In that very first class, my professor said, “No science fiction or fantasy.” Flat out stated this. Regardless, as the years rolled by, my fiction got more and more fantastical. I took other classes where this was stated. I wasn’t bothered, offended or worried. I have a way of ignoring those kinds of rules. Those stipulations simply went in one ear and right out the other, for me. I’ve always had to write what comes to me. I can’t pick and chose. In the critical moments when I submitted the stories, I just called them “magical realism.” That made everything ok. Also, as my professors saw what I was writing, I think several of them changed their minds about science fiction and fantasy or at least made exceptions for me.
I am also a product of the Clarion Writers Workshop. I learned to openly call myself a fantasy writer at Clarion (I started writing science fiction later). I went to Clarion after I had finished my first master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State.
Somewhere along the way I learned to combine/reconcile my academic and speculative fiction sides. They’ve never been in conflict. It’s very similar to the way I have fused my Nigerian and American sides. These are two aspects (my speculative fiction and academic sides) of who I am as a writers that are necessary and vital. I cannot do without either. I take from both. I’ve learned from both.
Ekaterina Sedia: In my case, they largely coexist—my academic career is a separate entity, except for when I occasionally teach a writing course. But my literary hobby hasn’t got in a way and my colleagues have been wonderfully supportive. On the other hand, being a scientist in a real life, I can convincingly fake science for literary purposes.
Joan Slonczewski: Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the more interesting works that I teach in my course, “Biology in Science Fiction.” Dune depicts an ecosystem in surprising detail, much of which is consistent with actual ecosystems. But there is a big hole, where do the organisms get their energy? Students get the message; and they appreciate what it means to “get something wrong.” They are also impressed by the amazing amount of ideas that Herbert imagined ahead of his time, such as global climate change, energy-harvesters, and drone warfare.
How has technology changed the way we learn?
Julianna Baggott: That’s a vast question. I’ll narrow down to something simple. Memorization isn’t as important a skill set as it once was. Those who had brains that stored information like computers were thought to be brilliant and were deeply useful. Now, people don’t have to memorize. We have to know how to access. The downside is that much of what we learn doesn’t have to burrow down deep and so it doesn’t. Our brains practice skimming and lightly retaining more than they practice deep excavation.
James Enge: In some ways a lot. I do a lot of teaching about the physical culture of the ancient world, for instance, and getting the visual evidence for that stuff in front of students used to be quite a chore. In a modern multimedia classroom, it’s almost too easy. And interactive software has been a boon for helping people develop basic skills in math and language.
In some ways, not a damn thing has changed. People have to read; they have to think about what they read; they have to talk with someone about what they’re reading and thinking. I guess it was James Garfield who described education as a log with a teacher on end and a student on the other. (Insert double entendre here.) That’s what it still is, and will always be.
Brian Evenson: I think different technologies have had a definite impact on the way we think and the way we write. I think, for instance, that computer word processing programs, which allow you to delete vast blocks of texts very quickly without leaving a record and in which you can move things from page 1 to 100 without much effort have changed the way we think about the structure and the integrity of a narrative. I think the way we text—which has become one of my chief forms of communication—and the emotional shorthand that’s developed from texting and twitter has had a serious effect on our emotions in general. That’s partly generational, and is influenced by television as well. I don’t think of it as a good or bad thing—I think of it as an inevitable thing and as a very interesting thing. The tools we use work not only outward but inward, modifying our selves even as they modify the world around us. It’s like how when you have an old car you learn all sorts of procedures and modify your behavior to make it work. You know you have to jiggle the key in a certain way to make it work, know that you should pump the gas twice before starting but not three times or it’ll flood, etc. The object teaches you to adapt to it and soon you do so without thinking about it. That’s doubly true with technologies that are connected to writing, in that they modify not only our bodies but the very structures of our thinking.
Paul Levinson: The digital revolution, which I examined most recently in my New New Media (2009), has given everyone access to increasing amounts of information from anywhere and everywhere in the world. The classroom has become, if not an afterthought, a place where knowledge increasingly obtained elsewhere can be discussed and analyzed. Of course, the same can be done, ever more easily, online.
Nnedi Okorafor: So much more information is right at our fingertips. It’s glorious. If my daughter asks me some crazy off the wall question, nine times out of ten, I can find the answer online. I can show her YouTube videos to illustrate points I’m trying to make. Sadly, this also means that just as much misinformation is also right at our fingertips. Now, people also need to learn how to read information. There are many factors to consider. The source, the timing, the type of information, the biases and agendas, etc. Learning has to be more active. Also, I think people suffer from staying inside to learn about something as opposed to going out an seeing it for themselves. Example, if you are researching grasshoppers, why not go out and catch one, as opposed to looking it up on Wikipedia?
Ekaterina Sedia: Kids no longer have to learn to visualize concepts from written descriptions? Look, I still use blackboard and chalk when I lecture, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask about technology.
Joan Slonczewski: Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker (”Get Smart,” April 4, 2011) argues that what we humans have done, for centuries, is to outsource our own intelligence. From the invention of writing and the abacus, to Deep Blue and SimOne, we build devices that do what humans do—then we define their achievement as inhuman. Whatever hurdles remain for machines to surmount, we define what remains as human—”not because it matters more but because it’s all that’s left to us.”
What will higher education be like in a hundred years? What will change and what will most likely stay the same?
Julianna Baggott: Oh, that depends on politics. Right now, those things are being chosen in legislative sessions, state by state. Some states will remain balanced and whole. Others will push solely toward degrees that get people jobs. The fact is, people create. The arts will endure. This skill set and that skill set will become obsolete; technology will continue to force great changes there. But the desire to create, to innovate and invent, to make use of our imaginations—those things will remain, but we might have to fight for them and be hungry for them for a while in certain regions.
James Enge: Higher education is likely to undergo a crisis in the near future, something like the crisis commercial publishing is experiencing now. Institutions may crumble, or adapt, but the storm is coming.
Information is now very easy to get. But the skills to use it, interpret it, understand it, make use of it: these are as elusive as they were in Socrates’ day. If institutions can provide these skills, and if people think they are worth paying for, universities will continue to exist. If not, then not.
Brian Evenson: I’m not all that convinced that America has another hundred years left in it, but I hope I’m wrong. . .
Jeffrey Ford: Forget the next hundred years. I’m more concerned with the next five years. Education is under attack. In this age of slashing budgets, education is one of the first things to go—hey, kids don’t vote. More teachers will be laid off, class sizes will increase, programs will
be cut. The electorate has, through the work of the right, been convinced that education is somehow evil. The word is always that everyone wants education to be top of the line, but “we don’t want to just throw money at it.” Why not? This is what’s been done with the military for the past 60 years, at least, and we have the best military in the world. Go ahead, I say, throw money at it. That would be a good start.
To compete in the world, we’re going to need smart and imaginative people. A lot of the bullshit restraints to thinking should be lifted from education. Let’s put a stake through the heart of Creationism (dogma circumvents the need to think), or situations like the one in Tennessee where teachers would be unable to say the word “gay” in a classroom. Forget school voucher programs—they favor the well-off and do nothing for those in need. Let’s promise to build up the public education system to where it should be. Throw some money at it, so you can hire the best people. Reintroduce full-on music, art, and athletic programs. Get rid of the inanity of lock-step approaches to teaching a given course and let the experts, the teachers, choose the material and the approaches to a given curriculum. Only ignoramuses think that all courses in a given discipline should be taught the exact same way. This drive toward uniformity is a way to dis-empower teachers and make them merely mouthpieces for the status quo. Keep tenure—teachers have to be able to express a healthy disrespect for authority in order to act as an example for their students. A teacher who is limited to the status quo, and is unable to call bullshit when they readily see it, will only help to produce students who can only spout the status quo. Online education definitely can have benefits for students, but this shell game needs to be thoroughly investigated. Is it more about the students or about the bottom line? Make education not about getting a job—there’re no fucking jobs out there anyway—and more about helping young people to become imaginative free-thinkers who are capable of learning any job and have a clue as to what’s going on in the world around them. This is where the money should be going, especially now. The current grade school and high school education in this country now is basically a disgrace. Our colleges and universities are somewhat better, but they’re faculties and budgets are under attack. I’m not saying spend foolishly, or not to cut waste, but more money is needed overall. This is an investment that will pay off in the future.
I can’t think a hundred years in the future. The struggle is now. If we ignore this problem today, there won’t be an America in a hundred years.
Paul Levinson: There is something fundamental and irresistible about in-person presence—we are, after all, flesh-and-blood beings. This means that the physical classroom will endure—or at least, professors and students in the same physical space—but one hundred years into the future we’ll see much more information imparted online. And the learning online will be increasingly individual—meaning, people will study and learn what they most need—which is good, i.e., real progress.
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 facto
r.” 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.
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