Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (41 page)

Nnedi Okorafor:
You mean after the Apocalypse? What will stay the same is that we will still need to do the work to learn. You can have all the information in the world available to you on many various gadgets and devices but you’ll still need to take it in and process it. you’ll
still
need to study. You will still need to think. What will change? That’s not so predictable. Things come and go. There are wild cards that no can possibly predict. I do hope touch screens go away as opposed to evolve. . . I loathe touchscreens.

Ekaterina Sedia:
More administrators, fewer full-time faculty, more talk about education as product and students as customers, less quality. Oh, I’m sorry. Were you expecting something uplifting?

Joan Slonczewski:
An unsettling consequence of online learning is that it makes it increasingly easy to narrow your world to those with whom you agree. For example, there is a growing fount of so-called biblical textbooks sold on the Internet. If you select their publishers—and there are many—you can feel as if you’re sampling many opinions, when in reality you never hear anything outside the circle. Which is the opposite of what happens in
The Highest Frontier
.

In
The Highest Frontier
, most of “higher education” has been outsourced to Toynet—a neural Internet device that, according to NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse, “makes the iPhone look like a Model-T Ford.” Students learn history by entering a VR world with Teddy Roosevelt, where they compare his imperialism with that of invading ultraphytes. But at Frontera, students still interact with live teachers. A new student reflects that for the first time she finds herself arguing face to face with a teacher she disagrees with—”breathing the same air.”

Julianna Baggott
[www.juliannabaggott.com] is the author of
Pure, The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted
(as Bridget Asher, and 15 other books. She is also is an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts.

James Enge
[jamesenge.com] is the author of
Blood of Ambrose, This Crooked Way,
The Wolf Age,
and the upcoming
A Guile of Dragons.
He’s also a lecturer in classics at Bowling Green State University.

Brian Evenson
[www.brianevenson.com] is the translator of numerous works and the author of eight books, including
The Open Curtain
and
Immobility.
He is also the Chair of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

Jeffrey Ford
[www.well-builtcity.com] is the author of ten books, including
The Shadow Year
and
The Drowned Life.
He also teaches literature and writing at Brookdale Community College.

Paul Levinson
[paullevinson.info] is the author of more than a dozen books, including
New New Media
and
The Plot To Save Socrates.
He is also a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University.

Nnedi Okorafor
[nnedi.com] is the author of six books, including
Akata Witch
and
Iridessa and The Secret of the Never Mine.
She is also a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University.

Ekaterina Sedia
[www.ekaterinasedia.com] is the author of five novels, including
The House of Discarded Dreams
and
Heart of Iron.
She is also an Associate Professor of Biology at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Joan Slonczewski
is the author of seven novels, including
Brain Plague
and
The Highest Frontier.
She is also a professor of microbiology at Kenyon College.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for
Clarkesworld Magazine
and a frequent contributor to
Kobold Quarterly
and
Booklifenow.com.
He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Suitably Strange:
A Round-Table Discussion of World-Building

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Imaginary worlds offer readers a time and place that is different from the world they live in. Imaginary worlds offer a fresh perspective, a new POV—a slanted angle of vision. These settings, these places— secondary worlds or “the realm of fairy-story,” as J. R. R. Tolkien called them—come with their own rules, their own customs, and their own logic.

“The realm of fairy-story,” Tolkien writes in “On Fairy-Stories,” “is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.”

At their best, imaginary worlds offer an immersive experience. We enter, we are filled with wonder, and we are changed by the experience.

Imaginary worlds don’t just
happen.
They must be built—whether prior to or during the telling of the story. Builders of worlds seek coherence, consistency, feasibility, and that ever-important “cool factor.” World-builders are both creator and first explorers of their worlds, inspired by personal experiences, real world history, the mysteries of human evolution, or grandly conceived “what ifs.” They draw on African, Celtic, Greek, Native American, and Norse mythologies and landscapes, among others.

Below, Tim Akers, Mark Chadbourn, K. V. Johansen, Kay Kenyon, M. D. Lachlan, Justina Robson, and Joel Shepherd discuss their imaginary worlds and how they created them. These seven authors, all of whom publish with Pyr, write a wide variety of speculative fiction, from historical fantasy to science fiction to “steampunk and sorcery.” They’ve “thought-formed” worlds, “liquid-life-engines”, starfish-shaped universes, and worlds very similar to our own, except for a few crucial deviations.

Some of these authors started building their worlds by “reading and thinking and studying. ” Some planned ahead, while others allowed the world to grow with the writing. Some started with an “odd thought,” others with compelling characters—characters like a princess turned warrior, an archaeologist in the Otherworld, a caravan-guard fleeing madness, a star pilot grieving the loss of his family, or a synthetic human pursuing answers while fleeing for her life.

Whatever the method or starting point, the goal seems to be the same: a place suitably strange, yet somehow recognizable.

What’s something really cool about your secondary world that doesn’t show up in any of your novels or short stories?

Tim Akers:
For the book I’m working on right now, there’s about four or five hundred years of history that I’ve sketched out, from migration patterns to wars to the establishment of three different religions, two of which are dead by the time the actual books start. I keep finding myself wanting to write those stories instead, or in addition to. I can really see how authors can fall into the temptation of interrupting a series to go write a prequel or something.

Mark Chadbourn:
In my interlinked sequences that began with Age of Misrule, the secondary world is the mystical Otherworld of Celtic mythology, the home of gods, Fabulous Beasts, magic and mayhem. Every time a character crosses over from our own world, he or she sees different aspects of it, or it appears subtly altered. What is never stated is that it’s a thought-form world, completely fluid in nature, which is created and shaped by the mind and preconceptions of the people who visit it.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe:
I write historical fantasy, so it’s our world but with the mythology taken literally. So, as I’m writing at the beginning of the Viking age, the gods
do
interfere in human destinies. Witches exist. Magic is taken directly from that described in ancient Norse poetry. The coolest thing is how strange history is—how differently people think and act to modern people. For instance, the size of the settlements. In
Wolfsangel,
Vali looks on the town of Haithabu as unimaginably large. It contains one hundred houses.

K.V. Johansen:
Some of the history of the Old Great Gods and the devils is quite cool, I think. I know a lot more about the cold hells and the “heavens beyond the stars” in which the human storytellers place the Great Gods and devils than appears in the published stories. But I’m not going to talk about that yet! (Although people can probably figure a part of it out. In “The Storyteller” there’s a bit more about that than in
Blackdog.
) In general, though, because of the way I work, the world grows as I write. I don’t usually see much of what lies over the horizon until not too long before the story gets there. That’s true of both the physical landscape and the social/historical/cosmological landscape, the cultures and the systems of magic.

Kay Kenyon:
My secondary world, called the Entire, is both a world and a universe. It is a landlocked universe that is shaped like a starfish, in that it has five geographic arms, or “primacies,” radiating outward from a central sea of impossible, vaguely oceanic matter. Things are so cosmically far apart that the only efficient way to travel is on the Nigh, a five-armed river fed from the central sea over which is suspended the Ascendancy where advanced beings dwell when they’re not up to no good.

Justina Robson:
I guess you mean this secondary world I’m making right now. Animal-people, I’d have to say. I haven’t done those before. They’re biomorphs: life-liquid-engines. Haven’t entirely finished working on their true nature. It’s been very hard going. My imagination wants them to be one way and my scientific brain is telling me it’s all never going to work so. . . obviously imagination has to win eventually and I’m struggling towards that.

Where did you start building your secondary world?

Mark Chadbourn:
I looked first at the old stories of Celtic mythology, and then at other mythologies—Norse, Greek, Native American, Chinese, African and more—searching for commonalities. The conceit is that this world is the source of all our stories, our myths, legends and folklore, our dreams, so it needed to be very much an ur-world that could speak to all cultures.

K.V. Johansen:
I started with the landscape of the Turkmenistan desert and the idea of small, local gods. In
Blackdog,
the mountains, a combination of the Himalayas and the mountains of central Asia, came into it almost right away, with the Siberian taiga lurking in the northeast. In a way, the seed of the world is a book and a TV series,
Realms of the Russian Bear,
on the natural history of the former Soviet Union; both the BBC producer and the Russian host were biologists, so it’s a cut above the usual sort of nature documentary and the book is very detailed. I had a fascination with the landscape and natural history described in that for some time, and when the story began, with the idea of the character who became Holla-Sayan being possessed by the Blackdog, it just always seemed to have existed in that landscape.

Kay Kenyon:
I started with the odd thought, what if you didn’t need space travel to get across the universe, but could instead sort of hoof it? What if you could walk to Alpha Centauri or the equivalent? And if you can walk, obviously there are no stars or space. So what is this place? It’s a tunnel. It burrows through our own universe. At this point you have to write the story to find out what the hell is going on.

Joel Shepherd:
For me it always starts with the cultures, politics, belief systems, and languages of various parts of the world. And that is always driven by the dramatic requirements of the story. In
A Trial of Blood and Steel,
I wanted to tell a story largely driven by the conflicts between the different values that arise from different kinds of civilizations. My main character was a young woman, a former princess who renounced her heritage to become a warrior in the somewhat exotic style of distant Saalshen. I loved the dramatic conflicts that sprung from a main character, one who chooses to give up that status and privilege for something that suits her better as a person. But I needed to have a land where that would be possible, because in a lot of lands it wouldn’t be. And so I came up with Lenayin, a land of individualist warriors where the royal family has only very precarious power, and inherited title means little, because everyone worships achievements and skill more than family. Much of that creation of Lenayin was driven by my need to make my main character’s situation believable.