There are a lot of different types of competitions, but we started with one that is a favorite of genre authors - the competition for succession to a seat of power. This is something that occurs in a lot of stories, including N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Frank Herbert's Dune, and many others. Such a competition happens in my forthcoming novel, but I wanted to run it in such a way that it would not be a battle royale or a bloodbath!
Cliff mentioned that in the Ottoman empire, assassination was the way to go to assure succession, and that it must have been weird knowing all your siblings and half siblings would have to die for you to achieve power.
In Jenn Lyons' The Ruin of Kings, there is a battle royale that happens in a prescribed space, so the king can't choose the Heir.
Kat wanted to see a story told from the perspective of someone who is not wily or strong and is stuck just waiting for someone to off them - the story of the non-victor. In this vein, "I, Claudius" was mentioned, as was Pillars of the Earth. An interesting story might involve someone saying, "Screw you, I'm just going to live as long as I can." In the Vorkosigan novels, everyone thinks they can co-opt Miles or his brother. Kate felt that a Peter story would be amazing. Cliff mentioned The Goblin Emperor, in which an unexpected heir turns up because everyone else was killed in an airship accident.
Historically, Henry IV became king of France when the previous king had no heir, and they had to search back along the genealogy and back down again to find someone who had blood relation to the royalty. They found Henry IV in Navarre and told him he was the king of all France.
Much is implied about a society by the kinds of competitions they set up - both for power successions and for other purposes.
Kat wanted to see more exploration of cooperative games as opposed to winner-take-all games. What would a world look like if it were based on cooperation and measured by cooperation? Even D&D has an us vs them mentality.
When you are looking at a siege, it's easy to think about how the people who are trapped might get supplies, but make sure also to consider how the besiegers get their supplies.
There is a large-scale assumption in narrative that we have to have competition, particularly antagonists.
Our sense of competition is often gendered. How do competitions designed by men or boys differ from those designed by women or girls? Would there be differences with non-binary gender?
Cliff told us that Babylon 5 featured coexisting competitive and cooperative philosophies which ended up striving against each other.
Do we need to have competition in order to foster excellence? How else might it be done?
Competitions often create pressure to divide groups by different criteria, and the selection process can be a site of shaming.
In classes, we tell people to do group projects without teaching them how to do group projects.
We ask companies to compete for bids on government projects without considering how competition encourages people to cut corners, which harms results.
Not all stories require people to compete against one another. We also imagine adventure stories that pit people against their environment, etc.
Why don't we have more stories about seed growers?
Cliff said he liked hacky sack because it was a cooperative game. He noted that Stephen King's The Stand involved people who were trying to build community. The show Jeremiah talked about trying to rebuild civilization after an apocalyptic disease.
Paul mentioned that the game Dead of Winter requires players to cooperate to win. He also mentioned that Spirit Island, while it has colonial tropes, has spirits working together against colonial invasion.
Kat talked about the game Terraforming Mars, which is not cooperative, but in which people can find themselves inadvertently contributing to each other's success. Settlers of Catan, she described as "let's go invade this place with individualistic goals." Monopoly is clearly competitive, and was originally designed to teach the evils of capitalism, but was interpreted by most in a non-satirical way. It's essentially "Gentrification, the game."
In Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series, the alien species called the Oankali does not have a competitive drive but an acquisitive one. Butler specifically examines the ins and outs of these differences. It does feature xenophobic humans, and the Oankali have a dodgy sense of consent. It's not posited as a utopia. The Oankali's critique of humans is that they are both intelligent and hierarchical. The story plays into fears of someone taking your germ line.
Dune has a grand game competition. The Snow Queen by Joan Vinge has a foot race. Game of Thrones has a lot of bloody battles. Nine Princes in Amber also centers a competition, but the pursuit of the throne changes to a larger project.
What it would be like if a potential leader were required to have a 5 year, a 50 year, and a 500 year plan?
Paul recommended Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire.
Romance often involves competition in the form of rivals for a relationship. Why not have that become a three-way relationship?
Kat said she's seeing more poly stories, but none that have made a major splash. Kate mentioned that there were such relationships in Sarah Gailey's hippo stories. Kat said Laurell K. Hamilton has some non-monogamy. There is an audience for fiction that features such relationships but perhaps less of one at the publisher level.
We all felt we would love to see "Cozy Marvel stories" where the day to day life of Marvel superheroes got explored.
At that point I brought up The Hunger Games. One of the reasons I feel this is such a brilliant series is that Suzanne Collins gets readers deeply invested in the outcome of the games, and then points out that readers have become complicit with the viewers of Panem. There is a tension between rooting for the hero and indicting our sense of competition.
The book A Player of Games by Iain Banks features a person paid to go and disrupt an empire. In this story the winner fo a game competition becomes Emperor. The book critiques the notion of competitive games. At the end, you find yourself wondering who won and who lost, what is left for the empire, and whether the intervention was good.
Competitions are not all one versus one. They can be one versus many, or many versus many. Many times, competition is not equal or simple.
Ritual combat is a way to simplify a larger competition, but it has drawbacks.
Many competitions are rigged. Either the competition itself is skewed so not everyone has an equal chance, or entry to the competition is limited.
Cliff recommended the book Interface by Stephen Bury, talking about electoral politics in the United states and how it functions differently from what we are told. He said he found it very disturbing. Stephen Bury is a pseudonym for the writing team of Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George.
We touched briefly on the question of competition in writing. Are we competing with each other? This question's answer depends a lot on the gatekeepers of canon. Marginalized people can be told that there are limits on the number of stories about their issues, while mainstream people get fifty slots for the same kinds of stories. Outside the mainstream, people thus get forced into competition. If you are visible, you end up doing emotional labor. Are you allowed to be just "a writer" or are you slotted into a niche?
Genre culture can be very competitive because of the limited number of slots for writing workshops, awards, etc. It often runs along socioeconomic lines. Money should always flow to the writer, but we are often called upon to make investments in our careers like paying for workshops, or even developmental editing etc. If you have limitations on your free time, this can also become a factor, when workshops run for long periods of time.
We didn't even have a chance to do much about science fiction and fantasy sports! Sigler has a football-based novel with aliens. Fonda Lee wrote Zeroboxer. Matt Wallace has a book with wrestling martial arts. Run Time by S.B. Divya and Achilles' Choice also came up in this context. We wondered whether people are still publishing sports stories, and whether demographic changes have influenced this at all. Kate Elliott has sport in Court of Fives. J.K. Rowling created quidditch. In DS9, aliens play baseball.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion! This week, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet on Tuesday, April 2 to discuss Monuments. I hope you can join us!
This was a really great discussion. Special thank you to our guest author Vida Cruz for persisting until she actually made it into the hangout, despite technical difficulties, and to our discussants for their patience while we resolved those issues to the best of our ability.
We started by discussing Vida's story "Odd and Ugly," which she describes as a retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in Spanish colonial Philippines. In this tale, the Beast is a Kapre, a kind of hairy giant who lives in a tree and smokes cigars, while Beauty is a farm girl. The story is told in second person from the Beast's point of view. Vida told us that she had written about these two characters in different iterations, and the Beauty and the Beast portion of the story came last.
Since the Spanish were in the Philippines for over 300 years, education has been heavily influenced by them. There is a dearth of good literature about the early colonial period. When Vida attended Clarion workshop in 2014, she did more research for that story.
In the story, the kapre views the farm girl with a combination of guilt and fascination. He's been living the bachelor life in a magical tree, and it's a bit of a mess. His servants can't do work, because they are flowers. He hoards things he has found in the forest over the years.
Vida told us that Tade Thompson was one of her beta readers and helped her flesh out the connection to world history. Spoilers - the kapre is a former runaway African slave who was transformed. It appears that some of the origins of the kapre myth include the fact that the Spanish told the natives of the region that escaped slaves were monsters. This added historical element is integrated beautifully and sensitively into the story.
Another character in the story is a diwata, which is most closely translated to "fairy" but is also like a mountain goddess who roams mountains and lakes. In this story, the diwata is missing, and Beauty wants to know where the diwata has gone and why she is not helping to chase away the Spaniards. This diwata is modeled on a diwata called Maria Makiling who is the spirit of the mountains outside of Manila, the protector of both the mountains and the bay. There are many stories about her, quite a number featuring mortal lovers she had who either had to go to war or spurned her. There are stories about her from the Spanish colonial period, and also the American World War II period.
Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in Philippines mythology in the Philippines. There is a zine called "Spirits of the Archipelago" that focuses on them. Vida directs those who are interested in this topic to The Aswang Project website.
A lot of the mythological stories grew out of oral culture, so it is hard to recapture them since the people experienced colonial invasion. People have tried to write down these stories a few times.
Kate remarked how this mythology would be a rich vein to mine since the West has had so little contact with that body of knowledge.
Vida told us how the Spaniards tried to stamp out these beliefs and stories. Most people in the provinces, though, still believe in aswang and you will be able to see things like hanging garlic and brooms across windows. Tagalog people had four local gods associated with death and dying. The Spanish took their names and turned them into witches in order to demonize them. It's important for us to try to find the original versions of these stories and preserve them wherever they can be found.
Next we talked about Vida's story about the origin of the mango. She told us this one was difficult to write. She worked on it during the Clarion workshop and had intended it to be the story for week 1, but ended up having to postpone it to week 2. This story is set in the pre-colonial period. There isn't much literature on this period - more now than there was in 2014, but at the time she had to rely on Google searches. The story features a mountain tribe living on rice terraces. The main character is a servant who works as a handmaiden to the heir to the tribe. This tribe values telling stories and singing, but the princess can't sing. The servant's brother falls in love with the princess, and she helps him court her, but he dies hunting the dowry boar. His sister goes and sings for him, and impresses the diwata of the mountain so much that she grants her one wish. The sister wishes to have her brother alive again, and the diwata brings him back as a magical mango tree.
One of the stories that inspired this piece was a story about a very good boy who dies and when his parents beg the diwata to bring him back, she turns his heart into a mango tree. Another variant is about a girl who kills herself, and when her heart is buried it grows a mango tree.
The mango tree is culturally important.
Vida expressed some uncertainty about the hearts being buried, because she explained that in pre-colonial times your liver, not your heart, was considered more important. However, it may be that the heart was chosen because mango fruit physically resembles a heart.
Kate asked if there were any spirits or deities associated with weather and storms. Vida said there was a creation story where someone fights a giant bird and the fight causes storms, but the world is born from that fight.
No one person knows everything about these stories. If you talk to different people you get different pieces of them, like trying to assemble a puzzle.
Vida has not yet written a story about the purple yam called ube. We were encouraging her to do so!
In fact, food features in both of the stories we discussed. A kapre who is courting a woman gives her food, but you are not supposed to eat it - especially black rice - or you will be stuck in his realm. The kapre favors a single tree. When you go inside it, it's one room of his house. The talking flower-servants were Vida's own invention. In fact, they livened up the story quite a bit! She told us the story was much slower when it was just the kapre and Maria, so she added the fire tree as a second in command. The flowers mirror aspects of filipino social communities where people know each other, gossip and have petty fights.
Right now, Vida is working on a Tiptree grant for a project involving an alternate Philippine archipelago with mythological creatures, told in the form of news articles. A journalist is determined to expose gender issues, the rise of fascism, and other things. One of the stories, "First Play for and by Tikbalang Triggers Uproar on Opening Night," has been published, but four more are planned. In one, Maria Makiling the diwata runs a popup cafe with human heartbreak as her secret ingredient. She picks up people really suffering as victims of martial laws under Marcos. In a sense, she said, writing this was to counter the revisionism that is currently happening in Philippine politics, where there's a resurgence of fondness for Marcos. Vida says that recent talk about the "good things Marcos did" have her worried about upcoming elections.
Still in the works is a story skewering the Duterte regime, in which there's a civil war between mythological creatures and the government because Duterte kissed Maria Makiling without consent and she demanded an apology.
Another story is about a human girl, age 12, and a mermaid marooned on shore after Typhoon Haian, trying to survive in the post-typhoon city. This one features a mermaid hierarchy, climate change, and sea pollution diminishing the mermaids' power to stop typhoons.
When asked what other filipino writers she was inspired by, Vida cited Dean and Nikki Alfar, who she calls the Oberon and Titania of speculative fiction in the Philippines. She says that the genre didn't really boom until the 2000s, but that every spec fic writer there owes them a debt. She also recommends The Infinite Library and Other Stories by Victor Ocampo.
Vida told us she really wants to see an alien invasion story set in the Philippines because the people there are so used to such things. She said if they met an alien "we would invite it to our houses and serve it lunch, but make it take its shoes off first. We're kind of doing it all the time."
Vida also recommended a great image of the three diwata Marias (Makiling, Sinukuan, and Cacao) and a friend, which can be found here.
Vida, thank you again for coming on the show and sharing your work with us! This was fascinating, and I hope you can come on again sometime.
Don't forget, if you like the blog and the show, you can come support me and get extra worldbuilding goodies like links and topic prompts at my Patreon, here.
This was a topic that came up because of recent online discussion of "right to repair" laws. I had initially understood these as laws intended to counter planned obsolescence, but in large part they are to protect businesses that refurbish and resell electronics etc. from being sued (under accusation of violation of intellectual property law).
Kat noted that our culture is very pro-corporate and forces people to be consumers. Would it be possible for people not to be consumers? What kind of legal structures exist that make it easy or difficult to choose not to consume?
Morgan noted that something as simple as a faulty charging cord can turn a sophisticated piece of equipment into a "brick."
Who builds things in your society? What is repairable? Who repairs it (if anyone does)?
Che noted that repairing something often voids a warranty, so we discussed what a warranty is and what it does. Essentially it is an agreement saying that the item is rated to keep working for a period of time. Short-term warranties protect against defects. Longer-term warranties restrict the purchaser so they can only get their product repaired by the company that originally made it.
Why don't companies do more to protect consumers? Where is the benefit? Why not have an onboard surge protector in the computer itself?
Repairing things used to be normal. Now it has become (as Kat says) "hipster and twee." It's also become commercialized so that in order to do a "life hack" you need to buy a product.
Do you own a sautering iron? Kat feels as though she should have one, but says this is likely because she lived on a houseboat where she needed to weld things.
Screws used to be standardized, and most things used screws. Now companies have started using proprietary screws. They will make things that can be assembled without tools, but that can mean they can't be disassembled. Sonically welded plastic is sealed so you can't open it, or so you can't open it without breaking it.
We often assume things should be thrown away, but we aren't even very good at knowing how to throw them away properly. People often ignore recycling rules, for example.
Sometimes you will see a post on social media about decorative repair of clothes, where you patch something and add an embroidered flower or something. This is an option only for people who have the necessary skills.
Culturally, we have lost some of the "hand-me-down" tradition of passing things along to younger siblings or cousins. Clothing has become more common in landfill.
People are having fewer opportunities to learn how to use tools like hammers, etc.
You can also repair other things. If a recipe has gone wrong, you may be able to change it in some way to make it come out all right.
Having knowledge of how something is constructed (object or food!) is useful to knowing how to repair it.
Medical care, especially first aid, can be a kind of repair. Especially if you are on a boat or otherwise isolated from the immediate opportunity to seek care on the outside, you need to have some skill at handling this yourself. Kat thinks having an army medic's kit would be very helpful! We're encouraged to go to experts for healthcare.
Repair could be considered a cultural right and ritual.
There used to be people who would travel around and offer their skills as a tinker to repair pots and pans and other items in the home.
Science fiction loves its engineers and inventors, and repair of spaceships etc. occurs numerous times in Star Trek. However, when you have replicators, disposal and reconstitution atom by atom is an option and makes repair of everyday items less common.
Fantasy has a very interesting thematic concern with repairing what is wrong with the world.
Morgan pointed out how interesting it was that the thirteenth Doctor constructed her own sonic screwdriver.
What would a science-fictional Radio Shack look like?
It's worth taking inspiration from Neal Stephenson and asking how things degrade over time.
We're often too busy in our stories to think about whether things break and whether they need to be repaired.
How often do we look at how things get washed?
Many stories get written by the type of people whose tea appears mysteriously. It's worth taking some time to look for the tea-bringers.
Anne McCaffrey's Harper Hall books were great because they gave some attention to who does menial tasks, and who does labor.
In fantasy, we often have repair, and clockmakers. But if you see a cauldron, who made it? Think about where to find the woodworkers and blacksmiths.
Are some things repairable at home, and others only repairable by experts?
Are ceramics repairable? How?
Often our repairs are visible, and documentable. What would happen if you had nanotech to repair things? How would that effect carbon dating or the other means we use to reconstruct the history of an object?
Was the pot broken for a reason? Sometimes haunted objects get broken or buried in faraway places. Maybe something was broken to annihilate it, and it should not be repaired.
Think about the social context of repair. If everything gets thrown away, repair might be transgressive. If everything gets repaired, getting a new thing might be transgressive.
Poor people might need to repair things more. If you have more money and more leisure, you might dispose of things. Tossing things out is a sign of privilege. Poverty encourages repair, but it means people might not have tools or skills to accomplish the repair.
Kat noted that people who live on farms or boats can still use tools that seem outdated in cities (like a tool to turn wire into a hose clamp!).
In science fiction you don't often see people tying things together. Snaps are much more common. Buttons are a very old technology.
Think about whether an heirloom artifact might be repaired. I used an artifact like this in my 2008 story "Let the Word Take Me."
Science fiction sometimes forgets that people do collect and keep things.
Some cultures are geared to preserve objects and others to destroy them.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion! Dive into Worldbuilding will meet tomorrow at 4pm Pacific to discuss Competitions. I hope you can join us!
This topic was so much fun that we gave it two hours! We came into it from the question of how worldbuilding drives footwear. Obviously, climate and geography are involved. We certainly have to get beyond the default fantasy assumption of boots. What other kinds of rugged footgear are there? We also talked about footwear behaviors.
Kat asked: do people take off their shoes as they enter a home? If so, those shoes must come off easily, and can't be exclusively-lace-up boots. Does a house have a place where you can sit to buckle or lace shoes? She remarked that she used to think of shoe removal as an East vs. West phenomenon until she learned about Western no-shoes-in-the-house culture in Finland.
Sometimes you need different footgear for school.
Roman lace-up sandals stay on. Geta come on and off.
Some boots lace and zip both, to let them be more flexible. Morgan said she remembers going out without her boots zipped to save time.
In heavy snow regions you can find snow boots, and stairs made of grillwork with holes to let the snow fall through. There can be snow scrapers beside the door. You can also add special traction apparatus to your boots to increase your safety on ice and snow.
Boat docks can have grooves to make sure people don't slip on them.
Your shoes can influence your gait. Some shoes encourage tiptoeing or small steps. Others encourage sauntering. Shoes can reflect social status.
Cliff mentioned that hobbits wear no shoes at all. It's particularly noticeable when you arrive in a place like Bree, where humans are wearing boots and hobbits seem in danger of being stepped on a lot. They would end up standing on tables with their muddy feet, though!
In WWI, boots were both protective and dangerous. Trench foot and gangrene caused people to lose toes or their entire feet. When the trenches flooded, people's feet would swell and they might not be able to take their shoes off.
What are snowshoes made of? What materials would be available for your people to make shoes with?
High heels used to be male footwear, but now they are predominantly female footwear. Certain styles of footwear are coded (like dominatrix boots). Shoes can indicate subcultures. Watch out if you think lucite platform shoes are cool looking, because they have been marked as street-walker gear.
Nurses wear particular types of footwear. Certain brands cater specially to them.
Kat talked about the problem of shoes not fitting our feet. Different populations might tend to have different foot size and shape, as the Dutch who are statistically tall with large feet.
When rental shoes are critical to participation in something like ice skating, roller skating, bowling, etc. shoes and their fit can become an access issue.
Paul remarked that we haven't always had Left and Right shoes; they used to be symmetrical.
In science fiction, creatures can have clawed feet that are hard to shoe (this happened in Star Trek, for example).
Cliff talked about the ritual of footwear that used to take place on planes: people would take off shoes and put on foot covers.
These days, shoe sizes are somewhat standardized. They are cheaper, but don't fit all. Custom shoes will fit, but you need a cobbler and the means to pay them.
Sometimes shoes are designed to create an impression that feet are larger or smaller, since culture creates pressure for smaller feet among women. This is only a piece of the larger pressures surrounding women and the expectation of delicacy.
Foot binding was an indicator of social class in a particular historical time period in China, but to ask modern Chinese or others about it now is a racial microagression.
We should not exoticize the pressure to constrict feet for delicacy: bunions on feet only happen when you wear confining shoes many hours a day, but here in the US they are accepted as relatively normal.
Cliff told us about a conflict of cultural expectations between himself and his wife. Debby was a ballet dancer, and had pointe shoes hanging on the wall as decoration, but Cliff had spent so much time internalizing the expectations of his sitar-playing circles, which say that shoes should not be near musical instruments, that he found it uncomfortable to have shoes hanging on the wall.
Kat said if you are worldbuilding about shoes, consider whether a home has a designated place to put on shoes. There generally isn't such a place in white American culture. In any culture which requires shoe usage to differ drastically between outside and inside, you will typically find a designated shoe-donning area. In Japan, schoolchildren line up at the start and end of school to use shoe cubbies like lockers. Cliff mentioned that he encountered a similar setup at the college where he studied sitar. Western architecture tends to lend itself just to piles of shoes, although as Morgan mentioned, some homes have mudrooms, especially in the Northeast. Even those rooms, though, don't always offer a place to sit.
People who will have to put shoes on and take them off all the time are more likely to have a long-handled shoehorn that allows them to put on shoes while standing. Shoehorns themselves are not as common as they used to be.
Cliff mentioned that shoeshine businesses used to be found on street corners and largely service men's shoes. If you are looking at shoe-shining, ask who is doing the shining. Is it lower-status people? Marginalized ethnic backgrounds? Children? In the past, children used to do the job of shoe-shining, at least in many parts of the US, but they were discouraged by child labor laws. In some cultures a job like this would be gendered, and in others it would not be. If a shoeshine business is in a male-centric culture, women can be discouraged from going there even though their shoes also need care.
How does your footwear link your climate and the way you walk? A particular type of shoe will be adapted to protect the foot from a particular range of temperature and moisture. That type of shoe may also constrain how a person can set down their foot while wearing it.
The European hard leather-soled shoe is not made for many environments. In particular environments it can be lethally slippery! It's good for sidewalks that are just a little rough, but not practical for mud, ice, or wet areas. It is often presented as an emblem of civilization, ideal for durability and traction, but the contexts in which this is actually true are limited.
What kinds of footwear do workmen wear? In Australia you can have elastic-sided boots, in England you'll have rubber boots ("wellies"), and in Japan, truck drivers will also wear rubber boots, but a cook will wear a particular type of white rubber boots. American workers often wear steel-toed boots.
Floridians will tend to underprotect their feet and wear flip-flops all the time (we heard a story about a welder wearing flip-flops!).
In Japan there is also a kind of boot worn by workers who must climb scaffolding. It's a canvas boot with a rubber sole and a separated big toe.
Shoes with a separated big toe can leave calluses between the toes. You could have a plot point where people were looking for a callus between the toes to see if a person was an insider (who wore insider's split toe shoes) or an outsider.
How often do you wear shoes? If you wear them a lot, your feet may be tender and soft.
Some shoe companies argue that letting toddlers use hard-soled shoes will incline them to flat feet. We weren't sure how true this was, but cultures do have many different beliefs about what kind of shoes one should wear for one's appearance and one's health.
There is no one kind of foot for optimal health. It all depends on what you will be doing with your feet. In some environments, flat feet are not necessarily a problem.
Cliff mentioned the shoes that are coded for children with lights and wheels. Some of us wanted them for adults, too.
Are you allowed to take a dead man's boots? Are they spoils of war? Are they haunted boots?
What kind of footgear should you wear on cobblestones?
Are there special types of ritual footwear? Yom Kippur forbids leather sandals because they are considered a signifier of high class, and you are not supposed to do things that indicate class status.
There can be a lot of social pressure to wear particular shoes.
Motorcycle boots are supposed to protect you from the heat of the motorcycle. There are firefighting boots. There can be magnetic boots. What is on your feet under your space suit? It may have more to do with culture than practicality.
Morgan noted that the TV show Bones makes a point of talking about the inappropriate footwear of the character Booth, asking why he's wearing fancy shoes in a muddy, wet crime scene. It's a reversal of the trope of criticizing women for the same reasons.
A lot of shoes are coded for gender. Shoe shopping is stereotyped as female.
Going barefoot is relatively normalized in Australia, while in the US there are signs reading "No shoes, no shirt, no service."
Regionally there are different words for the same footwear, like "sneakers," "tennis shoes," and "trainers." Then there are lots of shoes referred to by their brand names, like Doc Martens, Keds, Converse, etc.
At this point, our time was up and we felt like we hadn't finished our discussion! So we decided to resume two weeks later. For the purposes of not making my readers look around for the post, I'm combining the two sessions here.
Part 2
In this session we began by talking about orthotics, where you either have special shoes, or you put special inserts into your shoes in order to improve foot health or compensate for foot problems of various types (everything from low arches to legs of different lengths).
There are also special therapeutic boots that you can wear to protect an injured foot. These are bad in many ways, but better than a cast!
You can also get prosthetic feet and legs. These take various forms, including running blades, lifelike prosthetics, and art prosthetics, which can be very pretty!
Some footwear is designed to change your foot for a particular type of use. Ballerina pointe shoes have a structure designed to allow walking on the toes.
Much footwear is designed around a certain set of expectations about which of your toes will be longer. This varies, however. The Vibram 5 toe shoes assume you have a flat toe profile, and thus are only appropriate for people with a certain foot shape. Some people love those shoes, and some find stimulation between the toes to be uncomfortable.
Morgan noted that our footwear is seasonal, with sneakers or barefoot in summer and boots in winter. Kat told us she has a pair of Baffin island boots with a cuff which were designed for frozen mud, and are too warm for a great many weather conditions. It's valuable if you live in a snowy climate to have a variety of snow boots for guests who might not be prepared.
Kat pointed out that in Japanese, the word "ashi" incorporates all parts of the lower extremity from the hip down, though people can obviously refer to just the foot.
Cliff mentioned a fictional situation in Samuel R. Delany's Nova where spacers wore only one shoe so they could have a third hand.
Sometimes, animals can wear shoes, as when their owners are trying to protect their feet from heat or cold.
Sometimes, humans can wear animal-foot-shaped shoes, as when we wear flippers to improve our swimming abilities.
What if you need your shoe to grip? In the last session, we mentioned magnetic shoes. This time we talked about grippy shoes, including gecko shoes and gloves.
We talked about roller skates. These have taken many different forms. They started with metal wheels and clamps that would go over normal footwear, with a key to tighten them. Then they got vinyl wheels. Then they had a divergence between the rollerblades, which are fastened like ski boots, and the quad skates, which continued to have skateboard wheels. Quad skates are the only ones that work for certain forms of roller dancing. Now we are back to having clamp-on skates again, but with a different kind of technology.
Rocket boots are also a type of footwear.
Shoes can be designed to attach to leg braces or other kinds of medical support for the legs.
Roller derby has its own subculture of footwear. One of our discussants described it as a "badass feminist subculture with aliases." They use quad skates. The sport grew out of 1920's roller skate races, which in the 1930's moved onto racetracks.
Ice skates began as tie-on blades for shoes, and now they have become both complex and diversified. Hockey skates differ from figure skates in that hockey skates don't have teeth at the front of the blade, which are used in the jumps in figure skating. Long track speed skating uses clap skates, where the blade is only attached to the top of the skate at the very front, allowing a skater to raise speed by keeping the blade on the ice as long as possible. Henry Lien has used ice skates in fiction, in his Peasprout Chen world. He created a martial art that combines kung fu and figure skating. People in this world don't skate on ice, but on a material called "pearl." We all agreed this was epic footgear worldbuilding!
Folklore is surprisingly full of unusual footwear, including seven league books, winged sandals, the single-toothed geta of the tengu, red shoes that dance you to death, red hot iron shoes used as punishment, ruby slippers, shoes enchanted to be perfectly quiet, and fairy shoemakers.
People may distinguish themselves by not wearing shoes, as in the case of mendicant monks and mystics. Foot-washing may be a tradition when footwear lets in dirt.
Some people design special footwear to create a deliberately unusual footprint, like a cryptic footprint. These are less than plausible because they typically show no flexibility of the foot bed.
Wooden shoes have existed in many locations. In the Netherlands, they are called klompen. In France they are called sabots. People throwing wooden shoes to stop the working of machines gave rise to the term "sabotage."
Don't forget to ask if there are any special turns of phrase related to footwear! How do we talk about our shoes?
Gestures with shoes can be culturally important, as when someone threw shoes at George W. Bush, or when Kruschev banged his shoe on the table. What would be the significance of something like this in your world?
How we put on or take off our shoes can be important as an element of character-building. Do you toe your shoes off? Shuck them off? What, exactly?
Sneaker culture is a modern footwear-centered phenomenon. It's intense, creates a drive for increased fashion and consumption, and has its own community. What kind of social groups might be designed around particular footwear, or marked by footwear?
In Greece at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the guards wear special shoes with pompoms and do formalized marching.
Many dancing styles come with their own style of footwear, like ballroom dance shoes, jazz shoes, tap shoes, clogs, etc.
Kat mentioned "taxi shoes," which are shoes totally impractical for walking which people will wear if they intend to take a taxi from place to place in New York. She mentioned in particular "scrappy thin-soled high heel spike" shoes.
A shoe can give you foot habits.
Sandals, which we often talk about as though they are a single style of shoe, vary incredibly widely. They are "any shoe that shows your foot." Some people try to hide parts of their feet, such as "toe cleavage."
The wearing of Birkenstocks is a subculture. Teva had its own subculture for a while, when it was the only brand of wet/dry shoes.
What would happen to your shoes on a heavy-gravity planet? Would there be no high heels? What about platforms?
You can choose shoes that change your body's appearance, making you taller, or tightening your backside. These shoes can fit you to chairs and other things intended for taller people.
You can have fireproof shoes, or chemical-resistant soles.
There can be rules for color and style according to the season.
Are you expected to match your shoes to your other clothes? Is this gendered?
How are shoes gendered in your society? Are they?
Some people remove the heels from high heels and modify them into "hoof shoes" to create the illusion of having horse-, cow-, or goat-like feet.
Thank you to everyone who attended these two sessions and contributed your wealth of footgear-related ideas!
Don't forget, if you like the blog and the show, you can come support me and get extra worldbuilding goodies like links and topic prompts at my Patreon, here.
It was an absolute pleasure to have Dr. Heidi Stauffer on the show to talk about her area of expertise, Geology. Our thought was initially that geology was underused in genre, but she had the insight that it can be overwhelming for people, and they don't often want to take that dive.
If you're really wanting to go deep into geologically grounding a story, Heidi recommends you start at the solar system level, at least for hard science fiction. It's fine also to start at the planet level. Many people make the mistake of having an entire planet have the same climate. Remember, even frozen planets differ at the poles and the equator. If you are working with fantasy, it's fine to start at the continent level. If your people have a concept of the whole world, it's a good idea to think about the planet. If your people think at the level of the country or kingdom, then the continent level is fine.
You have more control the closer in you go.
There is no problem with using known Earth climates. They would be statistically likely given the size of our universe, and the possibility of other universes!
Heidi was asked whether it works to say that on Titan, water ice is like bedrock. She explained that many people struggle with the concept that hydrocarbon liquid can behave like water. Titan is missing free oxygen. Earth's free oxygen came from life. If you want free oxygen on another planet, you must find a way to put it there. In fact, it's not great for living things, because it's highly corrosive. It caused one of Earth's mass extinctions.
You can look at atomic structure similarity if you try to hypothesized silicon-based life. It will however be "life unlike we've ever known."
Chemistry is important to apply to worlds. So are biology, ecology, math, etc.
Heidi's Ph.D. is in climate modeling, but she did traditional geology for her Bachelor's and Master's degrees.
Consider the scale you are working on, temporally and physically.
Heidi told us she TA'd the natural history of dinosaurs, which allowed her to teach people about body size vs. metabolism vs. gravity. These are a set of calculations that work one way for our planet, but would have to be recalculated on another planet. Big insects can only exist on high oxygen planets. A lot of paleo-botany hasn't been done, and we don't necessarily know what plants dinosaurs ate, which leaves us making educated guesses based on their physiological needs and the general features of the climate.
Small changes in a planetary/geologic system can have a domino effect.
You don't have to choose between science and story. Both are important. If you want to tweak the story science, you must do so plausibly. A hot planet can still have frozen water depending on its orbit.
The snowball Earth phenomenon had partly to do with planetary configuration and the life cycle of the star. Our sun was 25% dimmer at that point. In fiction, you could knock a planet a bit out of orbit, and when everything aligns, you get a heavy glacial episode.
Think about how to link the geology to the lives of your characters. What are the seasons like? This grows out of orbit speed and planetary angle. For example, what are things like on Mars? What would happen if it were 50% bigger? What if there were one less planet? Maybe there might be a planet where the asteroids are.
Start with known, established things, and work from there.
What if Venus orbited Earth? Venus right now is too hot and too corrosive, and our instruments dissolve before they can measure much. What if it were cooler? It did have plate tectonics once.
Kate remarked that Tatooine would have weird tides if it had two suns.
Heidi suggested that we look at the moons of Saturn and Jupiter for complex tidal effects.
If you put a civilization on a rocky moon around a gas giant, how would you see daylight? When might it be blocked by the planet?
Heidi suggests the NASA websites, the NOAA website, and the US Geological Survey for research purposes. RealClimate.org is a good source where people deal with controversies and new research about climate. The Intergovernmental panel on Climate has summaries written for non-scientists.
PBS Learning Media website is a place where you can search by subject and grade level.
Think about maps and plate tectonics. Earth has layers that differ in density and rock type. The asthenosphere has a texture like silly putty: it's solid in the short term, but liquid in the long term. The rock plates rest on this. They are not like continents in an ocean, but like broken ice on a pond, all of them moving at once. They can move relative to each other in three ways:
1. Pulling away from each other.
2. Crashing into each other. When two plates collide, the one that is denser (the oceanic plate) is forced under.
3. Sliding past each other. This is called a transform fault.
Mountains are generally formed by number 2. This is how the Himalayas were formed. Number 1 forms ocean ridges, a mountain range on the abyssal plain.
These movements can change over time. The "young" coast ranges in the US were formed when the pate boundary was subduction rather than transform. Mid-continent mountain ranges can exist but usually are old and blunt.
A downgoing oceanic plate gets melted as it goes further down. The melted rock can rise up as volcanoes.
The Himalayas were formed when the Indian subcontinent broke off of Gondwana and slammed into the Asian continent. They are still rising. There are marine fossils on top of them! A spreading ridge by Antarctica causes this. New mountain ranges are high and sharp. Weathering will slowly wear it down like the Appalachians. The Hawaii emperor seamount chain is considered to be caused by a hotspot. We assume the hotspot to be stationary with the plate moving over it (otherwise the math is a nightmare). In Yellowstone, magma keeps pushing up.
In a possible twist, there may be the equivalent of mountain chains pointing toward the core of the earth.
Volcanic eruptions lead to increased sulfur and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Lake Nyos in Cameroon is a crater lake with a volcano underneath. Carbon dioxide built up under the surface of the lake, and then the lake water overturned and the carbon dioxide flowed out into the surrounding area, wiping out every living thing including people in local villages.
The Long Valley Caldera by Mammoth mountain east of the Sierra Nevada has been monitored for decades. The idea for the terrorism alert level colors come from the volcano alert levels. They monitor carbon dioxide, ground motion, and earthquakes. A caldera forms when magma empties out of an area and the ground collapses.
Heidi recommends the movie/docudrama Supervolcano from BBC/Discovery channel. It can be found on Netflix and YouTube. (Not the one made by others).
Methane clathrates are substances where methane is enclosed in a crystalline structure with water. They contributed to the Permian extinction. An eruption of basalt that lasted for a million years filled a basin of sulfur deposits, releasing toxic gas and warming Earth, which was further contributed to by methane clathrates.
Geology is very relevant to daily life. It affects how your house is built, and where, and what you need to withstand shaking. Heidi has worked with natural hazard disclosure which includes things like how close you are to a fault, how likely the ground is to undergo liquefaction, whether you are in a flood zone, or in a dam break flood zone.
Thank you so much, Dr. Heidi Stauffer, for joining us! We had such a great time and continue to be curious about the effects of geology in daily life, so I hope we can have you back on the show very soon.
Today at 4pm Pacific Daylight Time, we will be joined on the show by guest author Vida Cruz! I hope you can be there.
Don't forget, if you like the blog and the show, you can come support me and get extra worldbuilding goodies like links and topic prompts at my Patreon, here.
This topic arose after I had to miss a hangout due to being summoned for jury duty! In fact, I was not selected for the jury in question, but I found it fascinating to witness the process of jury selection, and thought it was worth discussing. American citizens are allowed to be called for jury duty no more than once a year, though it's possible for accidental address duplication to lead to people being called more than once. Removing such duplicates is fraught because it's tied to purges of voter rolls. Jury duty is one of the civic duties required in our democracy.
Cliff told us he had been a jury foreman. It's interesting to see people betray their desire to get off the jury, or to get on the jury, in the way they answer the question. Cliff brought up that military service is often a required civic duty. In Heinlein's Starship Troopers, it's a requirement for citizenship - something that gets called out by the movie of the same title.
Morgan noted that jury duty is a key part of our justice system. Whether you get a jury of your peers, though, depends on who you are. Some people are released from jury duty because it is a significant hardship to be so inadequately compensated ($15/day). This means that the people who pursue this duty tend to be people of financial means, which influences the perspectives held by jurors. The cost in childcare and lost wages for some people is too high.
Kat noted that the kind of people who end up being on trial are less likely to have a jury of their peers.
Cliff mentioned that the Peace Corps is a body intended to promote a sense of global civic duty. It too skews toward rich people. It's idealistic in some good ways but shuts out people of low socioeconomic status, and can be seen as "the good cop of Empire" or even as a secular missionary program. If you were worldbuilding, trying to create an organization similar to the Peace Corps, make sure to consider the consequences of power structures you create - negative as well as positive.
Should vaccination be considered a civic duty? It is roped into the capitalist system in a potentially unhealthy way because one must either pay for vaccination or indicate an inability to pay.
In some social systems, someone is assigned to your welfare so there is no need for self-advocacy.
In Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, everyone is given a Pharmacy Card, and if you are found to be abusing the card, you get assigned a therapist.
The United Sates makes civic duty difficult to do. Voting is a civic duty, and governments often take deliberate steps to restrict it. We may talk about the importance of civic duty, but the only easy one is military service, via the high school Draft for men. If everything were as easy as joining the military, we'd have a very different culture.
Countries that require mandatory service exist - but this service need not necessarily be military. Israel and Switzerland both require such service. You have options of doing other things rather than using a gun.
Kat told us that the one thing that tempted her to join the military was access to the Language Institutes in Monterey, where you can get intensive training in all kinds of world languages, and not be restricted to those most commonly studied.
The US Draft is run via the post office, where you give your name and address. Your eligibility for financial aid can be tied to this registry.
It's important to look at why we make it difficult to participate in civic duties. People who want to give to the community are often constrained, especially if they are not members of a church or incredibly rich. Camp counseling is one way to give service. Civic duty has fallen off as a cultural norm in the US.
Kat wondered if it was the Vietnam War that broke the national will to civic service.
To what bodies, organizations or institutions do we owe our service? This is a critical question to ask if you are worldbuilding. Is it your species you owe service to? Your planet? Your city-state? Your neighborhood garden? Some schools require volunteering. Others require donations.
PTO/PTA parent organizations that support schools play an important role, but they too are organizations for "parents of leisure," and concentrate resources at schools with parents who have time and money. They also hide the inadequacy of school funding.
This discussion links back to the question of charity vs. justice, which we discussed at a previous hangout. The US valorizes charity but it would be more broadly effective to provide economic justice. Even charity can be discouraged, as when people who feed the homeless are criminalized. You can be penalized for not conforming to inadequate government structures. You can't give food away; people use the food safety rules in bad faith to criminalize food giveaways.
What function is actually being served by the institutions we create? Is the world we are creating designed as intended? Or are we recreating things we haven't examined enoug?
In the US, we don't make it easy to be informed enough to make decisions. There are constant economic barriers to participation.
In Japan, sense of civic duty is highly encouraged, and kids even clean their own schools. This is very effective in getting people to feel responsibility for their own environment, but culturally would not be feasible in the US. Somehow, people with money would find a way to get out of it and put the burden back on others of low socioeconomic status.
In Australia, polling places are quite widely variable, and you are allowed to do things like hold bake sales and sell "democracy sausages" for people who have voted. The offerings at a polling place may be halal or otherwise different depending on the demographics of the surrounding area. This is not allowed in the US.
How many languages are on your "I VOTED" sticker?
Some people consider a heterosexual monogamous marriage and children to be civic duties.
Is buying or spending a civic duty? Could strikes or boycotts be considered bad for civic duty? Is there such a thing as civic withdrawal?
There is a special allotment system in England for community gardens.
Some cultures have turned it in to a civic duty to educate children. This was not always the case. Is churchgoing a civic duty? Is tithe considered a religious duty, a civic duty, or both? Some countries, like Germany and France, have tithe as a part of taxes - but now you are starting to be able to opt out of it.
What aspects of civic duty are locally driven? Is proper water management a civic duty for example? Is not overusing drains in thaw time a civic responsibility?
Is parenting a civic duty?
Culture clash can definitely influence civic duty because of differing expectations of behavior. People who grow up with different governments will be trained into different expectations.
What are the norms of personal interaction for using public spaces? Sidewalks? Roads? Can those be considered civic duty?
Kat told us how Japan has an intense recycling culture with lots of cleaning and sorting into various categories; in the US, some communities don't provide recycling at all.
Civic duties can be innovated. There was an anti-littering campaign in the 1970's that arose from environmentalism. It led to a decline in trash, and to programs like sponsoring a road for cleaning. There were ads with characters like Woodsy Owl.
What government wants to influence your behavior, and why? Australia has very stringent anti-smoking rules because smoking leads to drastically increased costs for the nationalized health care system. France has an anti-soda campaign.
Among the Amish, barn-raising was a civic duty for members of the community.
There was a Star Trek episode with warring planets that had developed to the point of dropping simulated bombs on each other, and it was your civic duty to be disintegrated if you had been "killed" by the virtual bomb. This asks the question: could death be a civic duty? Is it fair to ask soldiers to expect their careers to end in death?
This was a really interesting discussion. Thank you to everyone who participated. Dive into Worldbuilding will meet this week on Tuesday, February 26th at 4pm Pacific to discuss Footwear (part 2!). Just when you thought you couldn't get enough of shoes...
Don't forget, if you like the blog and the show, you can come and support me and get extra worldbuilding goodies like links and topic prompts at my Patreon.
Ellen Klages joined us on the show to talk about her novella, "Passing Strange," which appeared on Tor.com... as it turned out, precisely two years before our chat! The story is set in San Francisco in 1939, and includes magic. As Ellen said, "It's our world. I didn't make it up, but I did get it on the page."
I asked Ellen what had been the initial seed of this novella. As it turns out, the novella has a very long history! Ellen told us that she started writing a novel or a short story or something in 1977 when she was 22 or 23, and had just moved to San Francisco, and just figured out that she was queer. She ended up wandering around a lot, learning about Mona's and many of the other locations that appear in the novella. She did a lot of research and did what she described as cosplaying Haskel and Netterfield with her love of the time. She told us she thought it would be a novel. She had four scenes typed, and would read the scenes every few years and say to herself, "Damn, I should do something with that."
Then, years later, Jonathan Strand asked her for a novella for Tor.com. By that point, Ellen says, she had four or five folders full of notes and photographs put together from all her years of research. At that point she did 3 1/2 more months of research before writing. She read about a dozen books on Chinatown. She said she started there because it was "the thing I knew I had to get right." She filled eighty pages with notes, most of which didn't get used. One page, which she showed us on video, was filled with Haskel's signature. She explored the gay and lesbian historical archives about Mona's.
Three of the characters in the story, Babs, Polly, and Franny, have appeared in other works of Ellen's fiction. In "Out of Left Field," Babs and Franny appear as relatives of the main characters. Polly appears in "Hey, Presto!" and Franny in "Caligo Lane."
I asked Ellen why she included magic in the story, and she told us that honestly it was because the story would appear at Tor.com, and she felt compelled to make it fantasy. "I would have viable magic if it killed me." The original scenes she wrote were straight historical. She had written a story about Franny and the origami magic earlier, so that magic was preexisting, but she knew Franny couldn't rescue Haskel and Netterfield with her magic because it's not her book. She had to figure out a way for Haskel to save them. She spent six week noodling stupid ideas in Google, including learning the name for pixie/fairy dust in 37 languages until she found "tunderpör," which is Hungarian.
The art that Margaret Brundage did for Weird Tales was a critical piece of research for the story, because that turned out to be Haskel's profession.
It took Ellen eleven months to write the story, following each piece to the next piece. She had lists of creepy Weird Tales adjectives, and was proud to tell us that she used forty of them in two pages at the end of the story. Initially she said she thought the whole thing would be written as pulp, but that wasn't how it ended up working out. She describes the story as being "like phyllo." It has forty or fifty different layers. She didn't want the research to shout, "Research!"
Cliff asked Ellen about how she chose what to feature, given that the past contains so many things that are familiar to us and so many that are unfamiliar. Ellen told us she doesn't explain very much about what is going on. She describes a lot of the 1939 World's Fair because it existed for two years and then was bulldozed. She went to the location of the fair to see views of the city so she could describe what the city looked like from there. A lot of it was just details tossed in like "used the pay phone in the luncheonette" which is not so alien as to need a lot of explanation. She says three percent of what she knows ended up on the page... otherwise it would have been a giant infodump.
Ellen was trying to stay under 40K words, the official novella length limit. When she had one chapter left to write, she discovered she already had 52K words. In the end, she had to cut 19K words out of it. That's an enormous amount! She told us that no whole scenes were removed, but a lot of unbearably clever dialogue had to go. She trimmed sentences down as much as she could, line by line, cutting all flab and repetition. She told us, "I tend to use 'so' a lot." She described it as like making a sauce. "You just keep reducing it." It gets smaller and more concentrated and the flavors are reduced to their essence.
Paul asked Ellen what draws her to this time period. Ellen says she is fascinated with the twentieth century, particularly with "stuff I just barely missed." She says she has no interest in the future because "it could be anything." Ellen says she has always liked antiques and old junk, and the smell of old books. She calls it "as close as you can get to time travel." "I like to write about places where I wasn't." She says she likes to look at a picture and peer around the corner. She has viewmaster reels of the fair in the 1940s in 3D. "The stuff that tourists want to see is not what I want to see."
Ellen had established that Helen would have the painting, but needed to figure out what she would do with it. Destroy it, obviously - but bringing in the pulp dealer allows her to talk about the history of the pulps. She wanted a sleazy guy, and had to drop the idea of him calling her Lauren Bacall because it worked better if Marty thought Haskel was a man. Ellen also asked herself why Helen would cheat the guy, and finally came up with the idea of her friend who had been ripped off, and Helen giving away the money as charitable donations and tips. She had to put the gotcha scene with Marty right at the end.
Apparently the frame story of Helen and Marty confuses a lot of people, perhaps because the novella has chapters and suddenly jumps into the past with a totally different set of characters. Ellen said she relied on her editors to say if it was too confusing.
Ellen loves the cover image for this story. She says it's one of the few times a book cover has been essential to the plot.
Pastels as an art form were chosen for her, because those are what Margaret Brundage worked in. They have a slightly fuzzy quality, and a sense of depth because their surface is not flat. When she did research on pastels she learned how fragile they were. In fact, Margaret Brundage's career ended when her publisher moved from Chicago to New York because it was so difficult to ship the pastel works without damaging them. This sent Ellen into researching medieval fixatives. She couldn't use varnish because it yellows and cracks. Then she learned about fish glue! At one point she had 3-4 recipes for fish glue, and tried to figure out how important it was to explain. "I could get 3 pages of notes down to 2 1/2 sentences.
Ellen says her favorite sentence is one that follows the scene where they eat raspberry rings, when Helen comes to deliver fish guts for the fish glue: "You know, most buildings only have the milk delivered."
Ellen imagines Netterfield as a very young Katharine Hepburn. Because she had Hepburn and Bacall as very clear images for the two characters, she watched five or six Bacall and Hepburn movies to get the cadence of their dialogue and use it in the story. She says she never reads aloud from scenes where Haskel and Netterfield are together because "I just can't switch" between the two voices which are so different in cadence. The two actresses formed a key part of the worldbuilding, which Ellen described as "laying a concrete foundation for myself." She's been thinking about these characters for 40 years, and says at twenty-three she would have loved to see a romance noir with Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn as the romantic leads. By the time she started worldbuilding, she could already hear the characters' voices in her head.
We asked if she had expected the story to be as successful as it has been. Yes and no, she said. When she finished her distillation (sauce-making), she was certain it was the best thing she'd ever written. She could pick up 4-5 pages without finding anything to change. After an incredibly messy process, it turned out to be the best ever. "You hope the editor won't go, 'meh.'" But the beta readers loved it and the ARC got a good review. Sometimes when things come out in January, 6 weeks later no one remembers, but in this case, people still remembered it and were talking about it at Thanksgiving.
In fact, "Passing Strange" has received seven or eight award nominations and has won three awards. It gave rise to the best year ever of Ellen's career! Yaaay! Ellen said at one point there was hardly any competition at the novella length, but now Tor.com publishes 44 novellas a year, which has changed the game. Ellen told us the ego part of her thought "of course it will do well" and the writer part thought "no one will remember." But people did remember, and they are still talking about it two years later, which doesn't happen often.
Ellen tells us "I write slow. I love research so much more than writing." Writing is in third place behind research and editing. She especially hates first drafts. She writes longhand in a notebook, and then types it into a computer because she can't read her own handwriting.
She said when she was worldbuilding this she did some of it with actual visits to the locations, like Telegraph Hill looking out at Treasure Island at dusk. However, she also worked at home with her phone, iPad and laptop all open at the same time showing 3-d views out toward Treasure island. She said she "sat there doing the Vulcan mind meld" and then wrote a description. She said she did go to North Beach and eat raspberry rings, and walk around Chinatown and eat dim sum.
Ellen told us the top of the TransAmerica building was where the Montgomery block was, and that's where Haskel's studio is. She walked around the neighborhood a lot in 1977 and in 2008.
She said she knew Diego Rivera was at the World's Fair, and that Frida Kahlo had paintings on display at the fair but was coming in person later. She couldn't find out which Kahlo paintings were on display, though, and then on Ebay late one night she found someone selling the catalog of the art building from the 1939 World's Fair. She bought it, figured out which paintings were present... but the catalog was in black and white, so she then had to look up what the painting had looked like in color. That's research dedication!
Ellen also used the 1939 San Francisco phone book to find names of luncheonettes and laundry places.
She loves the cover art for the story. She was able to buy the original art, and keeps it at home.
What a treat it was to have Ellen on the show! Thank you so much for giving us your insights, Ellen, and thank you to everyone who attended.
