excited to see the world of Pearl rolling out in novel form after we had such a great discussion about his story, "Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters," which appeared in Asimov's in 2013.

Henry joined us to talk about his new novel, Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword, which he describes as a direct sequel to the previous story.

The world of Pearl is a secondary world in which Henry invented an art-sport that combines figure skating with kung fu. He first developed it at Clarion when instructed by Chuck Palahniuk. As an exercise in empathy and attempting to write something outside his own experience, he tried to enter the world of teenage girls, and examine girl-girl dynamics in a high-pressure setting, with talented but misbehaving girls prepping for an exam for an Academy.

The new book has been summarized by some as "Harry Potter meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on Ice," but is a lot deeper and more complex than that description would suggest. It deals with issues of immigration and crossing cultures even as it has tons of fun with its characters and their sport. The main character is a newcomer to a place that in her eyes appears to be more culturally advanced. Henry examines how one's identity splits during the journey of immigration.

This story is set in a fantasy world very different from ones we have seen before, so that we don't ever know quite what to expect. It draws cultural markers from China, Taiwan, and Japan, and uses elements of the region's history, including interactions between the different cultures. Henry said one of his goals was to create a world where you feel like you know it but when you engange in it in detail, it's super-different from ours.

In Peasprout Chen's world, tabloid headlines are delivered by birds in a delightfully innovative way. This world uses Chinese characters, which can be written in the grass script style as a continuous line. Henry noticed that his birds will follow him around, so he decided that he would have someone in the city skate the pattern of the characters on the ground while birds follow them overhead, essentially resulting in the birds tracing calligraphy in the sky. Grass-style calligraphy, which is an actual cultural thing, and actual bird behavior from our world, combine to create a completely alien result. In this way, Henry uses familiar building blocks to create a world that is unique.

We asked him how becoming a bird person changed him. This is a very sweet story! Henry told us about how he had rescued the birds, all of them small parrots. He calls them "an alien race that we share this Earth with." Birds are very sensitive to the environment, and their triggers are consistent. He compared some of their reactions to PTSD reactions. They are very idiosyncratic. Henry said, "It made me learn to love something I don't fully understand." You can appreciate the nooks and crannies even if you can't see the whole thing. 

Kat remarked that she's discovered a surprising number of figure-skating writers and editors that she hadn't previously heard about. 

Henry said that when he was researching figure skating and kung fu, he discovered that they have three characteristics in common: each is intense, lyrical, and punishing. Injury is always waiting for you, and can shut you down for weeks. There's a lot of drama in these sports that can be very appealing to writers.  The Olympics features brutal dramatic judgment where the athlete trains for four years to perform for two minutes, during which any error is catastrophic. Stakes are high, and the focus on age and performance is intense.

Henry talked about his own experience studying wushu, and explained that he came into classes with "hubris" based on his own general fitness and how strong the other people in the class looked. He made it quite clear that he'd been wrong about this! His 19-year-old lithe partner would "kick my butt every week." He feels that both figure skating and wushu reward the ways that women's bodies move.

The setting of Peasprout Chen is a city made of a non-ice substance called pearl. The fact that everything is made of pearl means that parkour can also be woven in.

He told us a bit about the backstory of the novel. There is the mainland empire of Shin which is kind of like China but not China; there is the island of Pearl which is kind of like Taiwan but not Taiwan, and then the land of Eda in the background which is kind of like Japan but not Japan. In this world, the male population of Pearl was destroyed in a war. A failed courtesan from Shin fled to Pearl and teamed up with an older woman famed for her ugliness. This older woman had discovered a substance that could be manipulated to make ice-like pearl. Together they created the city, and the courtesan invented the sport of Wu Liu to allow them to turn their disadvantages into strengths. The name "wu liu" combines the first half of "wu shu" (kung fu) with the second half of "liu ping" (figure skating.)

Henry put special emphasis on the idea of turning everything upside-down. We are told that our bodies and our identities are disadvantages, but those things should be turned upside down and turned into advantages.

On Pearl, there are no wheels, and no shoes. Dragging things around is considered primitive. Everyone learns to skate as soon as they can walk. The people are xenophobic and consider the outside world barbaric.

Cliff observed that if you were kicking people with blades, that would be cool for war but for a sport would lead to some pretty serious injuries. Henry agreed and said that there is always the threat of real danger with this sport.

Henry explained that he loves rules. School is an environment girdled all around with rules to keep people from misbehaving, so it's a setting he loves to work in. Students at the wu liu school are not allowed to do any moves outside of class, or they will forfeit their next examination. This is a key element of the plot of Peasprout Chen. 

In particular, he says he wanted a fantasy world with no magic. George R. R. Martin consulted with him on aspects of it. Everything is grounded in real world experience, including the constant threat of injury that has grave consequences for the students. Even a bad wrist can knock you out. Henry himself got injured at one point during his training because he had become frustrated when another student did a kick the first time. Henry tried the same jump and tore his hamstring; he said it looked like someone had cut him. 

Danger creates good stories. Ambition is a characteristic required by the sport.

Henry quoted a line from Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell: "Don't talk to me about magic. It's like everything else: full of setbacks and disappointments." If this is the way your work seems, then whenever you achieve something, it feels like a huge accomplishment! Peasprout Chen's life is full of cultural landmines and danger, but when she does something cool, we cheer.

I asked Henry what elements of the world had been developed between the initial Asimov's story and this novel. He said a lot of it was what he had developed with George R. R. Martin. He took a look at the structures that made the society and the city work, like food delivery, money and insurance. You need to understand these mundane things.

"If pigs could fly, bacon would be expensive."

Thus, it's important to explore the mundane consequences of fantasy things. How do people tell time? How are they called to class? How would people of their technology and sensibility go about building things?

Henry said he'd ended up with a 100-page encyclopedia, but that it was joyful to write. He knows that at dusk, when the sun goes down, the rich go home and the poor take public transport, while kids go fare-jumping by hanging on the back of a tram. Little things in this world, he explains, are very real to him. After writing in it so much and being "a hermit" in his habits, he feels he knows the world of Pearl better than ours.

If people have glasses, where are they manufactured? If there's no green space, how is food distributed?

Henry told us about his agent, Tina DuBois, and his editor, Tiffany Liau, both of whom he greatly admires. They helped him to think hard about questioning the usual generalizations, like "girls are more relational." This is commonly claimed, but is not universal. Not every girl wants that out of life. There are social forces that cause women to need to figure each other out, but some still say, "I'm busy here." This is the case for Peasprout Chen. Henry said he thought very hard about her because she resists relationships, and is not really ready for them. She decides her own place in her world.

Henry says he's very grateful to the people who nurtured and inspired him in his writing process, and most of them are women. They helped him portray the characters realistically, with variety and intensity.

Tiffany Liau, Henry says, is a genius with plotting. She had zero problem with the all-Asian cast with some LGBT characters; she said, "Let's make it a page-turner." Henry believes that the style of an editor can be as distinct as that of a writer, and put a unique stamp on the writing.

He was inspired in part by Kelly Link, because she writes across genres and for different ages. She helped him perceive genres as constructs with porous borders. Henry said that if you don't impose those limits on yourself, the world might not be as resistant as you think. The language can be beautiful even in a book for young people, and you shouldn't dumb it down.

Tina DuBois, Henry's agent, was the one who said, "Do you not realize what's special about this? The star is the voice, the main character." Henry explained that he hadn't been able to realize this because the character was too close to him, which made it hard to see. He also said that Kelly Link had given him some really important encouragement when he finished his first three chapters.

Our discussant, Sally, remarked that it wouldn't be right if a figure skating plot did not include LGBT characters. Henry said it's possible to think of figure skating as a non-binary sport, given that it requires both grace and strength. It draws a diversity of athletes who each approach this balance in a different way. He noted that even in point-based sports like basketball, fans still talk about the grace of the athletes, and deeply appreciate it.

Kat suggested that people who are less inclined to mix grace with brutal intensity will move to sports other than figure skating. There's no padding for people who are learning the beginner jumps. Only if you get to a very advanced level will they put the skaters on a rig to help them with spectacular jumps.

Henry said that he never got over how alien figure skating felt. It seemed an arbitrary idea for a sport, to him, and the experts in it seemed they were from another planet.

Cliff asked Henry if he felt he was a substantially different person after writing Peasprout Chen. Henry said, essentially, no. He said that people sometimes think their lives will begin once they publish their first novel, but it hasn't happened to him. There are gradations of change, perhaps, but he can't see it. He hates the promotional part of being a debut novelist, and says he's always doing things outside his comfort zone.

He said the most amazing thing that had happened with his debut involved a song he had written for New Year's celebrations at the Academy in the book. He researched, and managed to learn the Apple Garage Band suite of Chinese instruments in order to compose the song. Then, Idina Menzel sang it with him at his launch party! He rented a small taiko drum so he would have something to do with his hands, learned to drum for 10 straight hours before the launch party, and played it while they sang.

Henry says he's just finished Book 2 of the series, which he calls "My favorite book of all time." It's called Peasprout Chen, Future Champion of the Battlebands. He's currently working on Book 3.

Henry, thank you so much for coming on the show! This world sounds like it's expanded and developed in truly amazing ways, and everyone should go check out Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword.

Tomorrow, May 15, 2018, at 4:00pm Pacific, we'll be joined on the show by author Kelly Robson, who will be talking about her climate-change and time-travel mixing novella, "Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach." I hope you can join us!

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Exploring the Impact and Implications of Your Speculative Concept

So this session, with a very fancy title, is basically about what happens after you have a really cool speculative idea. You got an idea for a gadget, or for a magic power, or for a fundamental change in physics, or, or, or... There are potentially an infinite number of such ideas, but once you've decided to create a world with one of these features, what comes next? How do you figure out what life in a world with magic, or life in a world with this unique technology, would be like? How far would the impact of that change spread, and what kinds of different things might it influence?

These are important questions to ask, but we established one caveat before we dived into the topic, which is: you don't actually need to explore these questions in incredible depth in order for your story to succeed. We talked about Harry Potter, where people act as though magic has always been around, and yet muggle society (and even, arguably, wizarding society) is surprisingly un-influenced by it. You need to understand enough for the story to work. How much is too much? Hard to know. But if you do too little of this, you may leave some opportunities off the table.

Che remarked, about urban fantasy, "Does everyone knows vampires and werewolves exist? Or is it a secret? How does it stay secret?"

What are the parameters of your speculative phenomenon? Do they have legal implications?

I recommended Soulless by Gail Carriger because it demonstrates a lot of great thinking about the social consequences of having vampires and werewolves integrated into British society. The social details here are quite delightful. Che recommends Anno Dracula by Kim Newman, with a different view of what would happen if Dracula took over England and changed it. One of the details she mentioned was a scene with a live pig with a spigot in its neck, from which vampires would drink the blood. She also mentioned that in this book, young vampires are not supernaturally strong, and that it takes a long time for them to develop their strength. Variation within a group like this is important.

Keep in mind that it's relatively easy to think through the surface details of something like this, and much harder to think about the deep underpinnings of it, including its inception, history, and large-scale influences on society.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin is a stellar example of deep worldbuilding, where the implications of her orogenic magic are explored on a lot of levels. One of the most interesting aspects about it is how she portrays the powerful orogenes as persecuted minorities.

Morgan said that if you have an introduced social group, you need to figure out whether they are dominant or not in society. You also need to know if they are publicly visible or publicly acknowledged.

How does the thing you've invented change physical infrastructure? Even a special dominant social group can change physical infrastructure, because furniture and architecture are designed with the dominant group's needs in mind.

Kate pointed out that when you have TV shows where white people are being oppressed, they  never seem to go to the minorities on the show for advice on how to cope with oppression.

The question of how you live under oppression is one that people tend not to engage with in much depth. Even the X-Men world doesn't dig deep into the question.

These kinds of questions deserve TIME. Particularly if you are working in a complex, socially realistic world, give yourself the time to muse about these details. Sometimes getting all the complexity in will take several drafts. If you give it enough time and care, you can get a cool feeling of immersion.

Of course, you don't need to have complexity for enjoyment. But there's a difference between a light-hearted conceit and a phenomenon deeply integrated into its world.

Ann Leckie's universe is extremely complex. In general, she doesn't ever stop out of the action to explain things. However, she makes the necessary information available to readers when it is maximally relevant. This is a really good technique to use (and similar to what I do).

Whenever you have a world that is super-complex, you'll run into the problem of how to control it. One really useful tool for controlling world information is Point of View. It's very helpful if we only need to understand what one person understands (particularly so, since we are One Person). Multiple point of view can add to this in helpful ways without letting the entirety of the world weigh down the narrative.

Outsider perspectives on a world are also helpful at times because outsiders are allowed to ask questions and struggle with comprehending things. Ann Leckie's character, Breq, is uniquely positioned as a point of view character because she is both on top and on the bottom. She is the instrument of the Radchaai's power, and therefore has power over people, yet is a piece of nonhuman equipment to them. When a character is considered harmless, or as in Breq's case, totally under control, people may not be careful about what they say in her presence.

Kate recommended the book Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman for an example of a character who is an insider and an outsider at the same time... and then ends up having to be the go-between for someone who is even further outside. The consequences of this are complex and interesting.

Cliff mentioned how in the Hunger Games, it's helpful to readers how Katniss' tight point of view changes over the course of the story. She starts as the lowest group, an outsider to Capital society, and then gains some status by Book 2 and has to cope with its consequences because she retains her class consciousness. She has real power against the Powers That Be, but it is still limited in key ways.

I mentioned how my world of Varin has several different speculative features, each of which has its own set of consequences. People there have lived underground for so long that when they find themselves on the surface, they feel more comfortable at night than in the daytime. The reason for this is that they can comprehend the idea of darkness overhead, and even darkness with little lights in it (because of the wysps).

Cliff mentioned that Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky has sentient spiders, and because the sun dims and brightens, underground is safety. This isn't just a practical concern but also feeds into the symbolic understanding of a statue that looks like it's digging. The statue is actually reaching downward for comfort, and represents peace.

I mentioned The Shifter by Janice Hardy as a great example of thorough exploration of a speculative concept. In this world, the only magic is healing magic, and healers pull pain out of the people they heal into their own bodies. Then they must push it out into a magical metal before it hurts them. When she was designing the world, she told me about how she wanted magic users to be strong and burly, rather than bookish... so the sorcerers are the metal-workers. The concept of healing magic and metal used to store pain grew a lot, though, into a whole economic system. Once the pain is in the metal, there is demand to use the metal for weapons that can throw that pain at others. So there starts to be a drive for war, because the wounds of war provide fuel for the weapons needed to win it. It's fascinating and troubling.

Dune also has really extensive consideration of the impacts of Spice, which keeps you young, lets you fold space, and gives you superpowers.

As you expand a concept and explore its implications, keeping sense-making and consistency are very important.

Cliff mentioned how Star Trek transporter technology should have had much greater impacts than it did. Why not use a replicator for babies? Can the transporter fix DNA and keep people from growing old? If you run into the people of the phage, why can't you replicate organs rather than stealing them?

As we can see with Harry Potter and Star Trek, underpinnings are not necessary for you to have a very successful story! But sometimes it bothers readers when things have not been thought through. Sometimes you can run into inconsistencies in sequels and prequels.

Thank you very much to everyone who participated in this discussion! Today, Dive into Worldbuilding meets at 4pm Pacific to discuss Building Back Histories. I hope you can join us!

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