Worldbuilding for Masochists

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 [https://www.elizabethbear.com/] 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 [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cskfD1-TgwfGoh65elfK60yVtCn5SkukO1Tu0zC8340/edit?usp=sharing]] 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 [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XLzfUjTLBGbaNvDmQ8RuUxVjzap-PdBWDT22Zx5v7N8/edit?usp=sharing] -- 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 [https://imakeupworlds.com/] 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 [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jiOzF1xGLMthddYsuSlb_iNvDWCN7jjWZFqLlEiRw4M/edit?usp=sharing] 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 [https://www.jimchines.com/], 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 [https://docs.google.com/document/d/14KJLZy9CjNcTiD9Nru-IapfF5LrFa0fCusiqGuzTQWE/edit?tab=t.0] -- Thank you, scribes!]