Story Elements and Worldbuilding

This was a delightful discussion that went to a lot of different places. The question we looked at was "How many things are affected by worldbuilding in your story?"

Of course, the simplified answer is "everything." Worldbuilding and story are not separate, but there are people who are inclined to think about worldbuilding as a separate activity from storytelling, where you have a world bible you can look at to one side of your story. This discussion explored some of the many, many different ways that story and world are interconnected.

Kate says it's easy to miss good worldbuilding if you're not paying attention. She wants to see a background moment in a story that involves briefcase-sized kits for making insulin. Not the focus of the story,  just a moment to show that gatekeeping in medicine has fundamentally changed.

Morgan thought about cell phones. The technology of communication is incredibly important in suspense films and basically any other story where you have to anticipate how easily a message can travel. There has even been a line, "How did we ever fight crime without cell phones?"

Worldbuilding is like a gigantic continuum that stretches from planetary location and structure to geography and climate, and onward into architecture and food and social practices. It goes all the way from the macro- to the micro-scale.

Morgan observed that some stories can't be told in some worlds. Building on the cell phone idea, some stories depend on constrictions in communication. If you have cell phones, you can't cut the phone wires. On the other hand, you can find creative reasons why cell phones might not work.

Older people have different stories, because they have experienced different kinds of cultural and technological changes. Characters of different ages may not use certain items, or might use them in distinctly different ways. We talked about the character of Dot on Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, who starts out terrified of the telephone because she's been told by a priest that it's dangerous.

When you have different point of view characters, there isn't just one world; different characters have personal worlds. You can tell a story about moving out of your personal world into a larger shared world, or clashing with it, understanding or not understanding it.

Worldbuilding is all about taking advantage of exciting opportunities. It's a holistic process that links the large scale with the small scale.

Paul rightly pointed out that because everything in the world is connected, your point of entry can be anything.

I explained how I went about designing the Varin cities and expanding the variability of the cave systems in which they were built using models in our world: the Gouffre de Padirac, Derinkuyu, and the Skocjanske Jame.

Kate said she can steer any conversation to the topic of plate tectonics in five moves or fewer.

We also talked about the unrealistic geography in The Lord of the Rings. At that time, much less was broadly known about geography, and you could make things up, but now you have so many more resources on the topic that you don't have to.

Remember, when you are not making things up, it's less work!

It's also really important to think about the social part of worldbuilding, the part that builds the people and supports your characters. Character psychology is also tied to worldbuilding.

A lot of the time, you should not feel like you are wondering what is in a particular place; you should be trying to figure out what has to be there based on the principles you have set up.

In Varin, I set up a situation where all young noble women have personal bodyguards. This has significant implications for their social relationships, and for the social relationships of boys.

Always ask about implications. Stick a pin in a spot, and the implications of that choice will spread out and go everywhere.

Phenomena that appear to be incompatible may exist in different social groups within the same country or region.

Kate asked, "How hard is physics to deal with?" She suggests that convergent evolution is stronger than we think. Maybe alien worlds would be more similar to ours than we speculate.

Paul remarked that eyes have evolved several times in different genuses on Earth. Bats and birds both fly. Penguins fly, but in a different medium.

Oceanic creatures have some similarities because the medium they inhabit is "Hard to deal with." Some have emerged from the ocean but retain signs of their past presence there.

Models of bipedalism on Earth include the human model and the kangaroo model (and others). Kate called kangaroos "the T-rexes of deer."

It's worth thinking about neurology, too. This includes the neurology of dinosaurs and of everyone else.

Organisms and the ways they relate to their world offer a lot of cool worldbuilding opportunities. What if there were color-blind aliens? Kate said, "Punchy shrimp see sixteen extra colors, so they say, 'no, you're the colorblind one.'"

That said, we have one electromagnetic spectrum. This leads to commonalities in color words across Earth culture, for example.

Language is an enormous opportunity in worldbuilding that people don't often take sufficient advantage of. Each language is going to have to try to solve some of the same communication problems, but it might not do so in the same way. Japanese expresses the manner in which an activity is done via adverbs, when English uses a proliferation of verbs.

Morgan notes that the scope of possible worldbuilding can be daunting. The world is huge, and lots of things can happen at once. We need to understand the major influences that are most relevant to the story.

Some historical events can have a significant influence on culture and language. The American Civil War was one such period. The Genpei War in Japan had a significant influence on warfare, and also indirectly led to the naming of certain kinds of crabs.

Any time you have social groups like cliques or castes, etc. you can ask yourself where these groups came from. How did they form? Why did they form?

You can obviously create simple distinctions without interrogating them. If you simplify, you can give the impression of a culture that is like an animated film versus a live action film. This can be done well, but it's worth being careful.

Ask how people's places of origin affect their characters, and how they affect their relationships. Morgan noted that assumptions like whether someone will be college-bound or not, while seemingly simple, can have enormous influence on people's lives.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion! Today, Dive into Worldbuilding meets at 4pm Pacific to talk with guest author J. M. Frey about her Skylark Saga. I hope you can join us! The link to the Zoom meeting is: https://zoom.us/j/156853119

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Predictability and Unpredictability

If you're reading this, thank you so much for continuing to seek out Dive into Worldbuilding! After some exploration of technology options, the show is back. We're using Zoom meetings and streaming them live to YouTube. This past week we spoke about predictability and unpredictability.

What makes stories predictable?

First, it's useful to ask how we predict things in the first place. We use our observations of patterns in the world to speculate about what will happen next. Many of these patterns are culturally influenced. We also create narratives to make sense of events in our lives.

After you've read a lot of books or watched a lot of shows, you can become very good at guessing what will happen next. This can be a good or bad thing.

Kat observed that culturally, writers are trained into using act structure. We are trained to try to create a page-turning narrative of a particular type, with beats, etc. We participate in a shared storytelling culture, which uses template stories and variations on those. Storytelling cultures across history have had particular patterns they follow when telling stories. Following tropes and breaking them becomes part of this process, based on the kind of tropes that exist in a particular storytelling culture. There is a particular rhythm to narrative structure.

Unfamiliarity with a storytelling tradition from a different culture can make it unpredictable.

Storytelling is not always a straight line, but can be a winding ball of narrative.

If you are retelling a Cinderella story, readers who know the myth allow you to play more with the story. If you have unfamiliar readers, you will generally need to hew closer to the original.

The stories we tell generally maintain a balance between the predictable and the unpredictable. This brings us back to Jed Hartman's idea of "author points," which are a kind of trust credit between the reader and the writer. You need to keep a minimum level of points so that the reader won't give up on you. Keeping some things realistic can allow you to make other things less so.

Of course, we then run into the problem of dragons versus people of color in a fantasy scenario. People seem to have an easy time spending their points on dragons, and much harder time spending them on people of color (because of racism). So the use of such points is not as straightforward as it might seem, but is also culturally influenced.

People who mention potatoes and chocolate in fantasy settings are generally not thinking about whether there was a Columbian exchange or similar event in their world. People in fantasy often have spices but don't necessarily think about the countries those spices came from.

Reality is less predictable than the narratives we tell about it.

We can play with reader expectations, but doing simple flips on discrimination (what N.K. Jemisin calls discrimiflip) is generally problematic because simple flips tend to leave out a lot of underlying pieces, and implications are often under-explored.

Ann Leckie asks the question "what if hands were the thing you weren't supposed to expose?" This defeats our expectation that bare hands are unremarkable, and is a subtle way to play around with those expectations.

When you are accustomed to a homogeneous culture, you can imagine that some things are unusual when they might be much less so. Look further afield to other cultures to help expand your ideas.

People tend not to appreciate it when they are called predictable. Why might that be?

We really, REALLY want something like gravity to be predictable, because it causes enormous problems in our lives if it is not.

Unpredictability is stressful.

Grounding in a story is something we expect and don't want to change. Then there are gray areas, and then there are the things we want to be new.

Paul talked about it in terms of wonder and novelty vs. comfort.

Character behavior is one place where readers often prefer consistency and comfort. If Superman starts doing bad things, it's jarring.

Bertie Botts unpredictable jelly beans are great if you chose to eat them, but much less so if you have them handed to you.

What do we do to set expectations in a story? Very often we can make use of point of view and a character's judgment to set up guidelines about what we want readers to learn and to expect. Why is something familiar or different to the character?

The same story can be comforting or uncomfortable depending on the context. What if your shoes fit? It could be normal, or it could be wildly weird and suggest that shoe gnomes had come to your house.

Morgan noted that predictability varies depending on the scale you are looking at. We can predict a child will grow, and make some predictions about the final result of that growth, but we have very little ability to predict that growth on the shorter term.

Paul remarked that we have good modeling to predict the weather in the next few days, but far less to predict it on the long term. Chaos and unpredictability should be built into a world on some level. Climate change is bringing stressful unpredictability.

People find all sorts of reasons to throw over phenomena they find upsetting, and may deny the actual causes of events in favor of comforting narratives.

We then talked about how we feel about spoilers. I prefer hearing spoilers because I like to pay close attention to a narrative without feeling anxiety about the outcome. Paul says he thinks spoilers sometimes get you excited for the book. But is it robbing you of the chance for wonder, or is it prepping you for what you want? Depending on how you feel about it, you may love or hate spoilers.

What about in your writing process? Do you need to know where the story is going? Morgan said she likes to have a place for it to go, but she doesn't necessarily know how it will get there. Some people have told me they get shut down if they know where the story is going because they feel like they have already written it and are no longer motivated. Sometimes you can wrestle the story into where you need it to go; sometimes you can follow.

A story contains lots of incidental details. Sometimes those details are important and sometimes not. You may realize, after you've written a lot more of the story, that some of those details are more important than you thought they were.

If you come to a story with genre expectations, you will tend to have a set of trained expectations that a non-genre reader might not have.

When you approach a door, what is your expectation? That it will pull open? That it will push open? That it will slide aside, or go up, or dilate?

Working in the kitchen can be predictable or unpredictable. Planned recipes are generally predictable, while working with leftovers is unpredictable. Working just by taste has a whole new dimension of unpredictability.

Predictability and unpredictability are localized in the individual's expectations.

Kat noted that when we watch mimes or clowns we have an assumption that they won't get hurt, which is important to their success. In the real world, we'd have much more fear of injury.

Children often don't share an adult's sense of the ordinary or normal.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion! Dive into Worldbuilding will meet tomorrow, September 17th, 2019 at 4pm Pacific to discuss Story Elements and Worldbuilding. How thorough and interconnected should our worldbuilding aim to be, and how many things does it influence?

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Julie Czerneda and The Gossamer Mage

We had a delightful visit today from author Julie Czerneda, who came on the show to talk about The Gossamer Mage, her twentieth (20th!!!) novel, which is coming out on August 6, 2019.

I asked her where the idea for the book started, and she said it started with a pen - and proceeded to show us the pen in question! She brought a lot of cool props to show us, so I encourage you all to check out the video if you're curious about them.

One of the things that Julie explored while writing this was the history of ink. Battles were fought over areas of the world that provided good ink ingredients, and pirates stole ink as well as other things.

I've always found constrained magic systems very interesting, so I asked her to tell us about the magic system she used in The Gossamer Mage. Julie said she agreed with me that she liked constrained systems. She said she liked it when everyone knows how to use the magic, but wait, it's not so simple. This particular magic system is constrained in part because it requires writing, which means it requires a particular type of scholarship. You have to be able to write words that are not human words, and to intend them. Further, this magic can only be done in the one place in the world where magic remains. One important ingredient here is that magic used to be in more of the world, but is no longer present except in one region, ringed with mountains.

Thus, magic is constrained physically, and it is constrained to scholars. The other important ingredient here is that you almost feel sorry for the mages. Every time you use magic, the Deathless Goddess (source of magic) takes a part of your life. If you meet a very old mage, it doesn't mean that person is necessarily particularly old, but will depend on how much magic that person has used. Each time you use magic, you get a bell that you can put in your hair or on a wig or hat. Julie told us the bells are "good advertising." If you have twenty bells, you're a student. If you have 100, you know what you're doing. If you have 300, why are you still alive? I asked Julie if mages lived to a hypothetical fated life length, or just as long as the Deathless Goddess wanted them around, but her answer was more interesting: "You are around as long as you have the will power to be around."

One of the very tricky aspects of being a mage is that if you have this power, you have a lust to use it, so it's difficult - particularly for young mages - to stop themselves from using it again and again. The mage school is "a home for those who are helpless against magic." It sends its students out to do magic and earn money for the school.

I really appreciate when authors consider social implications of their systems, and Julie is doing a great job of this in this book. She told us about families whose sons become mages, and what it means to them. One family is just really happy and sends their son off, but another considers this a family loss, because it means their son will die so much earlier.

Julie told us about how much she likes to describe real objects. She showed us a Murano glass pen that was the inspiration for one of the important pens in the book. She also showed us a 100 year old ink pot that was designed so it could be screwed down and attached to a surface.

I asked Julie how she reconciled working with objects from our world in the context of a created world. She says she wants to create a world that is seamless for readers. The world of The Gossamer Mage has some medieval aspects, but is more like 18th century England.  The Murano glass comes from a place that is foreign, a nearby island. The ink pot also plays a critical role in the story. Julie says tying real things into the fantasy makes it more concrete.

Julie told us that this book is a bit unusual in that it has no chapters. It started as a series of novellas. Before each of the novellas is something called a Fundamental Lexicon, a 1-2 page history that gives context for the piece that follows it.

The Lady (the Deathless Goddess) does not allow travel.

Once, non-humans ruled the magical land of Tananen. When humans came, they interpreted what they found. What would we do if we came across a fount of magic?

Many people in Tananen live in Holds. Though each hold is ruled by a Holder, the land is held by the Hold Daughter, and she has the power to eradicate the entire population of the Hold if she feels like it.

The use of magic is gendered in a really interesting way. Men become mages, and women become Hold Daughters. Julie told us she looked to matriarchal societies from Earth history, where women owned and controlled property. In the society of Tananen, women are the tenders of magic, and men are the users.

Cliff mentioned that it seems as though Julie often visits themes of longevity and gender in her work. He asked if this was a conscious decision on her part. Julie said "It's more that they've collided." She described herself as always being an educator, and wanting to portray strong women. She's also a biologist, so she uses the definition "if it reproduces, it's a female." She says that she doesn't pull punches in The Gossamer Mage.

This book has a gorgeous cover, in a different style from those of her previous books. DAW was looking to produce more iconic covers. Julie said her husband made the original concept art using the pen that they had. Once he turned in that art, the art department came back with the cover art in less than a day!

I asked Julie about what she'd previously said about how the people of Tananen don't travel. Tananen is ringed by mountains referred to as Her Fist, and has one port, and a waterfall known as Her Veil. Any animal created by magic within Tananen turns to dust if it passes through Her Veil, and strangers who try to enter exhale, and then can't inhale again. This is a pretty effective deterrent to travel, especially given that the people of Tananen aren't sure they won't also turn to dust if they leave their home.

Julie then announced she couldn't go on without talking about the beards. The beards in the story are an example of the trivial use of magic (thus, the trivial use of people's lives). People put ornaments in their beards that sing, or have a smell, or have other magical properties. Women will glue beards to their faces in order to be able to participate in this fashion. It's a fashion of the rich, since most people in the country are working people who don't bother with much ornament. It's a fascinating view on how magic and its users are trivialized in some contexts.

I asked Julie about the language she uses in the story. She told me first about the different dialects of Tananen. In the lowlands is where you find people who are wealthier and speak a high-class "civilized" dialect. Up nearer to the ring of mountains, you find a different dialect. Then, in the mountains themselves, you have still another dialect. Sometimes people in the story use their native dialect to be obscure, even to insult someone without them entirely understanding and being able to take offense. Julie said she wanted a sense of the difference in how we speak when we travel vs. when we speak with our families. I always love to see code-switching in a book!

In fantasy, language is very important. Julie said it's important to recognize how quickly language changes for isolated groups.

I then asked her about the name suffixes. These are fascinating pieces of language that acknowledge a mage or Hold Daughter's relationship to the Deathless Goddess. The suffix -eonarial is for mages, and means "Debtor to the Lady."  The suffix -ealyon is for Hold Daughters and means "Promised to the Lady."

Julie told us that when she was working on the three main Tananen dialects, she consulted with her son, who is a linguist. Mostly people throw in different words, or drop letters. As for the untranslated pieces of language, these she termed "echoes of the past." A lot of these names are names that were already there when people first arrived in Tananen. She said it would be like calling a place Thor's Hammer if you didn't know what a hammer was, or who Thor was.

One of the really interesting pieces of the story is a character who believes that they can't have the magic continue, because he doesn't want to see young men's lives sacrificed to fashion and horses with night vision.

I asked Julie about the "made animals," and she said one of the things that people do with magic is create horses who don't have the limitations of real horses, i.e. they function like machines and can go without eating or doing all the normal things horses do. Another interesting made creature is called a "maul." It looks like a dog, but stands like a man, and mauls often serve as guards. Magic can also be used for subtle things, like changing the seeds of a crop so that it will be immune in the next generation to a disease it is currently suffering from.

The language of magic is only spoken by Hold Daughters, but even for them it's painful, because it's not really being spoken by them; instead, they are being spoken through by the Deathless Goddess herself.

Julie offered to show us "something else that's real," and showed us a picture of buildings in the Cotswolds region of England. This was the architectural inspiration for the Mage school. Julie also showed us the original map of the Mage school. I asked her for a moment about the hedges at the mage school. She said they were useful because they were cheap, sturdy fencing, and had wildlife in them. They also allow for eavesdropping or peeking through. In the story they have a key role as wind breaks to stop the students at the school while they fish for carp!

Julie told us she likes practical things.

The main door of the Mage school is a made swan whose wings are the doors. (Such a cool image!)

She said that most of her research was into ink and pens, particularly into the question of how to make in. She also researched the speed of barges so she could gauge the scale of her map on the basis of how long it took people to travel from one place to another.

I asked her about whether her training as a biologist had applied directly to this book. She said that mostly, it influenced the way she observes the natural world. As an example, she told us about a scene in which there are rings of ice around the base of the cattails, suggesting that there was a freeze the night before. This kind of detail is a wonderful way of simply conveying that this is a climate with extremes. She also has a character who travels from the sea coast to the interior, finds gulls there, and considers them inferior because they are smaller and have other slight differences. It is quite common to find gulls inland, however!

She says this book stands alone, because "there can't be" further books. Julie described it saying that in this book, "I ask a question, and I answer it to my satisfaction." The book is meant to linger with a reader.

Julie also showed us the original version of the map of Tananen, both right side-up and upside-down.

Morgan passed on a question from her daughter, which was "Why do you keep making me cry?" Julie couldn't answer that, but did tell us that she considers emotional catharsis important. She never sets out to manipulate people. As she describes it, "My emotions go through the wringer first."

This was a delightful and fascinating conversation. Thank you so much, Julie, for coming on the show!

Please be aware that Dive into Worldbuilding is going into its summer hiatus between now and August 20th. I will let you know on August 19th whether we will start meeting again on the 20th or the 27th. Thank you so much for your support, and please visit my Patreon to support the show more directly!

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Cadwell Turnbull and The Lesson

We were all really excited to meet Cadwell Turnbull and talk to him about his new novel, The Lesson. This is a first contact novel featuring aliens in the Virgin Islands. It takes place five years after the alien Ynaa integrated with humans, and examines the tensions and conflicts between humans and Ynaa. Cadwell told us it deals with the murky relationship between the two groups, and the social, personal, and cultural effects of having highly advanced aliens living here.

Cadwell explained that the Ynaa have one basic technology. "Reefs" are intelligent cells tht manage body health and also change the Ynaa's physiology so they can fit in. They can also be used for technology, ships, cities, and other things. The reefs can build themselves. This technology can also be used to kill people.

I asked him what the initial seed of the story had been. He told us he had a nightmare where there were highly advanced aliens integrated into a small town. They looked and acted like humans. One of the features of the Ynaa is that they have a culturally mediated response to threat, and that response is disproportionate. They respond with lethal force to threat. In his dream, an alien was being bullied by a group of people, and killed all of them.

He explained to us that he didn't do anything with the idea for a while, but it stuck with him. He started working on his MFA, and was encouraged to set the story in the Virgin Islands. Cadwell grew up there, and his family is still there. He moved away for school, but as he explained to us, it still feels like home. "I feel comfortable, like I understand." He says it's a feeling he doesn't get anywhere else.

Cadwell told us that for a long time, he didn't write about things connected to himself. When he decided to set his novel in the Virgin Islands, the things he researched further for the book included "a lot of dusty history books." In particular, he focused on the Akwamu slave insurrection of 1733. He read a dissertation about the events, and the origins of the Akwamu. Initially, the Akwamu were a group of people on the west coast of Africa who rose to prominence by placing themselves as middlemen in the slave trade. Initially their group had been of mid-low status, but once they became middlemen, this gave them prominence. It also gave them enemies. At a certain point, their neighbors took over their city and sold them into slavery, and they were sent to St. John. One of the fascinating things Cadwell told us about this was that when they rebelled, their motive was not necessarily selfless. He tried to make sure that was clear in the book. These historical events are used as a parallel to the events with the Ynaa.

Cadwell told us he doesn't like to separate plot from character. He considers Ursula K. Le Guin a major influence, since he really admires her work on character. He says he's mostly motivated by character. Sociological themes are important in the book along with larger themes. He strives for a diversity of perspective, using lots of different lenses to examine a complex situation.

I asked Cadwell about his use of point of view in the book. It's a speculative book, but character focused, so he uses third person limited point of view, looking from different characters. There are nine points of view in the book. That came about by accident, Cadwell told us. "I didn't have intentions to make it a novel." Once he'd written it, other people suggested it was a novel. "I wanted to maintain that diversity of perspective." Among these diverse perspectives, there is one Ynna perspective that's very big and important.

When I asked him about his approach to worldbuilding, he called it "pretty much a mess," but in fact, it's a really interesting in-process development strategy. He says he takes a piece of something if it's very interesting, and from that piece he explores outward to other pieces, looking for connections. Instead of trying to render the big idea, he starts with a piece of the big idea, and puts it together like puzzle pieces. Then there will come big moments when he feels "this actually fits together and makes sense."

He describes a larger-scale cosmology "in my brain" that takes up more space. The Lesson is a piece of it. He says this larger cosmology helps him cope with the immensity of writing anything.

I asked Cadwell if his worldbuilding has changed a lot for the book. Some was written during the phase when he felt it was just short stories. He discovered that the short stories kept needing to be explored in a larger context. The plot started to develop out of smaller pieces. He applied logic, asking, "What would this lead to?" Some of the worldbuilding developed after the decision to turn it into a novel.

I asked him about the characters that were unique to the book. The character of Jammie was intended to show that heroism doesn't always come from a predictable place. Cadwell says he'd really like to develop him more. The character of Patrice is a person who has questions about love, relationships, and faith. The character of Henrietta is devout and looking at aliens from a religious point of view. Mera, the Ynaa ambassador, is a really interesting character because she has been there far longer than any of the other Ynaa. Some of the historical pieces are in her point of view. You get to see how she has changed over time, and examine her sympathies for humans, and how they developed. Cadwell describes her as very central to the cosmology in his head. The Lesson is her introduction because she's very important.

We asked if his bookshelf was like the character Derrick's bookshelf. He says the character of "Derrick is better than me" in terms of his taste in books! Derrick is young, but has lots of speculative fiction on his bookshelf that Cadwell says he didn't read until much later. He also has posters from Firefly and Stargate and other things Cadwell watched years ago. He's interested in mythology, too.

One fascinating thing about the novel is that the aliens have changed the media. Giving Derrick reference points in speculative fiction affects how he interacts (disastrously) with the Ynaa.

The character of Jackson is an English professor, and has a very systematic way of distinguishing literature from speculative fiction. Literature only references news clips about the Ynaa, while anyone who writes about the Ynaa directly is considered speculative. Cadwell asked "how is the media changed post-Ynaa?" Subverting expectations is fun, and being aware of media is really important.

Kate remarked about how Cadwell dealt with the question of slavery, especially when the received wisdom in the US is so often that "Africans sold each other." No one says "Africans didn't just lie down and let them do it. It's important to have that part of the dialogue, and to understand that more deeply, which is an opportunity that The Lesson affords readers.

Cadwell responded that he wishes he'd done more with that because he really wanted to explore it more. The tribes of have their own cultures, beliefs, and languages, just like the distinctions between the tribes of Europe.

Any really powerful outside force entering a space where it hasn't been seen before destabilizes the tribal and social makeup of the area. Some people decided, "Not me, do it to those people over there." Europeans of the era were aware that they were creating conflicts. The results of this were multifold. When the Akwame, who had used the slave trade to gain prominence, were themselves sold into slavery and came to St. John, they met many people who they had earlier victimized. The book Night of the Silent Drums by Lonzo Anderson goes into detail about the hierarchies and fraught relationships among slaves. The Akwamu in their rebellion were trying to make the Akwamu nation again.

These narratives need to be told, and explored, in greater detail, so we see the decisions that were made, and why they were made. African tribes have in fact discussed this, and they realize it's disingenuous to say  "they did it" about any other group.

Kat remarked how prevalent the narrative of "When the aliens come, we'll join together to fight them" is, and how inaccurate. In a real situation, that's not what happens.

Cadwell told us he wants to write another story about this, and read some more - perhaps to read the dissertation again.

When the Ynaa come, there is no great uniting among humans. What happens when you do unite? Often the marginalized get thrown first against the enemy, and often whatever unity gets achieved is thrown out again and the differences re-instituted after the common enemy is gone.

We should be honest about what really happens. Who wields the power in a united front? If you want to achieve real stability, the power should be distributed.

The Virgin Islands were a convenient spot to place this narrative because the rest of the world is used to ignoring them.

Cadwell told us that he often gets asked why he doesn't deal with the rest of the world. He says it's because he wanted the Virgin Islands to deal with things on its own.

He is working on a new series right now. This series also takes the approach of looking at a speculative thing and how it affects individuals and culture over time. In this series, there are preternatural beings of different origins: creatures from Caribbean, American, European, and West African folklores. They were hidden for a long time, and he asks why that was. What were the political and social reasons for hiding them? There are social movements, as monsters advocate for civil rights. He looks at intersectionality and monstrosity, as for example the intersection of class and monstrosity, and culture and monstrosity. The vampires, for example, are high-class and can hide more easily than some others. Culture of origin affects monster success. Cadwell describes himself as taking a magically real approach to how people accept monsters. Marginalized groups are the most visible, and receive the most prejudice, and he gets to explore these things, and look at shadowy things under the surface.

Cadwell says he does see himself as someone whose work falls under the umbrella of Afrofuturism.

Kat asked Cadwell whether he experienced a moment when he rejected writing characters unlike himself, and Cadwell said in fact it was an adviser of his who told him he should do that more. When he started doing it, something clicked. He says his stories took on a human quality that was missing before. The question of how identity affects character became really important. This happened around 2012, and gave him more grounding as a writer.

Cadwell says he wants to to pursue the Ynaa character Mera a lot more, and do other parts of her personal history, as well as other characters who he describes as having second and third lives. He wants to return to them in different modes, like a quilt.

All our greatest thanks to Cadwell for coming on the show! We really enjoyed your visit and were fascinated by the discussion. Thanks also to everyone who participated. Dive into Worldbuilding meets today at 4pm to discuss Predictability and Unpredictability. I hope you can join us!

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Character Backstory

Many authors love to get engaged in the back story of characters, and explore the lives their characters led before the story began. What does that have to do with worldbuilding? It's possible to find books in which characters feel well-grounded, and those in which they feel less well grounded. Sometimes I've run across stories where the protagonist in a medieval setting feels like their behaviors and values were imported straight from the 20th or 21st centuries! This would not be natural for someone who grew up in the world in question.

Characters have to interact with their world. They have to know it, and it affects their behavior. Kate said a character can talk about the world like they do with their pets.

Paul brought up the perennial question of "As you know, Bob" dialogue. Many readers of this blog will already know what that means, but essentially, it's having a character explain, in dialogue to another character, something about the world that both of them already know. I have one main technique for expressing this kind of information without having it seem clunky and incongruous: conflict. People will far more naturally utter words about things they already know when they are disagreeing with another person, or when they are encountering problems in the way that things are supposed to work.

The example I love is from Mary Pope Osborne's first Magic Treehouse book, Dinosaurs After Dark. A young girl is running down the road and yells, "Help! A monster!" and her brother replies, "Yeah, sure. A real monster in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania." When you are working in fiction, there's no necessary requirement that monsters be fake, but she lets us know this in one line. This is a critical piece of worldbuilding. Furthermore, she also lets us know where the kids live without having anyone say, "As you know, we live in Frog Creek..."

Recommended techniques for avoiding "as you know, Bob" dialogue:
1. Put in a character who is unfamiliar with the world
2. Have something go wrong
3. Have people in conflict (fighting is not necessary; disagreement is sufficient)

Having a character who is unfamiliar with the world will give you opportunities to have people who do know the world well explain things to that person. It is not always an option, however. In my world of Varin, all people are insiders and none are outsiders. However, I take advantage of the different castes and subcultures of Varin to create the conflict that allows the world to be illuminated. This is one of the reasons why I use multiple points of view.

With multiple points of view, you can ask, "Why does this person judge things the way they do? What about their past might have caused them to have these judgments? Why would they disagree with another character, or see things differently?"

What are the individual experiences that affect a character's backstory? Are they fitting with expectations or not? Do they meet the expectations of their family or not? Does their family meet the expectations of the larger society or not? Is this character well-aligned or misaligned, and in what way, and because of what kind of experiences?

Do you need to know that a particular character loved to wear pink shoes? Not necessarily, but we might want to know why their wearing of pink shoes was important. Were they gender non-conforming? Was it just the wrong shade of pink to be appropriate, somehow?

If your world is resource-poor, think about what that means for a character's past experience and expectations. Think about where clothes and other items would come from, and how likely the character would be to possess them.

Beware the danger of default assumptions that come with your own cultural background.

There are a lot of things in our own world that we may not know. Some of us would be able to say where Prince Harry went to school, but others might not.

Don't give six earrings to someone playing Mary, Queen of Scots.

A lot of backstory information is likely to find its way into the "Miscellaneous notes" pile rather than into the story. However, you will find that the more you know, the more the story will take on dimension. The things you know will show in how you write your character's narrative.

Kat said she's often dinged for not being cinematically descriptive. You don't need to write this way, necessarily. It's better to get your details right than to go for total physical immersion.

Kate told us about a podcast on bad books where she would hear passages and wonder "what mobius size and shape is this room?" or "how many arms are there in the orgy?" Some authors have written about rooms where the sun is always streaming in the windows... forgetting that the sun moves over the course of a day. The constellation of Orion is not in the sky all year unless you are migrating with it.

Kat said she has had the experience of driving all night and watching the sky wheel. Having a character who notices that, or doesn't notice that, is part of their backstory.

What does your character know? What kind of information can they access? What is normal to discuss? What is not normal to discuss?

A lot of a character's psychology forms between the ages of zero and seven. Did anything happen to your character during that period? Did they form natural expectations of attachment to others, or not?

Try not to be simplistic when thinking about how past experiences influence a character. Kate told us about a book where test tube babies were compared with womb-grown babies, and the authors made the test tube babies more distant. Be careful that you don't fall into this kind of essentialism. Having lots of people in your parenting system may be healthy or normal.

The point of view of the writer is not always congruent with the character's point of view.

We also talked about narration style. How is backstory included? Kat talked about how omniscient viewpoint explaining the backstory can be useful. Many modern writers have been taught "show, don't tell," but this admonition is not necessarily helpful, and has drawbacks. Anything "shown" requires more work from the reader. Some kinds of information are best told, and if you can "tell" beautifully, it may be very successful.

Think about who the narrator is, and what they know. Some narrators have a colonialist quality (intentionally or unintentionally). This is one reason why you want to know who the narrator character is, and what their backstory is.

Kat says she notices when an omniscient narrator is pandering to a person who is not her, but she knows a lot about the context from her own experience that doesn't match the narrator's knowledge.

Always ask who your reader is.

Sometimes, insiders to a culture may find it interesting to look at an outsider's viewpoint on their culture. Kat told us about Americans living in Finland who vlog about Finland in English, and how many of their fans are Finns who enjoy the outsider perspective on their home.

Many TV commentators like Trevor Noah or even Johnny Carson have been outsiders to the culture they are commenting on in some sense. They bring in their own cultural assumptions, however, because everyone does.

Don't underestimate the power of the outsider-insider distinction in allowing you to explain things. Backstories are a key ingredient of this.

Some people in a culture are expected to be in a state of learning, like children. People in this state can also be useful for writers and narrators.

A person's idiosyncratic backstory can make them feel like they don't fit in interesting ways.

What if you were socialized to inhabit a different gender from the one you feel? What does it mean to have society tell you you're an outsider?

Even ordinary people have backstory. What backstory makes a character "ordinary" as opposed to "extraordinary"?

Whose backstory is relevant? Are the backstories of non-important people relevant? Why would those people not be important?

Thank you to everyone who participated in the discussion. Dive into Worldbuilding meets today at 4pm Pacific with guest author Cadwell Turnbull to discuss his new novel, The Lesson. I hope you can join us!

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Sam J. Miller and Blackfish City

It was a pleasure to have Sam J. Miller on the show after I saw him at the Nebulas this year.

I asked him what the seed had been for his Nebula-nominated novel, Blackfish City. Sam said, "A woman showed up in my brain, with a killer whale, and demanded my attention." He told us that he had seen the documentary entitled "Blackfish," and cried. He wanted to spend time with orcas, but couldn't do it in real life "because they'd eat me," and this book allowed him to do that.

The floating city of Qanaaq appeared in an immigration parable story called "Calved" that appeared in Asimov's in 2015. Sam told us that a number of different pieces fell together for Blackfish City to happen. He takes things he loves, things he finds upsetting, and things he's mad about and puts them in a pot together.

Qanaaqis a floating Arctic city in a future 100-300 years in the future, after catastrophic climate change. It's a boom town, a giant floating oil rig housing a million people, which is shaped like an asterisk with arms 10 kilometers long. Some of the arms house rich people, and some house people of many different backgrounds.

Sam explained that he has a background as a community organizer working for police reform, and has experience learning what kind of people cities work for or against. This is a critical piece in the creation of Blackfish City. Sam imagined a mass exodus to the north as cities in the south burn. The First Nations, including the Inuit, have adapted to the environment of the north, and so they play a critical role and become global cultural leaders. People who are immigrating to the area take on much culture from where they arrive. In the book the First Nations influence is a backdrop. Sam said that he did a great deal of research on the practices of these peoples, but didn't feel he knew enough about the ramifications to go really deep and still do them justice.

He described the city as "very much New York City," inasmuch as there are many issues in the book that he has encountered in New York. Frustrated by talking to robots, he created a city where Artificial Intelligence makes most decisions. Sam told us he's done a lot of work on open data. Every city agency keeps information in different ways. The way the fire department views a region is very different from the way the city planning department views that same region, and the information they view as critical differs. Trying to bring the two together becomes very messy. In the book, the AIs are not friends or enemies, but they are supposed to make it difficult to solve problems.

We discussed the food people eat in Qanaaq. Sam described it as an assortment of cuisines adapted to circumstances. People eat a lot of vat-grown meat, and have farmed protein sources. Because the city floats on the ocean, there is aquaculture, so they have farmed fish and shrimp. Shrimp have been genetically modified to make the shells edible. Most people rely on a minimalist set of foods, but the rich have floating greenhouses.

Sam said he wanted a lot of inventiveness in the way that the people of Qanaaq solve food problems. He said he looked at Hong Kong and Kowloon's walled city to see how people solved food problems there, since both places are really densely populated. Sam described how Kowloon produced massive amounts of fish balls in small DIY spaces. He was also inspired by his 2015 trip to Thailand, where he saw how food was made, prepared, and sold. He was impressed by stalls that flash-fried noodles really quickly.

I asked Sam how he set up the way the different arms of the city worked. He said his technique was basically, "Let's try this and see how it works." He put the wealthy people on the south side because the weather conditions on the north side would be harsher due to Arctic weather patterns. The city is built over a geothermal vent with a pyramid structure to capture energy.

There are some utopian elements in the story as well as dystopian ones. A lot of energy problems can be solved. The city uses methane generators to produce light. They also don't need militarized police. Sam remarked how any place can have both utopian and dystopian elements depending on who you are. To the people who live in the Capital, the Hunger Games world is a utopia.

I asked if this book was strictly speaking science fiction or whether it had fantastical elements. He explained that it is a science fiction story, but that he uses nanites to do things that might seem magical. The nanites allow some humans to bond with animals. That bond could seem fantastical but it has technological underpinnings.

There are people called orcamancers. Sam explained that the origins of the orcamancers are  with illegal pharmaceutical testing that happened in the period between the present and the time period of the novel. Rival drugs were tested on people at different times. This accidentally led to a form of bonding with animals that Sam compared to the daemons in The Golden Compass. He explained that cultural practices regulate why you would bond with particular animals.

Sam told us that all of his work takes place in a shared universe that can be cross-referenced to itself. He described it as "a sort of general arc to the future that I'm imagining."

In Blackfish City, Sam makes the end of America a sort of background noise by featuring a news report that talks about the 17th American government falling.

Sam told us about a short story he wrote called "It was Saturday Night, I Guess That Makes it All Right," in which there was a fundamentalist government that had outlawed musicians (among other things). He said he often writes about things that he's pissed off about, or scared of. He says that given what he is seeing with migrant children right now, he tries not to be gleeful when he writes something about the people who are causing this atrocity becoming refugees. He likes to imagine that the scales will tip.

I asked Sam about the influence of Octavia Butler's fiction on him, because I'd seen him mentioned in an article about her influence.  Sam explained that he can't quantify her influence on him, but that she freed him to think about bringing together social justice and science fiction. He says his favorite of her books is Mind of my Mind, because he says if you did have telepathic superpowers, by and large it would be really rough for you to be surrounded by horrific suffering.

He likes to see old assumptions being shaken.

Sam says, "I love so many kinds of books." He told us he probably should write only one kind of book, but he doesn't stick to one genre. Right now he has a book called The Blade Between coming out from Echo Press. He speculated with us about writing an epic secondary world fantasy, or a sex thriller. He said he had zero interest in writing epic secondary world fantasy because he was turned off by the restrictive visions of many past books, but then he read Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy and thought to himself that maybe it would be possible. He says, "I'm all over the place." He's writing a hard science fiction short story and a horror story at the moment, trying to be a jack of all trades.

Paul asked Sam about his use of point of view in Blackfish City. He told us that he was fascinated by the main character as an agent of plot, but that her influence is mostly having an impact through other people. She only gets to narrate one chapter at the center of the book. Sam explained that the model for this was actually Faulkner's story "As I Lay Dying," which features one section at the center narrated by the dead person who is being transported. Sam said that he really likes to look at the low and high of how people live, so the four points of view in Blackfish City represent the spread of lifestyles in Qanaaq, and each has an equal role and agency in the plot. He acknowledged that managing the logistics of four points of view is tough, and takes both skill and a good editor.

I asked Sam to tell us a little about The Blade Between. He told us that it's set in his hometown of Hudson, New York, a town in the rust belt that grew and waned with industry, and now is being revitalized by wealthy people building second homes and antique shops... but that this gentrification is very difficult for people who live there. The Blade Between is a nightmare vision in which a gay artist who moved to the city and then returned to his hometown fights back against gentrification. He said the question behind the book's premise is "What if gentrification came to a town with a secret?" This town is haunted by the ghosts of whales, who died when whaling was a major industry in the town. The whale ghosts (mostly sperm whales, whose bones fill the harbor) are manipulating people to resist the gentrification. They have a sort of ghost hive mind, which Morgan suggested could be called a "pod mind."

Sam told us that on July 2, he has a book coming out called Destroy All Monsters, from Harper YA. He calls it a combination of gritty contemporary and fantasy YA.

Sam described his worldbuilding as saying a bunch of crazy stuff, putting it on a page, and hopefully it coheres into a world that works. He says he's a half-pantser, in that his characters fill in their own logic. When a character needs to get coffee, he then asks what coffee looks like. If he discovers he never worked out what gender equality looks like or how magic impacts sex work, he goes back and figures it out. He says any worldview is projection and an attempt to make sense of chaos.

It was a real pleasure having Sam on the show. Thank you so much, Sam!

Dive into Worldbuilding meets this week on Tuesday, July 9th at 4pm Pacific to talk with author Cadwell Turnbull about his new book, The Lesson. I hope you can join us!

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What deserves a name?

During our last hangout about Naming, the question came up: how do we decide what deserves a name? So we began by asking what kinds of things we put names on. People get them; places get them. Animals can get them. Sometimes, things get them. Quite a number of people name their cars; I knew a fellow once who named his dishwasher "The General" because it was so loud.

Paul suggested that the human tendency to anthropomorphize, or to attribute human characteristics like personality to animals and things.

Kat pointed out that she grew up with an animistic culture in which everything has personality, but she doesn't name things (that's not a necessary extension of a worldview that attributes personality to things). She lived on a boat, and boats have names, but other things did not.

We speculated that boats have names because when you call the Coast Guard or a bridge, you need to have a way of identifying yourself, so you identify the boat.

Paul pointed out that some addresses in England consist of the person's name, the name of the house, the name of the town, and what it's adjacent to. Names can be given to castles, mansions, and rich people's homes.

Swords can be given names, but they aren't always. Kat said that in Japan, certain swords of note were given names.

Would you name your kitchen knives? Which one or ones? Would you name only your sharp knives or your butter knives as well?

Inns will sometimes name the individual rooms they contain, but this is usually something that happens in places with very few rooms, or with themed rooms.

Do you name the rooms in your home? What do you call them? Does everyone who lives there agree what they are called?

It's natural to name pets, but what about computers? You may be asked to name your hard drive. You may need to track the name of the server that you visit when you play video games. You might want to give a computer a name that helps you track its function in a larger system.

Do we name food animals? Why or why not?

Hurricanes get named when they surpass a particular size and strength.

Some companies even name their marketing programs.

In a hospital, it might be helpful to think of names that would help patients understand a place's role in the larger system; another kind of name might confuse them.

We often label things when we feel they must be distinguished from one another.

Roman names, the nomen and the cognomen, would indicate who you were in the family structure. Many famous Romans went by their nicknames, like Cicero, whose nickname means chickpea.

Consider how you might name things in your secondary world to help people keep track of where they belong in relation to one another.

Names very often indicate social affiliation. Sometimes they are immutable, as a name that stands for a unique individual throughout their lifetime. Sometimes they change over the course of one's life, or they change over time.

People in our world enjoy acronyms that are pronounceable as names.

Stadium names used to be idiosyncratic, and now they have become corporate. That suggests a lot about the nature of our society.

Dormitories are often named so they can be distinguished. They might be named for famous people.

When you look at the phenomenon of places or monuments being named for people who have done great things, and then you compare that with the phenomenon of corporate name buying, it suggests something about how fame can or cannot be bought.

A complex naming strategy would require some investment in teaching readers, but it could be very helpful.

High elevation points might get a name. If a place is generally quite flat, a low hill might be named; but in a mountain range, only a really high or uniquely-shaped mountain would get a name.

What size does a community have to be before it gets a name? Does the community have to live in a permanent location, or can it be mobile? Do neighborhoods get names? What about unincorporated areas?

Sometimes the way you use names can reveal a lot about social structure, and also history.

Naming cars appears to be a relatively new phenomenon, but boats have had names since thousands of years ago.

I asked how the question of naming might reflect on the issue of capitalizing things, like The City, the South Bay, the East Bay, etc. When we capitalize, it gives a name-like quality to the thing being described. Che suggested that magical librarians might need to be called something different if they were part of a magical librarian's guild rather than simply a magical librarian.

There are rules for the use of mother vs. Mother; mother is a noun while Mother is a name. Sometimes it's less clear whether to use capitals on something like Lady.

Legislative bills for the government often get names or acronyms. Military operations get names; we were trying to think whether Desert Storm was the first one or one of the first ones named, but we couldn't be sure because we don't have military experience. It may simply be that those names existed but weren't widely known.

When you want people to talk about something, it helps to give it a name. Similarly, if you don't want people to talk about something, don't give it a name.

Thank you to everyone who attended this discussion. I really enjoyed it! Dive into Worldbuilding meets again on Tuesday, July 2, 2019 at 4pm Pacific. I hope to see you there!

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