Episode 158: The Invisible Hand of Worldbuilding, ft. ELIZABETH BEAR

In one way or another, economy touches almost everything in a world. Even without currency or capitalism in the sense that we currently know it, the idea of obligations and repayment exert pressure on society. So how can we make interesting worldbuilding choices when it comes to money, debt, gain, and other aspects of economy? Guest Elizabeth Bear joins us to explore the options! Where does money intersect with other kinds of power and privilege? What’s the income equality or inequality like -- what conflict is there between the haves and have-nots? How much opportunity is there for mobility between classes? Even issues as simple as currency are worth interrogation: What is your currency made from? There's a reason many societies have always used copper, silver, and gold -- but others use things like shells or polished stones. Then, of course, there are things like faery markets and the stock market, both of which operate on the trade of abstract nouns. So how can you make these choices for the world you're building in a way that serves the story you're telling? [Transcript for Episode 158] Our Guest: Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award winning author of dozens of novels; over a hundred short stories; and a number of essays, nonfiction, and opinion pieces for markets as diverse as Popular Mechanics and The Washington Post. She lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts with her spouse, writer Scott Lynch. 

It's the start of SEASON SEVEN! And original co-host Rowenna Miller is back to join us in a reflection of how multiple years of doing this podcast has affected how each of us thinks about worldbuilding. What have we learned from our many amazing guests, and how have they inspired us to think about worldbuilding in new ways? Have our worldbuilding interests and focuses shifted? And since the real world we live in has been... um... interesting over the past several years, how has that -- and the changes in our own lives and careers -- influenced our work? (Transcript for Episode 157 -- Thank you, scribes!) Our Guest: Rowenna Miller is the author of the Unraveled Kingdom trilogy, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill, and The Palace of Illusions, as well as short fiction. She is also a prior cohost of this podcast! And also an English professor, and a fairly handy seamstress. She lives in Indiana with her husband, two daughters, four cats, and an ever-growing flock of chickens.

It's one of the first choices you'll make when writing a story, consciously or not: what point of view are you writing from? First person singular? Third person limited? Omniscient? Something else? The POV can affect a reader's experience of the narrative and the worldbuilding, either subtly or dramatically -- so how do you decide what's right for this story? Kate Elliott joins us to explore the possibilities! In this episode, we look at how the point of view can shape both what you communciate about a world and how you communicate it. The POV shows the rhythms of life and can be a good way to feed worldbuilding to the reader -- but it can also expose a character's gaps in knowledge or their biases and prejudices! After all, a commoner and a noble living in same location will interact with different pieces of the world and in very different ways. That, in turn, can affect how the author thinks of the world: what we spotlight, where we might have gaps, and prompting a need to check our own biases. And on top of all of that, POV is also something with its own trends within genres and over time! So we dig into those influences as well. Transcript for Episode 156 Our Guest: Kate Elliott has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for over thirty years with a particular focus in immersive world building and epic stories of adventure & transformative cultural change. She’s written epic fantasy, space opera, science fiction, Young Adult fantasy, and the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alternate-history fantasy with lawyer dinosaurs, Cold Magic, as well as two novellas set in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards. Her novel Black Wolves won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy 2015. She lives in Hawaii, where she paddles outrigger canoes and spoils her schnauzer.

We often think about "making things make sense" in worldbuilding and building internal consistency, scientific realism, and other logic-based considerations into our fiction -- But what happens when your worldbuilding principle is “What would be awesome?" Jim C. Hines, who embraced this principle for a forthcoming book, joins us to explore the possibilities! The Rule of Cool, credit to, is defined thusly: "The limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness." In other words, if it's cool enough, you can get away with it. This often applies to sci-fi tech and fantasy magic. Let's be real, things like faster-than-light travel, lightsabers, and starfighters will always be "rule of cool", in one way or another (so far as we currently understand physics), and magic doesn't have to be something you break down and quantify and explain perfectly. So what can we play with? And where do those decisions intersect with narrative tone, genre standards, and reader expectations? [Transcript TK] Our Guest: Jim C. Hines is the author of the Magic ex Libris series, the Princess series of fairy tale retellings, the humorous Goblin Quest trilogy, and the Fable Legends tie-in Blood of Heroes. He also won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. His latest novel is Terminal Peace, book three in the humorous science fiction Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse trilogy. He lives in mid-Michigan with his family.

We often think of worldbuilding happening on a grand scale, with huge maps and the sweeping narratives of nations and world-changing events. But that's not really the stuff that makes a world feel lived-in. The granular choices are what show day-to-day life, and day-to-day life illustrates so much about how a world has developed, how a culture has grown, and how people negotiate the circumstances of their lives. These are the things that, out of genre, creators might not think of as “worldbuilding” but as "just" character work or setting details. All of it helps to tell the story of your world and how people live in it. So in this episode, we start at the mid-sized level of worldbuilding and then narrow our way down, from cities to neighborhoods to individual buildings to distinct rooms. How can the smallest choices have a significant impact, giving your stories more life and verisimilitude? What defines public and private space, and how do people perceive the differences? What are the uses of buildings and the rooms within them, and what does that tell you about who occupies the space? And how can you craft all of this in a way that feels genuine and goes beyond the surface level? [Transcript for Episode 154 -- Thank you, scribes!]

How can language help shape your worldbuilding? We're not necessarily talking about conlang here -- that can certainly be part of worldbuilding, but it doesn't have to be, and many works of speculative fiction manage perfectly fine without invented languages. But the words you choose in description and dialogue will also communicate something to your reader. There are so many ways that words can create the vibes for your world: the aural quality of different languages, choosing character and place names, the cadence and flow of sentences, and the conscious emulation of other genres or eras. We also explore what the conceptual availability of certain ideas, technologies, or worldviews may mean for the vocabulary, idioms, and metaphors of a culture. Being very intentional about word choice can help a writer communicate a location's aesthetic, let a reader know what to expect from a book's tone, help reveal character through dialogue, and even drop information about all your other worldbuilding in quick and subtle ways. And since we are huge word nerds, we delight in examining all of it! The episode begins, however, with a 15-minute diversion into how much we love Shakespeare, so -- enjoy that! And happy birthday, Bill! We are also delighted to announce that we are, for the fifth year in a row, a Finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fancast! Anyone who has a WSFS membership for this year can vote, and we would love your consideration. Membership costs $50 and gets you access to the voters' packet, digital versions of almost everything you'll find on the Finalists lists -- novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, poetry, and even audio and video. [Transcript for Episode 153 -- Thank you, Scribes!]

Sometimes, people will say of a book that "the setting is another character". But what does that really mean, and how can a writer craft it? Ai Jiang joins us to discuss creating worlds and settings that have their own personalities! From the physical geography to the architecture, from the scale of the location to its dynamism, writers can make a lot of choices to make their setting feel unlike any other. The setting can do a lot to set the mood and tone of a story. Is it bright and peppy, or dark and gloomy? What's the vibe? The overlap between setting and aesthetic can be quite high, communicating a lot to your reader about what they might expect from the story and characters. We also often talk about how characters are the products of their circumstances -- and that means they're also products of their surroundings! What about the physical space that they exist in, or have existed in during their life, has shaped them? [Transcript for Episode 152] Our Guest: Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, The Masters Review, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of A Palace Near the Wind, Linghun and I AM AI. Find her on X (@AiJiang_), Insta (@ai.jian.g), and online (http://aijiang.ca). 

In amazing fantasy and science fiction worlds -- Who's doing the work? Where does the food come from? The clothes? Who does the caregiving? Guest august clarke joins us to discuss the hands and bodies that create a society. Labor is something that’s often sort of invisible in stories if it’s not explicitly the driving focus of a book – So, why is that? How can authors better incorporate labor into their worlds? Labor intersects with so many other components of a world, after all: ideas about currency and property, concepts of time, religion, social class, technology. With labor touching so much of our characters' lives, where do we use SFF to examine & explore our world’s labor issues, and where can we get creative and try to imagine escaping dominant paradigms? [Transcript for Episode 151] About Our Guest: august clarke is here and queer, etc. They have been published in PRISM international, Portland Review, and Eidolon. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction and a Locus Award, Dragon Award, and Pushcart nominee. They researched queerness, labor, and monstrosity at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the indie-bestselling series The Scapegracers, which he writes as H. A. Clarke.

Worldbuilding means getting to “play god” – so how does that take a different shape when you’re part of a pantheon rather than the One True Ruler of your world? Xen, Matt Roen, and Sara Wile, the creative trio behind Midst, a surreal sci-fi fantasy audio drama now produced by Critical Role Productions, join us to discuss co-creating a world and the stories that happen within it! When working as a team, how do you divide the labor? What's the balance of talents on your team, and how can you best get those skills to flow together? Words, art, sounds, shapes, motion -- all these tools can help to tell a larger story. How is co-worldbuilding for an audio drama like or unlike other forms of cooperative storytelling, like theater, gaming, and immersive experiences? We also discuss the joy of crafting the intricate details of a world and how creating the tiny details can actually communicate a great deal about the worldbuilding. [Transcript for Episode 150 -- Thanks, Scribes!] Our Guests: The trio (also known as Third Person) are master world-builders. Their newest series in the Midst Cosmos, UNEND, takes listeners on a cosmic journey with an unconventional crew aboard a mysterious, supernatural ship—a story with the adventurous, space-western spirit of Firefly. The story combines psychological depth, moral ambiguity, and unexpected humor, brought to life by their unique collaborative process. They divide creative roles—Xen (sounds), Sara (pictures), and Matt (words)—yet approach every stage of worldbuilding as a team. The Midst Cosmos is the surreal, reality-bending, sci-fantasy setting of our three standalone series: Midst, Moonward: A Midst Roleplaying Story, and our new addition UNEND. Talking place several decades after the events of Midst and Moonward, UNEND focuses on a supernatural ship and a remarkable crew set forth on an expedition to explore the highest heights, deepest depths, and furthest reaches of the known cosmos. But their journey is fraught with peril as they discover truths and realities far stranger than any of them could ever have imagined. You can listen to all three series now on your favorite podcast app and on the Midst Podcast YouTube channel! OR if you want to unlock bonus content like music, art downloads, AMAs with the narrators, AND support the story, we invite you to Join the Fold at Midst.co!

What happens when the world your characters -- or your readers -- first find themselves in turns out to be not quite what it appears? Marina Lostetter joins us to explore the different ways that a writer can play with an unreliable world. Maybe it means a story of scientific discovery that reshapes how their characters perceive their place in the universe; maybe it means a story where information has been deliberately suppressed and has to be fought for; maybe it's a world where knowledge has simply been lost and must be recovered. It could even mean a world that is, itself, changing as the story goes on! What are the challenges for on-boarding readers to an unreliable world? How is it different in a story that starts in what seems to be our modern real world and then reveals the Matrix or a portal universe versus a story that begins in a fantasy world, so that the author has to get the reader up to speed on that before they can start introducing the world's secrets? What role does self-mythologizing play at both the personal and the societal level? How about the pressure of a character maintaining a lie, either for themself, someone else, or their whole nation? Building these things may mean thinking about your world in layers of who knows what -- and how easy or difficult it is to peel back those layers. We also wrangle with the difficulty in combining an unreliable world with an unreliable narrator. Characters lying to teach other is one thing -- but a narrative lying to the reader or viewer is a riskier choice! It can be beautiful when done well -- but it can also be a breach of trust that impairs the overall story. [Transcript for Episode 149] About Our Guest: The open skies and dense forests of the Pacific Northwest are ideal for growing speculative fiction authors–or, at least, Marina would like to think so. Originally from Oregon, she now resides in Arkansas with her spouse, Alex. In her spare time she enjoys globetrotting, board games, and all things art-related. Her original short fiction has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, Uncanny, and Shimmer Magazine.  Her space opera trilogy NOUMENON and the stand-alone space adventure ACTIVATION DEGRADATION are available from Harper Voyager.  The first two books in her first dark fantasy trilogy, THE HELM OF MIDNIGHT and THE CAGE OF DARK HOURS, are out from Tor. In addition, she has written tie-in materials for Star Citizen and the Aliens franchise. She is represented by DongWon Song of the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and she skeets on Bluesky as @MarinaLostetter.