Episode 45: Transcript
Episode: 45 — World-building
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and society. I'm Annalee Newitz, I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:09] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer who thinks a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:14] A lot. Like I can—
Charlie Jane: [00:00:15] A lot.
Annalee: [00:00:16] I can completely validate that, like she's basically… even when she's sleeping—
Charlie Jane: [00:00:22] All the time.
Annalee: [00:00:22] —she's talking about science—
Charlie Jane: [00:00:24] Just science.
Annalee: [00:00:24] —in her sleep. Yeah. So, in this episode we're going to be doing another one of those deep dives into aspects of writing. And this is about how to build a world in your fiction, how other people have done it, how we do it, what the pitfalls are. And we're going to try to look at pretty much every aspect of creating a believable alternate reality from culture and environment to history and politics. And plus, we are super lucky to have K. Tempest Bradford joining us in the second half of the episode to talk about her work teaching, the Writing the Other workshops, which are all about world-building and also her own work world-building, doing something called pyramidpunk. So let's get started.
[00:01:08] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:35] So, Annalee, where does the term world-building even come from? It sounds very grandiose. What does it mean?
Annalee: [00:01:41] It is very grandiose and I think these days, really since the 1960s it's been a term that's mostly been applied to thinking about fictional worlds. And that really comes out of people looking at J.R.R. Tolkien's world-building where he created languages and an entire kind of socio-geographical world. But the term has its roots in the 19th century and early 20th century when scientists, and especially physicists, were speculating about worlds that had different physical laws than our own. And so part of the art of figuring out physics on our world and in our universe is really to imagine, well what if it was different? You know, how would matter behave differently? Or how would energy behave differently?
[00:02:27] And so it makes perfect sense that you'd see kind of a segue between the world of science and the world of science fiction at a certain point, because, of course, a lot of writers in our genre are reading those scientists and thinking about those questions and especially thinking about the questions around what would it be like if physical reality was totally different and we had giant worms or we had flying dinosaurs or I guess we did have flying dinosaurs so that would be our world. But, you know what I mean.
[00:02:56] So Charlie Jane, getting started with building a world can be bewildering and I wanted to invoke the spirit of the writer or the creator at the start of that process by playing a clip from one of my favorite movies, Adaptation, which is a Charlie Kaufman movie that was directed by Spike Jones about a guy who is trying to adapt a nonfiction book and turn it into something. And so he's—the book is The Orchid Thief and he's trying to imagine, he's sitting down to write and he's like, okay, what is the story of the orchid? And this is what he comes up with.
Adaptation Clip: [00:03:32] To write about a flower. To dramatize a flower, I have to show the flower’s arc and the flower’s arc stretches back to the beginning of life. How did this flower get here? What was its journey. Darwin writes that we all come from the very first single cell organism. Yet here I am and there's Laroche, there's Orlean and there's the ghost orchid. All trapped in our own bodies, in moments in history. That's it. That's what I need to do. Tie all of history together.
[00:04:07] Start right before life begins on the planet. All is lifeless. And then like life begins, with organisms. Those little single cell ones. Oh and it's before sex. ‘Cause like everything was asexual. From there we go to bigger things, jellyfish and then that fish that got legs on it and crawled out on the land and then we see, you know, like dinosaurs and then they're around for a long, long time. And then, and then an asteroid comes in and FWORT, the insects, the [inaudible] mammals and primates, monkeys, the simple monkeys…
Annalee: [00:04:39] And so of course this is Nick Cage playing this character, so it’s—
Charlie Jane: [00:04:42] The inimitable Nick Cage.
Annalee: [00:04:44] So it’s already amazing. And the thing I love about this is that he’s trying to figure out how do you start and he starts out with like, okay, it's a flower, it's just this flower, but it's also these people. But it's also the entire history of evolution on earth.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:58] It's the whole universe!
Annalee: [00:04:59] Right! It's the whole universe. And I feel like that is everyone at the beginning of starting world-building is, the first question is always scope. Like how big is your world? How far back do you want to go? So Charlie, Jane, talk a little bit about that. How do writers in general get ahold of that question and figure out the scope? Like, what's the first sort of set of steps to get through?
Charlie Jane: [00:05:24] Yeah, I mean I wish that there was a standard set of steps that you go through to create a world. I feel like every world is different and I think the first thing you have to do is kind of ask yourself what you need the world for and how much of the world you're going to need in the story. Because really you could spend five years creating an entire planet and map out like oh in the mountains, in the swamp and the desert and like here's what these people over here do. But if your story never visits those places, if the characters never get there, if you never actually spend any time in some of those locations, that time can be kind of a wasted effort.
[00:06:01] And I think that the scope of your story is part of what informs your world-building. And also I think that there are, there are different values to world-building that people have. Like, for example, we want world-building to feel immersive and to feel like it's a real place that you could actually visit. You want people to kind of get sucked into the world as much as caring about the characters. They have to feel like they really want to inhabit this place. And that's what's so great about fictional worlds like Star Wars or Harry Potter or whatever is that everybody kind of feels like they could go and live at Hogwarts or whatever. And they could go and live in the Star Wars universe and they kind of understand it and they have a sense of what it's like to actually be there.
[00:06:41] And then the other thing about world-building, I think that's really good is it provides in a sense, kind of an obstacle course for your characters. I always say that world-building is the thing that you can't just ignore. Like you can't walk through walls. You can't just like, you know, spit on a police officer and just keep walking for the rest of your day. There are things that you can't ignore or that you have to at least be aware of if you're going to get from A to B in the real world. And that's… Good world-building, I think, in some cases makes things more complicated or creates instead of obstacles for your characters to navigate. But I think that a lot of it has to do with the scope and a lot of that thing of creating an immersive world that people want to live in and want to spend time in is about just having a lot of details that people can glom onto, that people can kind of feel attached to.
Annalee: [00:07:31] In a way, I think what you're describing is there's two levels to the world. There's kind of the macro world, which is like what you're describing with say, Star Wars, for example, where you know there's a bunch of planets, there's a bunch of civilizations and government groups and all kinds of other organizations. Not all of which are actually world-built very well, but they're there. I mean, there's a sense of Astro politics.
[00:07:59] And then there's the little things. There's the little details like, I love what you said about you can't spit on a policeman and expect to just continue with your day. And those are the little social things that I think make worlds really come to life. And I really feel like, I think for me, I often feel like world-building falls down on the details.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:21] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:08:21] You get this amazing sort of sweeping tale of aristocratic space ship owning dynasties and it's like wow, that's really cool.
[00:08:33] But then characters in their everyday interactions seem completely unrealistic. You know, they kind of deliver speeches to each other or they have incredibly simplistic goals. My goal is I want to continue ruling, which is like, okay, what are the other parts of your… You know, is this because you've been taught that you should want this? Is it because you really are just a power-crazed monkey? Is it because you have an implant in your brain that makes you hyper-aggressive? Is it like what, what is it and who were the people around you that are helping you do that? Or the robots around you? Or the tiny furry creatures that are mostly made of teeth? What's happening in the fabric of your world that's kind of giving you that thing? So I think that it has to be both the big world and then the small details.
[00:09:26] A question I have for you, and there may not be an answer to this, but I've been thinking about it a lot because I've been doing a lot of tabletop gaming where there's a lot of world-building without story. Like you kind of get a world and then you kind of… the idea is that you and your character friends kind of help build the story. And same thing in Minecraft, right? Where you're kind of given a world and then it's up to you if you want to have the story or what you want to build. So do you think it's possible to build a world that doesn't have a story in it? Like a completely—a world that's really detailed and all the ways that we've just been describing but doesn't… that's kind of story neutral. That's just kind of like there and you can put any story you want into it.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:07] Absolutely. I mean I think that you can, anybody can do anything. I mean, people can do whatever they want.
Annalee: [00:10:11] Okay, fine.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:11] But I think that, I think that there are going to be stories embedded in the fabric of that world. I think part of what makes the world interesting is the history and the reasons why things are the way they are. And when you look at the little small details like, okay, we eat these, you know, cinnamon buns in this world or whatever, now I’m craving cinnamon buns.
Annalee: [00:10:30] Mm… cinnamon buns.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:33] We eat these cinnamon buns. And you know, maybe there's a religious reason why we eat the cinnamon buns, maybe there's some historical event that we're commemorating. Maybe the reason why we have the cinnamon buns is because somebody found a better way to mill flour a hundred years ago. And so—
Annalee: [00:10:47] Maybe it's because we colonized a country that has cinnamon.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:50] Yeah, exactly. There was a whole like cinnamon colonialism thing going on and I feel like any little item like that, like a piece of music or a piece of art or food or sports or politics, there's going to be things that kind of get into the fabric of the world around like, this crop will grow but this crop won't grow. So this is why we have this food and we don't have this other food. Or, this is why we wear this kind of clothing because we can make fabric out of this particular kind of plant that we're able to harvest.
[00:11:24] Those kinds of details, but also the historical, there was a war 30 years ago and every year on this day we, we eat this thing to commemorate that. Or because of this war we no longer do this thing that we used to do because it's associated with these people that we were fighting against. I think, stuff like that.
[00:11:42] So, I think yes, you can have a world without stories being told in it. You can just keep spinning up more and more details and building more and more cool stuff. And that's kind of awesome. It's like sorta like Legos in a way, but it's also like kind of creating an RPG setting. And I kind of did that for a couple of years with The City in the Middle of the Night. But I think that if it's an interesting world, if it's a world that's compelling, there will be stories embedded in it.
Annalee: [00:12:04] Yeah, I mean I feel like you sort of started by saying, sure, you can have a world without stories, but then your entire answer kind of convinced me of the opposite. That you couldn't really have a rich world that didn't have some stories in it. And I remember one time I was—I was being, I'm sure, an extremely annoying player in a Dungeons & Dragons game where the poor DM just wanted us to get into this cool dungeon. And she was describing the dungeon and she's like, actually, you know, this is some anxious Elvish—you're entering kind of the lower parts of an ancient Elvish city. And I started saying like, well, who built it? Wait, why is there a Dwarvish city on top of the Elvish city? Did that, what, what happened to those Elvess? And I was really interested in like the whole backstory of it and all of the other players were just like, shut the fuck up. Like, we just want to fucking get the loot.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:56] Aww.
Annalee: [00:12:56] And I think, you know, but I think the point is that that was embedded in the story. Like the story asked me to ask that question. It's like, well why is it an ancient Elvish realm that's underneath the Dwarvish realm? Like, you know, and we're exploring it now. And so whatever we find in it is going to have something to do with whatever that history is, where like one group of creatures got wiped out by another group of creatures.
[00:13:22] So I think you can choose to ignore that part and you can choose to just say like, Oh look, that just means there's cool anxious Elvish on the walls. Or you can sort of look at that story, look at that history as part of a story. And I think the best examples of playing in alternate worlds and playing in secondary worlds allow us to kind of, to get a little bit of each thing. A little bit of just fighting in a cool place but also a taste of the long history that led us there. And I think that's true of physical environments too. I know you've thought a lot about designing physical environments for worlds that you've written in. Do you think that there's stories embedded in that as well?
Charlie Jane: [00:14:02] I like world-building to be messy in general and one of the ways that we're all building can be messy is when you have, you know, physical constraints that come from this volcano erupts every once in a while. Or there’s this—there are natural disasters that happen or there are things that we can't do because of our environment that gets in the way. I think that the kind of messiness of human beings creating things that are kind of weird and that… love the Dwarvish temple built on top of the Elvish temple because I feel like that is like real life. People go—
Annalee: [00:14:36] So much, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:38] —find an ancient structure and they're like, Oh we'll just build a new thing on top of this. We were just in London hearing at the museum of London archaeology section all about like how the post-Roman Britain, the Angles and Saxons just built London kind of adjacent to but also kind of on top of the Roman London and they were like, Oh yeah, we can just use this stuff that's laying around.
[00:15:01] I feel like any backstory that I'm going to believe in is going to be messy and is going to involve stuff that nobody really planned on. And I think natural phenomena and kind of big structures are part of that for sure.
[00:15:13] I also think that people work with what they've got, right? People work with, if they come in and settle a place and there's like a mountain, they're like great, we can use the mountain for X, Y and Z. If there's a stream coming down the mountain, we can build a turbine around it.
Annalee: [00:15:27] Attach a canal to it.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:28] Yeah!
Annalee: [00:15:30] Or we can worship the mountain.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:31] Yeah, exactly.
Annalee: [00:15:31] Because, oh man, mountains are great to worship cause they're just so cool looking. And so if you're gonna start your spirituality with something, mountains are good, I'm just giving you advice.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:44] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:15:44] If you're looking to worship your environment.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:47] But geography and big structures give us interesting accidents. They give us interesting stuff that nobody could control that we just kind of like this is what we're working with. And so we made these decisions based on these situations that we had. Like I said, I like world-building can be messy. I feel like when I get thrown out a world-building, it's either that it's just really vaguely drawn. It's drawn in this really kind of sketchy way, that the details are not really solid enough or that the history is too simple. That it's like we came to this place 10,000 years ago and ever since we've been doing the same thing and it's like really? 10,000 years you've been just here doing the exact same thing for 10,000 years with no kind of nobody ever—
Annalee: [00:16:26] No disagreement.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:26] Yeah, nobody was ever like, hey, why don't we do with this other thing instead? Or why don't we go somewhere else? Or I feel like if you look at any real-life place, it's like, Oh yeah, this was abandoned for a hundred years. And then we came back here, but we started doing this other thing here. And then at one point we were just using this place as a garbage dump. But then we decided we should farm here instead. And then we decided that it was actually a sacred place. And then, I don't know, stuff like that.
Annalee: [00:16:49] And then a whole new group of people came in and they didn't even know what we'd ever used this place for. And so they were like, Oh, well we'll just build a housing tract on top of all of it. And so there's like 40 layers now there's like housing tract and then there's farm, and then there's sacred place and then there's garbage dump.
[00:17:05] And if you're an archeologist and you're digging down, you're like, Holy crap, there's like a million layers here.
[00:17:11] So, I think for me, what throws me out of a world is exactly what you're saying. Like, the fact that it's not messy. If it doesn't feel complex enough. And that doesn't mean that you need a character to have an info dump and be like, “As you know, Charlie Jane, we've actually had 40,000 years of strife and here's a stratigraphy of all of our strife that we've brought in to show you.”
[00:17:31] But I also think that it isn't just about history, it's also about the space that you're building can't all be homogenous. You know, I'm always thrown out of a story when it's the planet of listener people, or it’s the planet of winter or it's the, you know.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:48] Right. Yeah, totally.
Annalee: [00:17:49] Unless you have a snowball earth, in which case I'm excited because I'd love to see that. But I think that when you're thinking about building an environment, you want to make sure that the environment feels varied. You want to have deserts and swamps and mountains, or if you're building a world that doesn't have those features, there should be other kinds of variety. Say what you want about Ringworld by Larry Niven. But one of the things that's delightful about that book is that he imagines what a Ringworld would be like and how it would generate weather and how over time it would develop different kinds of habitats. And that's, I mean, I would say that's the primary pleasure of reading that book is just finding, you know, the weird storms and all the different things as the ringworld has been breaking down.
[00:18:35] And so I always like to see diversity. So I want to see physical diversity in the world. I want to see cultural diversity and I want to see a messy history.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:44] Yeah. And I think that another thing that you really need for good world-building, especially if it's not like a culture that already exists present-day United States or whatever, is language and cultural concepts that are not like one-to-one, the same as in American English-speaking cultures, and other cultures that we're aware of. I think that especially if it's a fictional culture, the more that they have cultural constructs and ideas about everything from sexuality to romance to war to your duties within society, the more that those things are kind of circumscribed by concepts that are not just analogs for concepts that we have in early 21st century America, the more I believe in it. And the more, it seems like there's something real there.
Annalee: [00:19:32] Yeah. Bee really inventive. Don't say like, Oh well of course everyone throughout space and time thinks that sex is dirty because obviously. And it's like, okay, even on earth that's not a universally accepted claim. And it certainly has not been, historically. And I mean it's easy to pick on that, but all kinds of other things too, I agree. Like I love when you travel to another world in fiction and they have a taboo that we don't have on earth that's really well thought out. Like having a taboo against, for example, eating publicly. Malka Older has a new collection of short stories where one of the short stories is about that and they people kind of go into a secret little area that's like a bathroom to eat and it's so well imagined and all it really takes is that one detail to make you feel like, Oh shit, I'm in a really alien culture. You know? And that's, I think just one way that you can do it.
[00:20:29] The other thing I want to say before we transition to talking to Tempest is that people seem to forget that characters are also part of world-building.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:40] Yes. I think that that's really important and I think that people are shaped by the worlds that they live in or the worlds that they are visiting even, and that a believable world is going to influence how your characters think and how they act and I feel like the characters are part of the world that they live in.
Annalee: [00:20:56] The important thing is that when you're conceiving of a character, there's a certain amount of world-building that goes into that person. Like you said, like thinking of—
Charlie Jane: [00:21:05] For sure, like what was their childhood?
Annalee: [00:21:07] What was their childhood? What influences were they exposed to? Did they love TV or whatever the equivalent of TV is? Did they love some kind of other weird thing that was really non-mainstream? What did they want to do? But I think it's also really important when, especially because I feel like there's a real push in science fiction and fantasy and maybe there's a good reason for this, if you're going into a weird new world to have a character who's an outsider or a stranger. I mean this is the thing that Ursula LeGuin does in her books all the time where it's like, I'm an anthropologist coming here to tell you about this world, and it works really well for her.
[00:21:44] I think partly because she actually knew a lot about anthropology and how anthropologists think, and so she was able to world-build those characters really well. But I sometimes get a little annoyed with that. Like I feel like that trope, I understand why people want to do that because it allows the reader to have a point of identification. But I also think there's something to be said for introducing us to an alien world through a character who's at home in it.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:10] For sure.
Annalee: [00:22:10] And who can show us what it feels like to be at home in what to us feels alien. And maybe that's maybe that’s too alienating. I don't know.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:20] I mean, I think that I definitely like to see through the eyes of somebody who actually has a relationship with their surroundings and I think that you do, like you said, get a much richer idea of what the culture is like by seeing what it's like to grow up in the culture or what it's like to kind of have your expectations for your life shaped by this culture that you're in. And I think that part of why people have gravitated away from portal fantasies, to some extent, although I still love portal fantasies but towards like secondary world fantasies and like epic fantasies is that they like to see characters who belong in the alien weird world. Not people who have to discover it, but people who are at home in it. And then the reader gets to vicariously experienced this thing of like what if I just felt at home in Narnia? What if Narnia is where I grew up? What if Narnia is just like my place? I don't have to have this remove of being a visitor. I can just be a resident. I can be a native. And I think that's part of what people really seek out in a lot of fantasy and in science fiction as well, now, is that thing of being a native.
Annalee: [00:23:23] That's a really interesting point.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:24] So we're going to take a break and then we're going to come back with K. Tempest Bradford, who's going to tell us about writing the other and all the ways that world-building can go wrong.
[00:23:34] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:47] We're so excited to have as our guest in the studio right now, the inimitable, the estimable K. Tempest Bradford, and I want to just start off by asking you about the writing the other workshops that you've been helping to organize and host. Where did those get started and what's the rationale for having those workshops versus just telling people to go read the book that Nisi Shawl wrote?
Tempest: [00:24:05] Well, we started off actually doing an in-person retreat/workshop and I organized that with Nisi and Cynthia Ward who co-wrote the book and a lot of wonderful writers came out of that workshop and I've been like really pleased to see some of them like getting published and such. And then after that, I just thought it would be really great if I could bring this experience to people who can't necessarily come to a writing workshop because of time, because of money, and etc. And another thing was really, I was trying to help Nisi get more income because as writers, unless we have day jobs, sometimes the income is hard to come by.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:50] Oh, yeah.
Tempest: [00:24:50] And I was like, I want to make sure that Nisi is taken care of. So I proposed to her that we start doing online workshops and she agreed. Then probably about six months, maybe a little less than a year after the first retreat, we started doing them online.
Annalee: [00:25:08] One of the things I know that you guys do in these workshops is teach people how to write about marginalized communities and to do it without having terrible fail. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the common failure modes we see when people try to tackle those subjects without actually understanding what it means to write the other.
Tempest: [00:25:31] I feel like the, the most common stuff that I see more has to do with people just not doing enough research and going off of the stereotypes that they have received from various places in our culture. Sometimes those stereotypes come from other media, the TV they watch, the movies, the other books they read. Sometimes those stereotypes come from like general culture. Like everybody knows that black people are such-and-such a way and everybody knows that women are such-and-such a way, which of course you know is usually just bollocks.
[00:26:07] And because these modes of thinking, I guess you could say, are just accepted, people are like, Oh well everybody says black people are such-and-such a way, so they must be such-and-such a way. And I see that on my television, so I'm just going to put that in my book and then fail ensues.
[00:26:24] And I think that the biggest thing that we try to impart to people is not just that you have to do your research, but you have to realize that you have to do research. You have to realize that you have to unlearn the things that your culture has taught you. And that is true for everybody. That's true for writers who come from, you know, the more privileged sectors of society, are white, heterosexual, cisgender able-bodied, middle-class ,Christian culture, men, you know, they have to work at it. But also, anybody has to work at it. If you're a woman, if you're a black person, if you're a native person, if you are not able bodied, you know, whatever it is, because not all marginalizations are the same. They don't always present the same. And unless you experience it, you don't necessarily know how to spot it unless you are actively looking and learning and trying to pick apart what you think, you know, what you've been told.
[00:27:26] So that's the biggest thing that I think that when people come to our classes, that is what they have to unlearn. I was actually talking to author Steven Barnes about our class earlier this year and I was saying, yeah, this happens every time where they start out the class and you know, because they're taking it, they're like, I know that I have to do this well. And they have—a lot of our students just like, they feel like they are knowledgeable but they want to make sure and that's why they're taking the class. But then in the course of taking the class, they realize everything that they don't know and everything that they haven't examined. And then there's like a little bit of a crisis that goes on where they're like, “Oh no, I thought I knew, but I realize I still have all these stereotypes in my head.”
[00:28:10] And we're like, that's okay because that's what we're here to help you understand that you still have those things and to give you tools to help you unlearn stuff and to learn better things and to go forward. But it's like, it's just a process that happens over and over and Steven Barnes then said, well, maybe you need to tell them that at the beginning because this is like a little bit of a hero's journey thing. Because when they go through that, it's like them going through the dark night of the soul.
[00:28:39] And I was like, oh, that actually makes sense. So, yeah, so we have to take them through the dark night of the soul. But it's a good part of the process because sometimes you do need that realization that you don't know everything that you think you know, in order to be able to really absorb all the tools to do it better.
[00:29:01] You know, I went through that. I’m sure that any writer who has done something along these lines has gone through that.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:06] And a lot of science fiction writers are really smart people who have probably read a lot of stuff and thought about it a lot of stuff. Why is it so hard for someone who's already really smart and really kind of engaged with real life history and stuff to avoid falling into these awful stereotypes?
Tempest: [00:29:21] Probably because they're so smart.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:25] Oh.
Annalee: [00:29:25] Yeah.
Tempest: [00:29:25] Just like having a little bit of knowledge sometimes means that you think that you don't need any more knowledge because you have some of it. I feel like that's just common in lots of things in life. Feeling like, oh, well, I know that and I know more about that than some average person over there. So that means that I'm super smart. But really there's more to learn. There's always people who are more expert than you. And I think that's something good to know.
Annalee: [00:29:54] Yeah. I wonder if you could talk about how this kind of information about real life groups, human groups, translates into world-building if you're making a fantasy world or if you're creating another planet. How does it help for me to be educated about minority groups in the United States if I'm writing a story about aliens on another world? Why is that important?
Tempest: [00:30:19] It's important because the more you understand about how humans do things, the better worlds that you can create. Even if those worlds aren't necessarily about humans. But we all have to come from a human perspective because at this time we don't know anybody who came from another planet at least, unless you're in the Illuminati.
Annalee: [00:30:39] As far as we know.
Tempest: [00:30:40] Right, you know. Unless you’re in the Illuminati. Unless you were hanging around in ancient Egypt when the aliens came to build the pyramids. Like, we don't actually know any aliens. And so we always have to, as writers, we bring a human perspective to everything. And so understanding how culture works, understanding how things have gone down in history and why they've gone down that way can give you a lot of insight into how you then project into the future or how you then project into a secondary world.
[00:31:10] I think that probably the best world-building education that I ever received was from starting to understand things about ancient Egyptian history because that's what I've been studying for many a year.
[00:31:28] And just sort of understanding how not only spiritual and cultural things mix, but also how environment impacts so much the way that a culture develops. Because so much about what was going on in ancient Egypt completely had to do with the fact that Egypt went from being a sort of savannah-like environment where there was rain to not that.
Annalee: [00:31:59] Yeah.
Tempest: [00:31:59] Actually kind of rapidly at one point and how Egyptians had to plan everything around what was going on with the Nile, which was their only major source of water for crops and other things. And there are tons of things that go into it besides just that. But beginning to understand that and just understanding how that worked in that one place. I was able to sort of understand how to extrapolate to other things. And the more I learned about other different cultures be they North American culture is in the present or in the past, or I once delved into what was going on in Europe during the War of the Roses because YouTube was like, you like watching stuff about Game of Thrones, watch this.
[00:32:45] And I was like, this is much more interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:48] Yeah.
Tempest: [00:32:48] But thinking about like a lot of the things that made those historic events come about, it wasn't just because like some guy was feeling a way. It was like that feeling a way plus another factors—
Annalee: [00:33:00] There was no great man who like changed the course of history?
Tempest: [00:33:03] Somehow, no. Somehow, that wasn’t it.
Annalee: [00:33:06] It was all Ramses, man. He just like, he built Egypt and then that was it.
Tempest: [00:33:10] Right. Just Ramses doing stuff. But meanwhile, all the other people who are before Ramses, they're like, how come nobody talks about us? I was very important—
Charlie Jane: [00:33:19] That’s a good question.
Tempest: [00:33:21] Says Pepi the first. They're like…
Charlie Jane: [00:33:24] Yeah. One of the things I hear a lot or one of things that we kind of talk about a lot in science fiction and fantasy circles is that you can deal with real like difficult political questions in science fiction by setting them in the future on another planet or in a magical realm. If you want to comment on stuff that's happening here and now you can transpose it to another setting or create a metaphor through like having aliens who kind of stand in for stuff. And that is a very valuable tool that science fiction offers. But it feels like when people try to create metaphors for racism or injustice or misogyny or whatever, by putting it among aliens or having aliens stand in for different groups or whatever, or fairies, that it goes horribly wrong. And I was wondering if you have any thoughts about why those kinds of metaphors can go horribly wrong?
Tempest: [00:34:17] I feel like, in a lot of cases when it goes wrong, it's because the author isn't actually as smart about the issue at hand as they think they are, which is one of the reasons why they choose metaphor or allegory or whatever in the first place. Because if they understood the issues better, they would be able to translate it into an allegory that that didn't just make everybody go, what the heck was that? Why? Why did you do that?
[00:34:47] And it's interesting because one of the examples that I have that I love is actually the original Star Trek because sometimes the original Star Trek would engage in some allegory and you're like, that's really good. Thank you, Gene Roddenberry. And other times you're just like, no Gene Roddenberry, stop. What are you doing? That’s too on point.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:06] Oh my God.
Tempest: [00:35:06] But I think—
Charlie Jane: [00:35:07] Yeah, this guy's black on the wrong side and he's white on the wrong side.
Tempest: [00:35:11] Right? And you’re like… oh. I see what you’re doing and just like, oh stop.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:16] Oh jeez, just stop.
Tempest: [00:35:16] And I think when allegory is too one to one, that's when it gets eh. Let's, not have that because then it just looks like you're just sort of avoiding the issue.
[00:35:29] Gene Roddenberry wanted to address things on television that he would never have been allowed to address directly. The Vietnam War and other like social issues such as racism and stuff. He wasn't able to actually just make television about those things. He had to make it an allegory in order to get it on television because those were his limitations at the time. But the thing that I sort of wrestle with, myself, and I sort of challenge other science fiction and fantasy authors with, is that we don't necessarily have those same restrictions now.
[00:36:06] Like you could make a TV show, and many people have, about how they don't like this president or they don't like this current war or they don't like the way that the financial crisis was handled or whatever it is. Like there is not as much censorship of the type that Roddenberry experienced in our media right now. So that means that you don't have to always couch things in an allegory. And so then, I'm like, so why are you putting in the allegory right now? Like are you doing that because you're like well, writing shouldn't be political or should be sneakily political, or not really political. I'm like mm-mm, stop it. Everything's political. But also because when I see the way that marginalized authors deal with that same sort of thing, I feel like they're actually getting more into it by not necessarily, I wouldn't call it hiding in allegory, but like not using allegory in quite the same way.
vI actually wrote an essay about this because I was talking about Janelle Monáe and Chesya Burke and their use of the android as the other. Because we love that in science fiction and fantasy where we’re like, the alien stand in for the other, or androids, they stand in for the other. And the way that Janell Monáe uses androids as the other is that she actually literally makes them the other. The androids that are in the world that she is creating in her music with Cindi Mayweather or the Jane Android, whatever they are made to look like black people.
[00:37:37] And so that means that in the story when the androids are being oppressed and used and made into commodities, it's black bodies being oppressed and used and made itto commodities. And so you can't avoid the message that she’s sending.
[00:37:54] And I also compare that to Chesya Burke's story that was published, I think, in 2017 or 2018 in Apex. It's called Say, She Toy and it is about an android who is created literally to be abused all throughout the story. People buy her time to abuse her and they're not just abusing her because she's an android. They're abusing her because she's an android that looks like a black woman. And the story challenges you to think about whether or not it's “okay” for somebody to abuse this android who looks like a black woman because then it will allegedly keep them from abusing black people. But does it really do that or does it just keep you in that state where you're like, it's totally okay for me to abuse black people?
[00:38:46] And so that's what I mean, the way that, Janelle Monáe and Chesya Burke and other authors who come from different marginalized identities deal with those issues problematizes them even while using the sort of allegory framework that we find a lot in science fiction and fantasy.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:05] Yeah. So, finally, what can you tell us about pyramidpunk? Where'd that idea come from and how is pyramidpunk gonna take over the universe?
Tempest: [00:39:11] It is going to take over the universe by being awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:15] Yeah.
Tempest: [00:39:17] Yeah. So I'm still in the midst of, of writing the first novel, although I have a couple of short stories that I've written in the pyramidpunk world. But it's essentially steam punk in ancient Egypt. And I put it in ancient Egypt specifically and not like sort of in Victorian-era Egypt in part because I wanted to get away from the Victorian-era with steam punk. Like if I was going to engage in steam punk, I don't care about Victorians. But also, because I really love ancient Egypt as a setting for fantasy, but to not engage in the same kind of fantasy that some others have where like everything is because of aliens or whatever. And I wanted to show like a technologically advanced ancient Egypt that came from just smart people who were like, oh wait a minute, it's so sunny here, why don't we use this sun to like make some steam to make this metal beetle go and make it build things for us.
[00:40:19] So that was what I originally had wanted to do and I've fallen like very deeply in love with this world, which is good because it's taken me forever to write this book. But also because the more I have sort of veered off in my research away from sort of traditional academic Egyptologists into the more esoteric Egyptological world, I'm discovering all sorts of things that I think are really good things to play around with in fiction.
[00:40:50] And then also just having a greater appreciation for just how amazing the ancients were. I know that everybody was always like, oh, ancient aliens is so terrible. And like, yes, generally that's true. But I do appreciate about that show that they're like the people who were living 10,000 years in the past, were doing much cooler stuff than you think they were. They weren't just hanging out in caves or whatever. Like they were involved in all these things. I'm like, yes, that's true. And then they're like, but then the aliens came. I'm like, no, stop
[00:41:25] I draw the line! I draw the line at aliens. But hat is one of the things that I appreciate about alternate Egyptologists and sort of metaphysical ancient researchers is that they are more open to the idea that people in the past were doing much cooler things and were smarter and had higher technology than we seem to think.
Annalee: [00:41:45] Since we've been talking about world-building. And as you're recreating ancient Egypt, what kind of world-building stuff are you doing to show us everyday Egyptian life?
Tempest: [00:41:54] It's hard because the most stuff we know about ancient Egypt does come from royal sources and that's just literally because they had tombs, whereas people who were of lower status didn't always have tombs. And so we don't always know as much about their daily lives as we know about the, the daily lives of the nobility. But right now, the book that I'm writing sort of takes place across two different social castes, but they're still sort of upper social castes.
[00:42:22] And, that’s just because of the, the subject matter that I chose. The main thing that I have been really looking into in terms of everyday life was how the spiritual aspect of ancient Egypt filtered down into all the different layers of society because it's much more than just like, they were religious people and they went to church on Sunday. They actually have church. But the way that Egyptians conceived of how their actions were impacted by or impacted things in the spiritual realm. Things having to do with the gods and how different aspects of their environment were given a spiritual side to them. All of that really fascinates me and I'm trying my best to recreate that in a way that comes across.
[00:43:17] The other big thing that I've been trying to do a lot of research on is how matriarchal societies function because the more research I do, the more I am convinced that ancient Egypt up until a little bit into the new kingdom was a straight up matriarchal society. Like not even like sort of matriarchal or it's matrilineal, but no, like I think it was a straight up matriarchal society and just trying to think about how that worked on every level. How that worked in terms of what was going on with the nobility and the people in the palaces as well as people in different sort of middle-class structures as well as the people in what we would call the working class structures. That's been a big area of my research lately.
Annalee: [00:44:05] Cool. I can't wait to read about the matriarchy.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:08] Yeah, I’m super excited to read this book.
Annalee: [00:44:10] Ancient steampunk matriarchy is my jam.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:12] I'm ready for pyramid punk to just like sweep over everything and leave everything changed in its wake.
Tempest: [00:44:19] Awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:21] Tempest, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you and discover more about your awesomeness?
Tempest: [00:44:24] Well, I have a website, KTempestBradford.com. And that pretty much links to everything. I’m on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. I also have a Patreon in which I give people the chapters that I write in the pyramid punk universe very slowly. Very, very slowly at this point. But that's sort of the main thing that's keeping me going is giving chapters to my patrons.
Annalee: [00:44:51] And where can people find out about the Writing the Other workshops.
Tempest: [00:44:53] You can go to WritingtheOther.com and there’s—we have actually have a lot of free resources on there, like links to articles and essays, videos that either we link to we produce that we've put in our resources file. You can buy the books there and you can find out about all the upcoming classes.
Annalee: [00:45:12] Cool. All right.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:14] Thank you.
Annalee: [00:45:14] Thanks a lot.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:15] Thank you.
Tempest: [00:45:15] Thank you for inviting me.
[00:45:16] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee: [00:45:31] You've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us on Patreon and we'd love it if you would support us. You can also follow us on Twitter at OOACpod. Please, if you are listening to us through Apple podcasts, leave us a review. It really helps people find us. Otherwise you can listen to us really through any mechanism for listening to podcasts. It's pretty much all open to you.
[00:45:59] And we'd love to thank our amazing producer, Veronica Simonetti and Chris Palmer who does the music. And we will be talking in your ear in two weeks.
Both: [00:46:11] Bye!
[00:46:12] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.