Point-of-View Characters as Ambassadors to your World (Part 1)

Note: We'll meet to hold Part 2 of this topic on August 31st at 10am Pacific on Google Hangouts. This session will be a special workshop session, with discussants asked to send me a paragraph or two of material representing a POV character they have chosen. Contact me to participate. At the time of this writing, we have five slots left open.

A character lives in your world. When you step into that character's head, you have the opportunity to discover not only who that person is, but how they have been shaped by their environment - physically, socially, culturally. In some sense, that makes the character a physical embodiment of the world, and they possess a psychological map of that world.

There are a lot of discussions occurring online at the moment which talk about how culture and identity mix - well, that applies to fictional characters as well. We don't want our characters to be generic. A strong POV also can take some of the burden off an author because they can help convey things about the world and reduce the need for setting description.

People are shaped by the world they grew up in, and carry their backstories with them. We want them to have specific backgrounds. Training, experience, reasons why they hold the beliefs they do.

Internalization is a really important tool. The language that you use to convey the character's point of view should be their language, or at least reflect their language in some way. One aspect of that is how they categorize reality. Who do they consider "us"? Who do they consider "them"?

I spoke about my Varin world, and how nobles think of themselves as "us," and everyone else as "Lowers." The lowest caste thinks of themselves as "us" and everyone else as "Highers." Depending on where you fall in the middle, you will have all three of those concepts. People in this environment have to be able to read others' marks and act accordingly, because there are different greetings and modes of address for Highers and Lowers depending on their caste identity (Varin has seven castes).

The way people refer to the undercaste, as "undercaste," "Akrabitti," or "trashers," depends on their own identity and on the surrounding context.

Only the nobles don't have to make any special linguistic accommodations, because they are uniquely blind to the operation of the system. They also don't know how to shop for their own food, because they are never required to do so. They don't use cash money, and have no concept of it.

All of these details express themselves in the point of view of a character.

Che mentioned how Key and Peele had a comedy sketch where Will and Jaden Smith went grocery shopping. Morgan talked about how she'd heard the expression "turn a tap and money comes out," which is a reflection of a particular point of view on money.

I brought up the idea of metaphors. Very often, we think of metaphors from an authorial point of view, in terms of bringing in color, flavor, "coolness," or any number of other elements. However, thinking of metaphor from the perspective of character point of view can be extremely valuable.

We discussed some linguistic aspects of metaphor, specifically target domain, and source domain. A metaphor essentially has as its goal describing a target that needs to be better understood or fleshed out. That's the target domain. In order to describe that target, it pulls elements from a source domain which is better understood by the speaker and hearer. Any time you're having a POV character use a metaphor, think about what is being described, and think about what that character knows well, the kinds of things they would use to flesh out their understanding of the target.

So when my alien character Rulii talks about his life in terms of hunting, "life" is the target domain, and "the hunt" is the source domain. He can pull from that source domain over and over to flesh out extended metaphors about his life, goals, and activities.

Che mentioned Aria of the Sea by Dia Calhoun as an example of good control of metaphor, because so many of the metaphors used are from sailing, and from the sea maiden religion.

Working in with a character from another language group or culture is a key example of when to employ this kind of thinking. People have different metaphorical resources. Characters are thus ambassadors for their fictional worlds, or can also share world concepts from the author's world.

Expectations are an important part of this. Because of geography and climate we develop expectations for our homes, our cars, our tools, our behaviors.

A world can be complex, but it is nonetheless understood by the point of view character. You don't need a million-world bible; you need a character with experience, expectations, and opinions. Think about opening your story by placing your character in a situation that will reveal aspects of the world.

Morgan mentioned a conversation between two of her characters where one doesn't understand why the other doesn't keep track of their extended family. We often know why we know things, but we don't have explanations for why we don't know things. Age can be a factor in what we know (or don't), because it means we witness history to differing degrees. The knowledge one person has from being told about something is different from the knowledge another person has from experiencing that thing.

Octavia Butler's Patternist series is a fascinating example of the use of different perspectives.

We also talked about multiple points of view. Different perspectives can give the reader a larger picture of the whole world than is possessed by any single character. It's also cool when you can use unreliable narrators.

You don't always need to use multiple points of view. I chose to use a single point of view in "Cold Words" because Rulii had the most at stake in the story. Similarly, in "The Liars," I used only one point of view, because including the other point of view would spoil the mystery inherent in the story. On the other hand, I used multiple points of view in "Let the Word Take Me" and "At Cross Purposes" because in those cases it added valuable things to the story.

When we got to the end of our hour, we decided we wanted to talk about the topic more! So we'll be meeting next week to get a bit more concrete and look at particular characters. I hope you can join us!

#SFWApro

Vermin

Vermin. No one wants to talk about them, but pests and unwanted guests are an integral part of any world, and we had a good time talking about them. Lots of examples came up! Fleas and rodents were only two. They can attack your food (or even make you their food). Shauna Roberts commented to say that when she lived in India, she was told to put her rice out on the roof so that birds could pick out the pests!

If you are thinking about a secondary world, it's important to look at vermin because they have an astonishingly big influence on the culture of a world. I just recently read an article about how mosquitoes don't like chickens, with the implication that people should consider sleeping with chickens beside their beds - an unusual cultural practice to be sure, but one that might become common if it proves unusually effective.

Plagues have changed history, and vermin are often disease vectors. We also see foods that are forbidden or must be cooked in particular ways due to the possibility of parasitic infections. These things drive and alter societal development.

We spoke about Kameron Hurley's Gods' War series, where bugs are used as a power source, and people have to avoid house-sized insects, or sometimes use bugs for rejuvenation. This is an imaginative and thorough use of bugs in a sf/f scenario.

We can also talk about how vermin and parasites inspire changes of clothing, such as use of shoes and boots to go into water. We spoke about the guinea worm, which because of the efforts of President Jimmy Carter and his educational organization, is about to be eradicated (the first parasitic infection ever).

People often spice their food to discourage bacteria and pests. Bugs can show up as eggs in flour or cereals and hatch if they are left too long. Sailors had to deal with weevils in their hard tack, and of course flies lay eggs in fresher food. We were united in our horror of maggots!

Now, of course, there are also insects and other unwanted creatures that can be used as a food source. Generally speaking, if you want to eat mealworms or crickets or even snails, you should feed them things that taste good. This is also true with meat animals like cows (or bears, in Prince Caspian).

More gross things: tsetse flies, bedbugs, bot flies...

Che noted that humans create good environments for vermin to thrive.

Are pigeons vermin? Some people consider them so, but they also have the fastest level flying speed of any bird and can give milk out of their throats!

Another thing that can arise from the presence of vermin is a symbiotic relationship, as when birds live with hippos or crocodiles and rid them of pests.

Vultures can be considered vermin. I highly recommend the National Geographic article about them. Scavengers are really important to keep disease from spreading, however. Their role is vital. Tasmanian devils keep the roads clear of roadkill in Tasmania (and have amazing jaw muscles!).

Morgan asked if, when humans move to a world, they might bring scavengers to deal with the stuff they have that needs to be cleaned up.

More pests: fruit flies, Mediterranean fruit flies, termites, wasps, fire ants, ticks...

Che noted that by fighting our vermin, we also cause them to evolve. She also said that wasps and ants are related.

Possums will eat ticks in your yard, so even if they seem like vermin, don't discourage them!

Raccoons are cute but fearless and capable of serious bites and scratches. They also carry a dangerous parasite in their feces. Skunks stink, which is why they are often driven out even though they don't cause much other trouble.

Kimberly told us that bees and wasps hate noisy places so she blasted Metallica at them for 12 hours (more than one occasion) and they left.

We did touch briefly on the question of humans as vermin, but agreed that when people try to do that in SF they usually only have humans called vermin as an insult, and don't usually have humans taking on the role of a vermin species. What might that look like?

Thanks to everyone who attended. I'm about to run off to another hangout!

#SFWApro

Jeffe Kennedy and Pages of the Mind (The Uncharted Realms Trilogy)

We had a really cool chat with author Jeffe Kennedy about her book, Pages of the Mind, and about the world she has created for her series, The Twelve Kingdoms and The Uncharted Realms. One great thing about talking with her was exploring a secondary world where romance was a major focus.

Jeffe says her work is classified as fantasy or as fantasy romance. Each story (out of 4 so far) has a love arc. I asked her about the requirements of Romance as a genre, but she said she doesn't conform to them so strictly; her main contract with reader is the happy ever after (often referred to in Romance as HEA), which she called "one rule to rule them all."

In her first trilogy, The Twelve Kingdoms, she followed the journeys of three princesses. In this book, Pages of the Mind, she moves to the point of view of a kingmaker librarian who assists all three of the princesses in the first series.

Jeffe said she expanded her world concept when she moved to this second trilogy, which is one reason why it's called The Uncharted Realms. She describes herself as a character-driven writer who discovers the world as she writes around. The first trilogy began as a dream where she was trapped in a castle by a monster and people would go out to battle the monster for her and die until she realized she had to battle it herself. The main character of the first book is the middle sister of three, a recluse who discovers the world and finds a mythological land.

Jeffe says, "I write for discovery." I think it's probably fair to call this the opposite of beginning with extensive worldbuilding and a world bible - but each technique can yield good results.

Jeffe came to fiction out of environmental consulting, so she has deep interest in ecology and biology, and this is evident in her work.

One of her books in the original trilogy works with the eldest sister, who falls for "a man she couldn't deal with," a foreign mercenary. The presence of the foreign mercenary opened up the door to a whole new region of the world, and a lot of new political complications.

I asked her about one of the main plot elements of Pages of the Mind, which is that the heroine and hero start out not speaking one another's languages. She said that since her heroine, Dafne, was smart and bookish and spoke lots of languges, she wanted to give her a hero she could not communicate with. (Jeffe and I are both interested in languages and linguistics!) Jeffe said, "There's a big chunk of the book where there's a lot of gesturing," and she said it was very challenging for her to work through.

Jeffe describes herself as "a word person." She studied languages in high school and is very interested in etymology. As a graduate student she looked at neurobiology and language in the brain. When she was building words for the language used in Pages ofthe Mind, she built words off real Earth languages: Hawaiian and Polynesian. The word mo'o for dragon she borrowed directly. She wanted the feel of a tropical island for the location where most of the book's action takes place. She said she didn't do a lot of research specifically for this book, but relied on much of her previous reading. She also looked at "behind the name" websites, and a website of colloquial Hawaiian phrases.

We talked about the character arcs for her hero and heroine. Jeffe notes that Romance is often criticized by people who say "you know how it will end," but different genres make different such promises, as when mystery promises that you will find out who did it. She sees the romance arc as someone going from being unfulfilled to being whole and happy with a partner. She says transformation is an important theme to her, and she gives her characters the chance to seize happiness as promised by love.

I asked her about a phrase she used several times in reference to her heroines, that she wanted to give each one "someone she can't handle." Jeffe told me that's her shorthand for finding someone who will force change in a heroine's life. It doesn't have to be an instant physical attraction, but there has to be some attraction, and some reason to want to change, as well as a reason why it's difficult to do so. If it's too easy, she says, it's unsatisfying. We asked, "should both people change?" She said it depends, because often having both people change introduces a lot more complexity and plot.

Jeffe told us she teaches classes on writing sex scenes and about taboos. The word tabu is originally Polynesian. Cultural taboos, she says, are often meant to help us survive to adulthood, but you have to break them to become fully adult. This particularly applies to sex-related taboos. Taboos also vary depending on the culture. What's ok in the US is not ok in China. Taboo can be an important story element because it makes characters profoundly uncomfortable.

We spoke a bit about the sexuality of the characters in Pages of the Mind. Dafne was orphaned when the High King took her castle and has been a political hostage her whole life, having to resist being married off for political purposes. Her attitude is that she avoids sexual entanglement for the purpose of safety; she has been kissed twice but didn't much enjoy it. Another character in the book, Jepp, is pansexual, very sexually active, and essentially doesn't understand her way of thinking. There is value in portraying different characters whose attitudes about sex vary.

I asked Jeffe about the shape-shifting in her book, and she said that originally it was an analog for the fae, but that it fed into her interest in mutability and transformation. She didn't want her Tala people to be were-creatures. Some can't transform, some can take just one form, and others can take many. Shapeshifting informs how the character Zynda sees the world, and where she places her sympathies, as when she refuses to kill animals with magic except in self-defense.

One of the interesting aspects of Dafne's character is that she struggles to accept the coexistence of science and magic, because the realm where magic applies has just dramatically expanded.

Thank you so much for joining us, Jeffe! I really enjoyed our conversation.

Dive into Worldbuilding will meet tomorrow to discuss Vermin at 10am Pacific on Google Hangouts. I hope you can join us!

#SFWApro

Eva Elasigue and Bones of Starlight

We had an enjoyable chat with author Eva Elasigue about the world she's creating for Bones of Starlight. She told us about thinking through what kind of physical and cosmological rules she wanted to have for her fantasy space opera, which explores broadly.

She said the story comes first, but she enjoys questions like "How fast does lava move on this world?" She says she also invented living beings that interface with the universe differently, with human technology evolving with alien technology. Her society is an Imperium in an alternate futuristic universe.

The aquarii people perceive different parts of the spectrum from humans. Dragons are living elementals in a world where elements can be conceptual (sunlight, icy currents, rumor, etc.). Eva asked, what would be the properties of phosphorus if it were alive?

She says she blurs the lines between fantasy and science fiction.

Within the Imperium lives an innocent main character who is a non-royal vagabond, but whose life goes into upheaval. Two of the characters are members of the ruling family of the Imperium divided by generation and by their beliefs.

She described a system of transportation similar to that in Dune, where the aquarii sun-singers are vital to using intergalactic transport gates powered by technology from a private corporation.

She says the main driving element is the Hero's journey.

She talked about having fun writing from different points of view.

I asked about an interesting element of the city architecture, a psychically sensitive mural installations, created by artists who could perceive a wider spectrum than humans. She described it as taking extra sensitive elements and turning them into paint. People get used to having them around, but they function like a "room full of mirrors."

She tries to use relative measurement so as not to commit to a particular Earth measurement system. This includes time, which has periods named after the ruler during that period. Eva enjoys languages and aims to make things sound polyglot. She also uses material from Earth like Gilgamesh and Japanese and Finnish folk tales.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Eva! And thanks to everyone who joined the discussion.

Games

I really enjoyed this dicsussion of games. We began by talking about place where games appear in fiction. My first thought was Split Infinity by Piers Anthony. It begins with a character who is a competitor in this massive multi-game scenario - a dystopia where the status of the higher-ups depends on how good their stable of gamers is, and the gamers themselves are like serfs. This includes a wide variety of games, some very familiar and others less so.

We also had Kimberly Unger present as a guest, and she is a game developer. That's a very different kind of game, and in fact it's drastically different designing games for a fictional world than designing them for our own.

One of our discussants mentioned that the game tack from Pat Rothfuss' work has been turned into a game that is playable in real life.

Games in fiction do some very interesting symbolic things. They can represent relationships between people, or they can be a way to carry out negotiations between larger groups.

In my Varin world, I created a game called keyzel marbles. Because the actual moves of the game are not relevant to the story, I don't know the precise rules for moving the marbles. What I do know is that it's played on a round obsidian board with cradles drilled for blue and green marbles, and that the object of the game is to outmaneuver your opponent and cross the board.

There are several places in the book where keyzel marbles comes up. The first one is in a scene where an eleven-year-old noble boy named Pyaras starts playing it with a twenty-five-year-old soldier bodyguard named Veriga, and this is perceived as a totally inappropriate form of fraternization by one of the other characters. However, it indicates the beginning of a friendship between Pyaras and Veriga.

I also have the game representing the way that the past can't be recaptured. Another character walks to the gameboard later in the story and starts putting the marbles back to their starting positions while musing on how he wishes he could go back and start over. This then intersects with the Pyaras/Veriga part, because Pyaras objects to the other character wrecking his game-in-progress with Veriga. Veriga has since been hospitalized due to the hazards of his job and Pyaras is concerned that their relationship will vanish with the configuration of the marbles.

The last place I mentioned the game playing a role is in a scene where Lady Tamelera wants to reveal something very important to her servant Aloran but doesn't know how. She invites him out to play keyzel marbles with her, to fill awkward time, but also to try to open up a different sort of relationship with him. The problem is that he doesn't feel comfortable playing a game against his mistress, because it represents a power struggle that he feels is inappropriate to engage in.

Power struggle is one of the big things that games can symbolize. Chess has sometimes been used in science fiction as a form of communication between races. It can reflect or change a power dynamic.

Games are also powerful in folk tales, such as when you play a game with the devil, the fae, or Death.

Games can be critical as a symbolic representation of a larger conflict. If you can engage in single combat instead having whole armies clash, why not do it? If you can play a game and agree on the stakes, might you save many lives?

Games and the ways in which they are played reflect the world around them. If you are playing a game with plastic dice, it's not the same as playing a game with pig knucklebones. Where do the knucklebones come from? Knucklebones, the word itself, makes the game of dice sound exotic and like it comes from a particular period. There are many games of chance or rune-reading. We noted that people have found real twenty-sided stone dice from the Roman period.

Another game from my Varin world, called dareli, is a card game based on the concept of families. It's not played as often as keyzel marbles, but it's meant to reveal things about the world of the nobility and their myopic focus on their own inter-family struggles.

There are a ton of ways to play cards, and more are being invented all the time. There are even a ton of ways to play solitaire.

We spoke a bit about cooperative games. How are children taught via games? What values come out of the game? These are good things to think about when you are creating games for a fictional world. How much is skill? How much is chance? Are people rewarded for defeating others or for creating something?

There are cases where dueling is used in fiction as a test for the children of a person in power, to see how willing one child is to kill the other, to show their ruthlessness for future rule.

I told the story of the red hand of Ulster. The men who were competing for the title of king went out in boats and raced for the shore, having accepted the rule that the first one whose hand touched the shore would become king. One of the men, seeing he was going to lose by a hair, cut off his own hand and threw it ahead onto the shore. He ended up becoming king!

The topic of the film Gattaca came up. In a world where genetic manipulation is common, there is a swimming competition between the genetically perfect child and the natural child. When the natural child won against all expectation, it changed both children's lives because it changed their attitudes about perfection and what was possible, and set up the conflict for the movie.

We also talked about games in Jane Austen, such as games played at a picnic, or charades, or riddle games. Games can become a way of making fun of someone in public, so their stakes can be quite high.

In Monopoly, there is some building, but all opponents are enemies who need to be bankrupted.
In Settlers of Catan, everyone gets points for building.

Kimberly mentioned that this is why there are often specific areas of games set aside for Player-vs.-Player competition.

In Minecraft, the focus is on building.

In massive multiplayer online games, there are many people who only want to fight the AI or non-player characters. This is the largest group. The people who play PVP have a very different focus. Some games will have servers specifically for roleplay, and others specifically for PVP.

Some people are really into customizing characters and costumes, and focus mostly on the customization rewards. In games like Sims or Tomogachi life, the first character people create is most often themselves, and they branch out after that.

When people are playing a game, it evolves its own culture, and that is not always predictable.

We talked about the movie War Games, and the way the videogame Thermonuclear War stood in for the actual conflict, as its outcome reflected a real life potential outcome outside the world of the movie. In this case, the idea of conflict as a game is problematic, because it estranges us fromt he fact that anyone actually playing gets a bad outcome. In this movie, the innocence of the computer was a metaphor for the attitudes of the younger generation.

In the Spy Kids movies, there are several instances of games that suck people in or otherwise come to life. This has become a common trope.

The metaphors and world concepts of games can influence our real-life metaphors and world concepts. This was noted and explained by Anita Sarkeesian in her series of videos.

Generation by generation, people are improving games and increasing representation in them. This is also true of books. Equality gets layered gradually into the cultural canon (there is much more work to do).

Games like Overwatch and Destiny can take on a culture that was not intended by the developers. Kimberly says, "no game survives contact with the audience." She mentioned Riot Games as an example of a developer group with a lot of control over their culture. They have an entire judiciary system with tribunals.

"House rules" are game rules that are idiosyncratic to the place where you are playing them. Not knowing house rules is a problem. It feeds into the idea of games as representative of power.

This week's hangout has been rescheduled due to some thorny logistical problems. We will meet with author Eva Elasigue on Thursday, 7/14/16 at 5pm Pacific. I hope you can make it!

#SFWApro

Bo Bolander and "And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead"

I was thrilled to have Bo Bolander join us on the show to talk about her award-nominated story. I began by asking how "Trail of Dead" came to be, and she told me it was a pastiche of pulp, noir, anime, and Tarantino with lots of sweary shooty. (You can watch the video for the precise quote!).

She was asked to write a flash piece for a literary zine, but "it didn't want to be a flash piece," and "it took off. Bo said she didn't know how it would be received, and that she was taking a risk stylistically, but she woke up at four in the morning one night and started writing the rest of it. It took her two years to finish. I asked if she planned how long it would be, but she said of her stories, "I write until they're done."

She said that the voice really drove the story forward, but there were points as it got more complicated where she wanted to take a white board and organize some things because she wasn't sure how to get some points, some beats she wanted to hit.

Rhye, she says, is basically a replicant in the Bladerunner sense. The story is something of an homage to Bladerunner and to Ghost in the Shell. Rhye doesn't have good self esteem (understatement) and "she kinda needs a hand up." The character of Rack was complementary to her, and Bo only worked with his point of view much later. The two viewpoints are very entangled, and we get to see her view of him, and also how he sees her during the course of the story. (Spoilers!) One revelation about his view of her comes when she sees a version of herself that he has created as a security program. It's interesting to see her considering that.

Bo is working on a sequel to the story and having fun with it, exploring where the characters are going. She says she likes stories that don't spell everything out for you. "You have to do some worldbuilding," she says. She focuses on the character's voice and point of view. History, nuance and detail are not necessarily interesting or relevant to a story.

She says she does worldbuilding a little with what Rhye is thinking, because the world influences that. But it's not always a weakness not to map out the entire world. She focuses in on how the world has made Rhye what she is, beating her down.

I asked about Bo's use of metaphor and simile, which I think is one of the outstanding strengths of the piece. She said that Rhye is broken and mean, but in some ways a lot like her internal voice, so she was easy to write. Sometimes you have to stop and think about how Rhye would see things, because she's going to use what she knows. In a sense, any character is going to use metaphors and similes that reveal things about what they know to compare things against.

Bo says there are stories out there ostensibly using the point of view of (for example) someone from backwoods Florida, but the voice comes out as that of a postgraduate literary person. "If the voice is not there," she says, "I can't get behind it."

Rhye's past helps to construct her narrative, and that is coming into play in the sequel, with some experiences Rhye had between the last story and this one. She has changed. There are changes in story #1, but also more between 1 and 2. Bo gets into her backstory a bit more deeply.

The sequel is apparently a novel. Bo says, "I'm trying to expand everything."

She's also working on a fantasy piece right now, because she says, "I can't do the same thing twice. I get bored really easily." She expressed her admiration for patois and dialect use in the film Fury Road. She says most people don't mess with language much. She says the fantasy work is nice because it gives her a break from Rhye occasionally.

She has posted a snippet of the sequel on her blog.

I asked her about the submission history of the story, and she said one market thought "Trail of Dead" should be a novel instead. Some people objected to all the swearing, saying "Why does she talk like that? What made her like that?" Bo says that after two years of writing and reviews from people she trusted, she went with it despite uncertainty, and then took a breath, and then suddenly got nominated for awards.

Bo expressed her high regard for Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazines, and for the art of Galen Dara.

When I asked whether she had done any research for the story, she said that there had been no research component except that she used to go to the firing range a whole lot, and that helped her with the portrayal of firearm use, which she described as "a zen thing. You have to get out of your head." She had some experience with that having grown up around firearms.

She says it's interesting how much of yourself ends up in your story. "You put so much in, but you don't even notice."

Bo described her writing process as "I get it out in one draft, but editing the entire time." This story ended up with a few line edits at the start but none toward the end. You can't do that with a novel, though, she says, because you have to keep moving. "A novel is such a different beast. You can't make it perfect on the first go."

Bo also spoke to us about her experience with ADD. Never downplay the influence of prescription drugs on the ADD brain, she told us. Sometimes, she has found just sitting down and concentrating to be impossible. "Sit down and write," people always say, but sometimes it can't be done. "You're not lazy." It's not that you're unfocused, or that you don't care. You're not alone. Sometimes your brain needs help. ADD is underdiagnosed especially in women. She took particular issue with the term "airhead" and speculated it might be linked to ADD.

Bo described the feeling of productivity as "amazing" and was happy not to be "frozen in my own indecision." She says she hates portrayals of medication as turning you into a zombie, because that has been so far from her experience.

She says that she has lots of ideas, but not all of them are worth stretching out. "It has to be more than a cute hook. There's got to be something deeper going on." "What's the through line?" she asks. "What is the emotional underpinning?" It's possible to find the point of a story while you're writing it, but it's useful to have some hint of it beforehand.

Bo, thank you for joining us! Readers, if you want more detail, the video is below.

This week's hangout will be on Wednesday, July 13th at 10:00am with guest author Eva Elasigue. I hope you can join us!

#SFWApro

Ken Liu and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Last week were joined by the amazing Ken Liu, who spoke to us about his new short story collection. Ken has in fact published about 120 stories (!), and he says he has collections in other languages like French, Chinese, and Japanese, but that this is his first one to be published in English. He wanted to make sure that he had the right set of stories for an English language collection, and was urged to this by SAGA press.

He said it was important that the stories in the collection reflect what short fiction means to him, and acknowledged Joe Monti for helping him select the stories and choose the order.

Ken says, "I have a different profile in different languages." He says some of his stories don't work as well in particular languages because of the complex issues involved in translation and crossing cultures. Since his stories were all written in English for an English-speaking audience, he said it was harder to pick out which ones to put in the collection because more of them would have been appropriate.

I asked him about a technique he used in two of the stories, which I called "iteration," where he makes lists of alien species and does brief explorations of some of their features, as in "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species." He said that he has always liked experimenting with different forms in fiction, and likes to resist the idea that a story needs to be one particular type of thing with a beginning, middle, and end. He resists "universal" rules and patterns, and in this case was attempting to write a story that is not a story at all, but patterned after an academic scholarly report. Essentially, he says, the story is about how we view the Other, and our tendency to define cultures as superior or inferior. The different aliens read their books but also read one another. He sees aliens as aspects of us as humans, and reading as representing the construction of meaning. Also, he notes that changes in the technology of bookmaking (as when we moved from scroll to codex) influence the way that we create books and define them. We are now undergoing another such change with the advent of electronic formats.

In the second such story, the iterative pieces have to do with alien cognition, and serve as a companion/reflection on a separate, more narrative story. Ken said this one had to do in part with how our metaphor for thinking has changed, as it went from spiritual, to telegraph, to clockwork, to computation.

He views SF/F as an ideal genre for literalizing metaphors and playing with them.

In several of the stories, he chooses to reverse our expectations, as in the story Good Hunting, which begins as a ghost hunter story and then changes when it shifts our awareness to the viewpoint of the fox women themselves. Ken describes it as going from ghost hunter story to "the old ways are lost" story, but then it changes again and reminds us that magic will always be there in different forms. The fox woman finds a way to recover her shape-changing power through steampunk technology. He described it as a way to think about the metaphor of change. Nothing is constant.

We tend to think of cultural preservation as a lack of change, but it's not; living culture is constantly changing. We still make toast, but we don't make it at all the same way we used to. Cultural preservation is about change that occurs with internal agency, rather than with a gun to your head. You as a member of the culture get to decide that this is how you keep it alive and preserve things. We linked this thought back to the idea that culture is both replicated and changed every time it is enacted, and Ken also brought up one of the alien species from "Bookmaking habits," whose method of inscribing books means that they are changed each time they are read.

I also asked Ken about his use of Chinese characters in his stories. Ken said that in the West people have a view of idiograms as mysterious, an impulse to treat them as different or exotic. However, they don't have this aspect in thier native context. They are primarily phonetic to represent speech, with no particular magic quality, though they start with a semantic root in the left-hand radical to hint at meaning, and a phonetic component in the right-hand component. There is a playful and exuberant attitude toward the characters which is often lost; they are not merely recording speech. Ken says that in his stories he tries to convey the Chinese cultural practice of folk etymology for the characters. He compared it with the form of charades played in Jane Austen novels, where people create false etymologies for words like "season" to try to convey them without words.

In one of the stories, a clever lawyer modifies a character in a contract in an undetectable way to change its meaning, exemplifying this playful relationship. I also brought up the use of the character for "umbrella" in the Japanese-based story "Mono no aware." Ken said that there were some similarities between Japanese and Chinese characters, and that the use of the character here was part of the characterization of the narrator, who was a child when he left Japan and went into space, so he has self-constructed an idea of what it means to be Japanese. He is both defensive and protective of his cultural identity to keep it alive. He sees it as something precious that needs to be protected, and is trying to make it alive. He explains it to many people, and those explanations and his final act make it become part of the culture of the ship.

I asked Ken about some of the thematic questions he raises in these stories about the nature of reality, which he called a "huge philosophical question." One way to think about the difference between science fiction and fantasy, he said, was that science fiction holds the idea that the world is knowable, where it might be argued that fantasy does not. It's not so simple, he says, but there is tension between those ideas. He says does not know where he stands on the answer to this question for his own work, though, because The Grace of Kings holds to the idea that the world is knowable. In stories from the collection like "Simulacrum," he meditates on whether the world is knowable. For example, he says, in our world we tend to see "the definitive biography" of a person released, as though this is it, and the totality of a person's being is knowable. On the other hand, there are many different performances of the self, over time and as one presents oneself or interprets oneself differently with different people. We so often act on the basis of habit, and different patterns hold with particular people. In his story, the father and the daughter have locked each other into a limited view of who they are, and each one loves the mask more than they love the changing person behind it. Ken says that maturity of love is when sometimes the love has to change with the person.

We spoke briefly about code-switching, which essentially means altering the way you speak in order to fit different contexts. It's a form of performance and presentation of identity and group membership. Sometimes it is switching between dialects, and other times between recognized languages.

Mirrors also appear in many of Ken's stories. They reflect ourselves and others, and sometimes we even act as mirrors for other people. Ken doesn't view fiction as unrelated to real life. One of its roles is as a mirror, in that he says his work is reflective of real life, but also transforms it. "Worldbuilding" is a distorting mirror, or possibly a corrective one, that will allow us to change or correct biases in real life.


Thanks again for joining us, Ken! The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a fascinating collection, and I hope everyone will read and enjoy it.

#SFWApro