R.S. Benedict
Welcome to Rite Gud, the only podcast that helps you write good. I’m R.S. Benedict, I can show you the world. Shining shimmering, splendid. Tell me write her. Now. When did you last read a world building Guide? In this episode returning champions Karlo Yeager Rodriguez and Simon McNeil, join us to talk about world building. Thank you for coming on.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
And we will be battling to the death right for the title of World builder rights. I’m sorry. Oh,
Simon McNeil
yes, absolutely. I mean, now that I’m in the United States, I can even access Oh,
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
to do so. Oh, dudes are legal here, right?
Simon McNeil
Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, you’re
R.S. Benedict
in the Carolinas, I assume you have a gun already. Just Just call me old hickory just give you one. When you get off the plane, like when you go to Hawaii, they hand you a lay. You go to the Carolinas, they just give you a gun.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
They do the drape drape you want to bandoliers from what
Simon McNeil
I’ve heard down to the marine base. I was like, Hey, can I have an AK? And they were like, no, no, no, but you can have an M 16.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Right. Oops, you gotta get the right branding Simon. Yeah. But anyway, thanks for having me back, Raquel. And a pleasure speaking to you again, Simon. Yes,
Simon McNeil
it’s a wonderful to be invited back again. So thank you, Raquel. And it’s great talking to you again, currently?
R.S. Benedict
Yes. So the reason I decided to do this episode is that there’s usually in the Sci Fi fantasy writing circle, a lot of talk about world building. It’s a really popular topic for workshops and seminars, especially for profit workshops and seminars, little pay us some money. And we’ll do an online seminar and teach you about world building and lot of how to world building guides. And it’s something that many speculative fiction authors are concerned with. If you’re going to write a second World Fantasy, you need to create this imaginary world to put it in. If you’re, if you’re going to write space opera, you want to create sort of a crazy space world to put your adventures in, it makes sense setting is a really, really important part of writing. And when you are writing something speculative that takes place in a world other than our own, you do want to craft a setting that is workable, that’s interesting, that’s memorable. And that doesn’t make people roll their eyes too much going, Oh, come on.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Right. Yeah, there has to be a certain level of plausibility, that Roebling is pretty prevalent. It’s it’s, anytime you write in any type of setting, including so called realist or mimetic fiction settings, your world built, Johnny walked up to the door and knocked on it. No, you didn’t. That didn’t happen. Unless, unless there’s a biography. And even then, there is a certain level of you building up, you’re filling in gaps, if you’re going to be a little loose, fast and loose with the rules, right? So even in, you know, sort of like, what people mistakenly call non genre fiction. literary fiction is a genre is in and of itself, as I push my glasses up on my nose and say, actually,
R.S. Benedict
well, actually, literary fiction is a genre in itself.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yes. Just imagine, oh, my god, the literary version of the comic book guy would be so annoying. I guess what I’m getting at is that it does serve a purpose. It often the issues that I think we will probably discuss, not to jump ahead too much, is where the world building is just concentrated on lore, or backstory or just can’t wait to tell you about the secret history that prologue is the entire story that you’re going to read or something to that effect. Yeah. Rather than being integrated and fully digested into the writing itself. And being shown via the constraints characters have working within that world.
R.S. Benedict
It’s a fan wiki in search of an actual story a lot of the time, it can be it can be, it can be like, I think we’ve all seen this. If you are a fan of looking at things that make you roll you Arise and upset you which, Carlo, I know you are very guilty of that you’re the king of that in the discord. Every time Carlo posts a link to something I steadfastly refuse to click on it because it’s always the worst thing I will ever read. But if you’re a fan, looking at amateur writing forums are amateur writing discussions, especially for sci fi and fantasy. So many sci fi fantasy writing forum posts are about like, oh, man, I’ve spent about 13 years building the world for my fantasy novel. I have not written any words of this book. And you got to my dude, what are you doing? You’re not you forgot to write a book, you’re just obsessing over? Well, what is the what is the primary important primary export of this imaginary land? And what’s the state bird like my, what are you doing? Stop it.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
They’re they’re writing the CIA World Book for a secondary world.
Simon McNeil
And there are people who are advising that though. I mean, like, I remember one time I was at a convention, I was on a panel together with Brandon Sanderson,
R.S. Benedict
of course, mentioned it.
Simon McNeil
Really said, he literally Shapiro wrote an encyclopedia for each of his not. Well,
R.S. Benedict
I’m sure, but he can write an encyclopedia in 10 minutes. Yeah, you guys. He’s got a cluster of Sister Wives like cleaning him for himself. He doesn’t have to do anything else. He’s just got this Mormon compound of like, women to brush his teeth for him. So he can just right all the time.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I’m just imagining him like rolling out of bed directly in. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
the women just carry him. They all just lift him.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
There’s a typewriter in the sink. And they’re just like brushing his teeth.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, like it’s like a baby. When you when you wash your baby in the sink or something that just washing Brandon Sanderson while you’re removing his clothing and cleaning him. You can just type putting food in his mouth, and then like working his jaw, so he can, he doesn’t have to, like put in the effort to do it himself.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
So this is we’re doing world building right here. But I mean, seriously, I will, I will say that there’s at least two things that I think about when I hear someone telling me like I’m designing like my World Bible. The first one is, you don’t need to do that. Because you’re not creating a TV show or multimedia type of thing. Where I feel like that is something that’s sort of leaked into, quote, common knowledge of how to write in secondary worlds. Is this idea that it’s really leaked in from like, Hollywood, and reading franchise building. Yeah, like franchise building. And granted, like I get it, you, maybe you you and your head, or think I’m gonna make this into a series? Well, first off, you get to write the first sentence, and then paragraph, pages, books and all that good stuff, right?
R.S. Benedict
I’m pretty sure that when George Lucas made the first Star Wars, he was making shit up as he went along, he was winging it, he was not planning this out. I refuse to believe that he thought any of this through. I’ll be incredibly angry. If it turns out that that was, there
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
were some very strange sort of first draft ideas in the original Star Wars. And that’s not even counting the fact I don’t remember why read or heard this. But I believe that, essentially, his first attempt, had a whole arc of the three movies or something to that effect was going to lead to the destruction of the of the Death Star. And they said, No, you don’t understand you can only make one movie. So we had to cut out a bunch of stuff, and make it just about a new hope, is what we got. And there was no there was no guarantee that we get another movie because no one knew. I think people thought it might be a hit because I believe we touched on it briefly when we’re talking about damnation alley and the adaptation movie that they made. Essentially, that movie got shafted, because I want to say to Alan Ladd said, Yeah, we’re gonna we’re gonna earmark most of the budget that we were going to give you guys because this other movie called Star Wars on No Oh, but that shows exactly why. I mean, this is sort of like a roundabout way of getting to the point that I was going to make, which is, it shows why a like in a movies sense, or in a TV sense, or even in video games, where you have to make sure that you’re allocating resources correctly to make something to get something made. You need to have that initial document that gets a variety of different writers across the project on the same page,
R.S. Benedict
right.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
What exactly Oh, what are we working on? What what is this look Like, what does this mean? That type of thing? You as an individual author don’t have to worry about any of that. Free yourself of that idea because it is limiting. Yeah.
R.S. Benedict
And be real. It’s very unlikely your book is going to get to be a franchise is unlikely, like, come on.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah, I mean, again, I don’t I don’t want to I don’t want to, like discourage anyone because maybe maybe you get it. It’s very like, but then again, maybe I’ll win the lottery if I ever play. Yeah, but but I think that the issue here is that it sort of like, to a certain extent, it also feeds into the other aspect of it that might simply be avoidance. Like, this is avoidant behavior. We all know this as writers, every writer has
R.S. Benedict
no way to behave now. What’s I
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
could write the next page or revise the next chapter of whatever I just finished writing? Or, Wow, you know, the grout in the bathtub really needs working on right now. Yeah.
Simon McNeil
And, and I look at all the Wikipedia edits that I’ve got blogged for last week and the writing that I’m supposed to finish before the end of the week. And I just kind of get my own self aside I just about now. That’s
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
what I’m getting at. I think everyone suffers from that. The, because even people who have published will experience avoidant behavior. Generally, when you think yourself and you scold yourself by stop procrastinating? That’s because you know that you’re doing something you just can’t seem to get out of it. I mean, that may, there may be a real good reason for that. But also, there could be no real reason for it other than sort of afraid of writing the next thing.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah. So no idea what you’re talking about. No, what’s it’s fine.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Not at all. No one is ever. I’m the only one that it’s ever happened to, I guess. Yeah, absolutely.
Simon McNeil
No, right.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Never ever, ever. But what I say I say this because it’s also like you give you gotta give yourself a little love, but also a little tough love and go like, come on. Get just Yeah, you gotta
R.S. Benedict
please read the fucking book. Just yeah, the hardest, right?
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I think I even read this recently. Like the hardest part of writing is just getting your ass in the chair. Yeah, to just do it
R.S. Benedict
just unless you’re brand new Sanderson and you have a dozen Mormon women to carry you to the chair
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
in a pelican that you have inside your own house like a litter just
R.S. Benedict
all wearing Lula row presumably
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
now now I’m imagining them like sealing a sealing them into a lacquered like little thing like in Shogun
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
and they just dropping over I can’t see shit. Guys, where am I going? It seems a little hot.
R.S. Benedict
Now their take, they just take them to evermore and just leave them there. Maybe
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
we should discuss what world billing is supposed to be like the definition of it. Okay. So I mean, it’s essentially is the process of constructing an imaginary world or setting sometimes associated with a fictional universe depends developing the world with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, culture, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers. What? Why? Why are they singling out the science fiction and fantasy writers? In the
R.S. Benedict
wake of discrimination?
Simon McNeil
I think it’s because that phrase world building itself came out of the sciences. Yes. And so. So my suspicion is that part of the reason that constructing setting became known as world building and in science fiction and fantasy, is because there’s a bunch of people who actually read the physics books and saw that term being used and just miss applied it to Tolkien. That
R.S. Benedict
sounds that sounds right to me. That sounds perfect.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I wonder if Tolkien would have been a little bit insulted that we called what you did after something we read in physics is like, dear sir, get off my step. Oh, he wouldn’t needed that.
R.S. Benedict
Get away from me, you fucking nerds. impression I think it sounds really good. He was
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
dressed up as a Saxon warrior and jumped out at them jumped out from the bushes at them.
R.S. Benedict
Hell yeah.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
As he was known to do at at parties sometimes. I guess the guy knew how to do a pull a prank Can I say? Yeah, anyway, I think that that’s more or less what we’re driving it, I think in this discussion that we’re having. So
R.S. Benedict
to just maybe obsess a little bit less about world building as much fun as it is to imagine in this imaginary world to remember that this should probably serve your story and not the other way around. Well, and
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
also, like, make it interesting. I don’t know, there’s no delicate way to say it. Just like, yeah, make it interesting. I think we were talking a little bit offline. And I think my general idea is that for you to rebuild in a way that is effective in the supposedly, you know, like that Hemmings way iceberg type of way, is essentially to be a good observer of the world, to hold up a mirror at a strange angle to our present world and then apply it to this fantastical world. Because, I mean, we need we as readers, like we as writers need to leave ways and milestones and little landmarks for readers to sort of join us in creating this world as well. Right? Because that, I think that the, you could also apply, like the idea of worldbuilding, to writing and the idea of the reader as a bit of a co writer with you, right? Yeah. And so I think we discussed this a little bit in WoW, in a very early episode that we talked about who you’re talking to. Yeah. And if you fill in all the spaces, you don’t leave space for the reader to inhabit the story. They will not help you build this world. And then you know, like, then you’re stuck doing all the heavy lifting.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, yeah, I guess it’s the here’s my Funko Pop collection thing in set, you can’t touch it. Instead of like, Hey, here’s some action figures that like move and can be posed. And you know, the robots turn into cars here, kid play with them, like Fuck, yeah, I’ll play with that. It’s the
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
difference between something that’s for play, or for display?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah. Ooh, very nice. Very nice. Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that, because I put in, in this outline to thinking about the Taoist idea of like negative space, there’s that principle about a wheel might be made of 30 spokes, but it’s the emptiness in the middle, that makes the wheel useful. Everything turns around this hole in the middle. Here’s if this wheel didn’t have this hole in the center, you’d have nowhere to put your axle it wouldn’t spin around anything, right? So when you’re creating a world, you want to leave space for the reader for the reader’s imagination for the reader to go into.
Simon McNeil
I’ve been reading something it’s a really good example of an of a work that uses negative space really well. So I’ve been reading Alex Pheby’s Cities of the Weft series. And I mean, to a certain extent, it’s very much a me sort of of luck. Alex Pheby is somebody who previously wrote historical fiction about data schizophrenics. And then he decided to take a hand that fantasy writing, and the books are in this series are both and there’s a third one coming is going to be following the same basic structure. What if there was a city that was really fucked up? Hell yeah. Like, what we know about this world is basically contained to these three cities that are described the costings, three books. And beyond that, like, we know that the city of mordioux, which is the setting of the first book, it’s a merchant city, we know that people are trading with it from somewhere. And we know they’re not coming from Alcoy, which is the main city a second book, because those two are enemies. But exactly where those merchants are coming from is kind of left a little bit to your imagination.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Mm hmm. Well, I was gonna say, I forgot what I was gonna say. Please, continue.
R.S. Benedict
Okay. All right, Karlo, we will continue. I’ve heard a different approach referred to as world conjuring, instead of world building. The idea is, instead of creating a super detailed blueprint, you might want to instead take the sort of light, impressionistic strokes, you know,
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
like a pointillism or Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, yeah. It’s not the super scientific, super detailed diagram, but just sort of, here’s a sort of sketch of what the world looks like. And I rather like that approach.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I would say that I also approach like, a lot of my writing is like that evocation type. approach, right? Yeah, I think we even discussed Oh, we had discussed liquids over loss as an example of world. Like, I think that’s a perfect example to bring to bear to continue on, like the CO writing or CO creating. Yeah, idea. Because if you’ll notice, the story is like, Oh, this may not actually exist, like for real to the author. Like, she’s letting she’s like developing like, oh, imagine this the city and the like, what would she’s essentially asking you? What would you imagine Utopia to be? And for most of the story, it’s very nice, but nothing seems very, sort of vague and slightly boring. You know, it’s nice. Yeah. Everyone’s content, but it’s slightly boring. And then she, that’s where she, she is essentially working against our own, using our brains against us, right? Because she says, Well, what if I told you there that the utopia that you know, here, it has a dark secret? Would you believe it then? And of course, we believe it?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, then we believe it. We believe it, or we
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
believe it, because we don’t we do not live in Utopia, we live amongst struggle, we need to see it in our stories for it to feel real, which isn’t to say that you need to torture people in a basement with your stories. Yeah, you don’t need to do any of that. But you need to, you need to sort of put some of the struggles that we recognize in our world, into these fictional ones, for us to see that complexity, right. And granted, that is sort of like maybe that’s to our detriment. I don’t know, you know, but but it is something that we react to, we respond to, it resonates with us. Let’s
R.S. Benedict
put it that way. Right, right.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I mean, in fiction, it’s not simply using your imagination, it’s making you feel something that’s what makes you remember a fucking place in a fictional place. It’s if it made you feel something.
Simon McNeil
Yeah, I kind of want to get to Tolkien a little bit here for just a second on the idea of making you feel something. Because when, when you’re looking at what Tolkien was saying, and on fairy stories, which is where a lot of the nuts and bolts of world building comes from, ultimately, he wanted you to feel a sense of truth. And the reason he was putting so much detail into his worlds was so that it wouldn’t all fit on the page. And you get this sense of of the story happening somewhere that was bigger than the story itself. And and it would overwhelm you to the point where it would actually feel true. And it wasn’t like he was really clear, and that he wasn’t going after some sort of Joseph Campbell style scientific approach to mythology or anything like that. He just wanted you to feel like you are living in a created space so that you could approach something like a religious truth.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I think it’s worth noting to Gera tokens history, he was a, he was a linguist that I think was an Oxford or something like that he was Was he he studied very, very old literature. So a lot of the way he approached creating the Lord of the Rings trilogy and this world of Middle Earth Well, I’m guessing he’s recreating a lot of what it was like for him to read these old stories, these old Icelandic sagas because he is reading about a world that no longer exists and is alien to him. And it is bigger than whatever the saga is that he’s reading, there are going to be these references to events that, you know, Icelandic people in the year 608 would recognize but that he would not know anything about
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah, I think that there’s also to perhaps expand upon what Simon was talking about. It reminds me of something I read from Rudy Rucker, who was talking about like Norrell, like this idea of, he’s using it more of a science fictional sense. So his approach is more along the lines of that he actually got it from a colleague, and essentially, is that you can think of natural processes as a computation, that there’s a procedure that happens, you may not understand it, right? You may not have the technology to really understand it, but it can be observed. It can be if if it can be replicated, you might be able to figure out how to do it. And then hints at this underlying structure to the world, right, that then lends itself to someone who’s reading about this, to think that world is more complex than what’s on the Ah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, there’s there’s stuff that’s beyond the edges of the page that you’re just not seeing. But you can feel in it the way that people react and to your earlier point about the Icelandic sagas and a world that exists no longer like, one of the things in many ways, I would say that the, if we can stay on toking, the Lord of the Rings, books are narrowed quite a bit by the movies in the way that people visualize it. But one of the things I really fucking appreciated is how much how much of the scenery, there’s always ruins in the background. Like there’s old buildings and structures that are just falling apart. Like, oh, this was a this was a watchtower, back, you know, the 5000 years ago, and you’re like, shit, okay. What happened there that looks fucked up. And to a certain extent, there’s a lot of the Gothic in it, right, this idea of the bones of the past or jutting out of the world as we see it.
Simon McNeil
And the violence of the past to, to Yeah, like, like, let’s be honest, the entire story of The Lord of the Rings. Is everybody having to come to bear with the incomplete resolution of a war a few 1000 years previous?
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yep. Yep. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do the first time around. So got to do it again. Well, and it’s cyclical to write because it’s, it’s sort of like, that’s the curse of sour and it’s the shadow will always regroup and eventually reconstitute and appear again, at a later date. So it’s deeply melancholic, you know, for everyone that thinks that George RR Martin is nihilistic. Dude, this is bleak shit. Okay, come on, man. Yeah.
Simon McNeil
I mean, the only reason you couldn’t level and I was in charge at Tolkien is because of how clearly his faith shines through on the page, like, that’s, that’s the one thing that we got to remember is that this is these are, whether or not he intended them to be that way. And I think he kind of did intended, these are deeply religious works. Oh, yeah. And there’s that sense in Tolkien that he’s trying to make the books to give you a feeling of what it would be like to experience the divinity of creation?
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mentioned in the recent type bar essay that I made, you know, like, one of the things that always like, every time I reread Lord of the Rings, the thing that gets me at the end is like this idea that this dream must end. And you know, it’s just so sad. And granted, like I understand, yes, yes. There’s lots of problems with cocaine. Yatta, Yatta, yatta. We know, still, yeah, the the feelings are there. You know, I can’t I can’t I don’t know what to tell you. Well, I
Simon McNeil
think, like, yeah, we can interrogate Tolkiens politics, all we like. But the truth is that if we’re looking at science fiction and fantasy writing, and at how we approach the idea of setting in science fiction and fantasy, he’s inescapable.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t wanna say revolutionize. But he definitely changed the genre entirely. Because like, I want to say that there was a decade of him sort of like having been in paperback, like, I believe, late 60s to mid to late 70s. Those were the first times that his books had been like the rights had been acquired. And they were coming out in paperback for the first time in the US. And I distinctly remember, like, in the foreword to the I believe this was the second edition that I had had a foreword by Peter S. Beagle. And, and he says that like when he was going through the subways in New York City, you know, at that time, like in 69, or whatever, at the end, like, this is two towers had just gotten printed. People just rushed out and bought it and read it through. And people were scrolling like spray painting, Frodo lives in the subways. It’s so it’s so interesting to me, if
Simon McNeil
we want to look at like authors who came a little bit later and like, like New Wave authors, like like Herbert or when or Warhawk especially. Then the other thing we have to consider is the extent to which a lot of it was writing in response to him. Yeah, so yeah,
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Moorcock. I would suspect more so than anyone else.
Simon McNeil
Oh, yeah. But Martin to Oh, yeah.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I mean, Martin has made no made it no secrets that he sort of like covering gaps, you know, that that Tolkien did not want to cover right. The idea of like, the just king, he thought was like piffle. He’s like fuck that. What’s his tax policy? Okay,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, I’ve actually I took down a quote that by George RR Martin that a lot of people like to like to talk about when they’re maybe trashing him or criticizing him. But I actually kind of like this quotation, at the very least, I think it expresses an interesting perspective on world building because I don’t think there’s one way to do this. And I find it interesting how different authors approach it. So here’s the quote, ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom as much as I admire him, I do quibble with Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy, that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history, and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for 100 years. And he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question. What was Aragorn tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs by the end of the war, Sauron has gone, but all of the orcs aren’t gone. They’re in the mountains, did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and killed them, even a little baby orcs and their little orc cradles? I mean, you know, you can look at that and go like, Huh, you know, the interesting question, or you can look at that and be like, Okay, take off the fedora George, come down. Reveal, like, Okay, this is a different writer, and his approach would also think this is his approach on on how you handle a fantasy world.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah, and I think that it’s really interesting to me, because it really does show that he thought about this, like, he really put some thought into it. Because if, and I think that that’s the thing that a lot of people, a lot of detractors of George RR Martin, you know, they sort of don’t really get that, like, he’s really, none of this is unintentional. Like. And I mean, apart from the fact that they’re often just criticizing him for what the show did
R.S. Benedict
in the last season in the last episode, especially well, and also
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
he’s not really in control of the show. That’s why you have show runners, you know, yeah. Like he gave him the material and maybe some some notes here and there and whatnot. But he’s and then
R.S. Benedict
fucked off to go play with his toy trains. Just having a great time,
Simon McNeil
you don’t Martin’s getting at something a little bit with world building there. Once you dig past the kind of the edgy presentation and the questions of work genocide, he’s getting at something kind of important with the idea that when you’re building a world, you’re essentially setting out a set of problems. And you’re going to be necessarily constrained in which problems you can explore with any given piece of world building. Like a lot of the early world building, like I alluded to this earlier with the idea of world building as being a scientific process. But like yet, like one of the earliest references to world building was space, time and gravitation and outline of the general relativity theory by Arthur Eddington where what he was talking about was things like, imagining a world that was literally a sphere of nothing but water. So that you could examine more clearly how light would pass through a gravitational field. And like, that’s a very specific problem that you’re creating a world in order to elucidate and create a narrative around. So I think that there’s this bit of this tension in world building between trying to make this big, vast lived in space on one hand, and on the other hand, you’ve got a theme you’re going after you’ve got a problem you’re trying to explore, and how you construct your world is necessarily going to be informing how you explore that problem.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I think I agree with that fully. Absolutely. If you were to go the route of like, Oh, come on, George, tick off the fedora, you’d be like, Okay, sure. But But Tolkien was sort of like Aragorn was tokens, nod to authority and type of medieval thought, right, this idea that you don’t really need to know about it’s that’s the end of the story, more or less, or the end of Aragorn story, not the end of the story. But yeah, like that’s it. And then the hobbits go fuck off back to live their lives supposedly go back to normal but twist. But at the same time, like I do agree that they’re in tokens, themes. It’s the the question of Eve ill as personified by, you know, Morgoth, or Sauron, his lackey. And that is the central sort of, like, problem of the world. And I would say that in Westeros, the problem is, well, okay. You got a series of different problems, but the main problem is, there’s a big fucking like, extreme emergency that’s going to happen. up and everyone needs to pull together. How can they? Right?
R.S. Benedict
And I mean, of course, we’re looking at people who have very different mindsets to very different political, and moral philosophies. toking being a very religious, I believe Catholic conservative and, and George RR Martin being, you know, more left leaning kind of conscientious objector in Vietnam kind of sort of a more 1960s 1970s kind of mindset guy. So he’s going to have a very different attitude toward power and a very different attitude toward the idea of someone being all good. And the idea of a king like, obviously, toking I don’t think he intended the Lord of the Rings is like a literal, here’s what the world should be. But it is revealing more of a different attitude toward power than what George RR Martin has.
Simon McNeil
Yeah. Like, like Tolkien is basically a modernist author. And Martin is absolutely a postmodernist author.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah, I agree. One of the things that’s interesting about Martin is that he totally does construct a believable world where you do actually sort of believe that. Yeah, like, like, the White Walkers are gonna just like, kill everyone, because political expediency is more important in the moment than setting aside, you know, power struggles to sort of pull together, right, you know, it’s gonna happen for a long time. There’s also the question of like, okay, so you had a rebellion? Was the person who led the rebellion, the person that should lead by the time we start the novels? The answer seems to be not really, maybe not. Yeah, like Robert Barofsky is a terrible king. He sucks. Terrible. He also sucks as a person. But that’s another story. Yeah.
Simon McNeil
And I mean, that questioning of the effectiveness of politicians to respond to the challenges that confront them outside of the initial context that led to their rise is a perfect example of what I’m gonna getting at what I call an a postmodernist by Tolkien sets out a meta narrative of the just king and then Martin’s like, I don’t know, let’s let’s let’s break that meta narrative down.
R.S. Benedict
Like Aragorn was really really good at fighting with a sword that those particular skills do not necessarily translate well to being a monarch during peacetime Yeah, like rubber
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
breath, Yun was a fucking demon on the battlefield. Like he he stove in what was his face his chest with one swig of his like Battle hammer or whatever the hell yeah, dude. He’s great. Like he fucked the guy up. Should he be on the throne though? Like, should he have had to die and poisoned by an gored by a boar? You know, one of those 30 to 50 feral hogs that wander the woods, outside King’s Landing.
R.S. Benedict
God we love the feral hogs. We live precise yet vague number of feral hogs. A very specific range of number of feral hogs.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yep, the specificities and the range is no no, no less than 20 no less than 29 no less than 30 and no more than 50. But yeah, anyway, I think that you’re you’re absolutely right. There is no real right way to go about this. There are different vectors and trajectories to get into world building. And whatever works for you is probably the best thing that you can do. You can improve that though. Like I do, if I can circle back to the beginning, like I do think that sometimes the common wisdom is Oh, don’t info dump. Well, probably not a great idea. Unless you’re Kim Stanley Robinson and you can do it with fucking style. Then go Go ahead, lean into it. You know, whatever works is really what what works. And honestly, I I’ve read plenty of Kim Stanley Robinson, I, I really do like his style, and he info dumps like a motherfucker. And those books
Simon McNeil
and pro style can get you a long way. Like when I’m reading Lewin or when I’m reading Phoebe, the construction of their setting is greatly improved by their ability to describe it vividly. And in a way that is interesting. Yes,
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
yeah. Like it’s one thing to tell me. Oh, you know, this is a town that you know, like is on the shores of blah blah blah see yada yada yada. I you know, there’s lots of its major trade is fish. Like, okay, that’s that’s good stuff. RT walk me down the street while the mud is squelching underfoot and you can’t you gotta cover your ears because the fishmongers what stops fucking shouting about the fresh fish that you can tell isn’t really that fresh. Yeah, that give me that, like
Simon McNeil
so much of what makes the more do such a good book comes down to not not just its setting, although its setting is amazing, but how its characters interact with that setting like the character of this this little urgent Nathan like wandering through the slums that he lives in, squelching through the living mud looking for these magical by blow creatures that he can sell for parts. It’s like the presence of that character in the world is what makes the world interesting. As well as of course, like I said, the quality of the pros,
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
let’s take a moment to not set aside the pros, because that is something that that I do think helps with world building. Yes, absolutely. It’s the site. And again, I ran across this quote, and it’s a liquid quote, I’m going to paraphrase it, but essentially, she says that no one ever thinks about world building as the construction of which word goes after which, in what order, and therefore slowly but surely building and building creates that world, that your style also informs the world building that is part of the part of the craft that goes into it. It’s not just simply like this separate thing. It’s, it’s helped along by what words you use, if your society doesn’t really have, you know, like, hasn’t discovered fire, but somehow magically still has swords. Well, then there, you can’t just talk about fire. You can’t use fire as a as a descriptor or a metaphor very often because they don’t know what it is.
Simon McNeil
You’re telling me that the Ursula Gwyn who wrote a Wizard of Earthsea, thought that word choice was important. I’m shocked. But no, seriously, like, it’s entirely correct. And I’m sorry, I was not trying to suggest that prostyle wasn’t important, I think is incredibly important. My point as much as anything else was just to say that the setting can’t be extracted from the other portions of the of the work. And it’s it’s informed by word choice is informed by character. And all those things have to work together to create your story, rather than being built on top of a frame of ascending. Yep,
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
exactly. It needs to be all of a piece. Otherwise, the seams start to show and that those seams showing really sort of boot you out of that immersiveness that you’re looking for when you were talking about worldbuilding? That’s right.
R.S. Benedict
Yes. All right. So we’ve talked a little bit about Martin and talking a little bit about logwin. I mean, the Left Hand of Darkness does such an extraordinary job with world building, you can really see that she was the daughter of anthropologists with the way she just handles being a foreigner in this very, very different culture. And I love how much she really considered like, I have issues because a heck of a whole lot of queer authors will write a very medieval fantasy setting, except everyone is queer, or whatever. And there’s a little gwynn’s noticing, okay, the way our society is, the way it’s structured, the way it is, is very heavily based on first of all a sense of a gender binary and also like a gender hierarchy. There’s a division of labor in every facet, like economic, domestic, social, emotional, young, using the term emotional labor. And it’s gendered in a society without gender. How are we going to deal with that? How are we going to handle domesticity? How people are going to live different, the family is going to be structured, different, everything is going to be fucking different in every way. And you might not necessarily be on board with the idea like, Oh, totally gender fluid world would never have wore like, well, I don’t I don’t know about that. But the fact that this wasn’t just oh, it’s our world, except that it out. It’s like no, this would fundamentally change the structure of every aspect of society. So she’s going based on that.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I mean, you’re absolutely right. And I would argue that she is using that particular again, I think that’s the central problem to us Simon’s phrase that she’s sort of reflecting back at us but instead of going like well this is like our world but different this is a no no no, no, you don’t understand if we would get rid of this problem. This is what this world might look like. Which is a very like like shit I always forget the names of the characters but like the two main countries right planet are very different from each other, you know, like was a monarchy one of the other ones seems to be somewhat somewhat of weirdly, like a parliamentary socialism or something. I Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
a little bit Soviet in some ways. There’s Yeah. The
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Soviet about it. Yeah, for sure. But also like, even like you said, like the relationships and how people come together and you know, reproduce and all that good stuff, and how they divide the labor of reproduction is very different from how we do it here. But at the same time, like I like, to your point about, oh, the gender fluid wouldn’t have worked. No, the the fact that Gidley I’m sorry, has arrived at this world has actually sort of accelerated them towards maybe developing a concept of war, because of an external enemy that an external perceived enemy, I should say in the acumen. So it is interesting, right? You could, using your anthropology angle, it is sort of interesting to view this as a somebody making first contact with like one of those remote indigenous tribes. And suddenly, like everything goes to hell, because, yeah, the the you’ve upset the entire balance of their society. And
R.S. Benedict
I love that again, Lehi does that while being a fucking idiot the entire time. He has no idea what’s happening.
Simon McNeil
And I think Carla, you really hit on something really good there with liquid as being somebody who really did right problem. Well, it’s quite a lot. I know that one work of liquids is often not given enough focus is always coming home. And that’s because it’s it’s one of her more difficult and inaccessible pieces, because it’s basically speculative science more than it is science fiction. But But again, she’s she’s creating a problem world and she’s trying to explore, they’re very explicitly anthropological question about how the world might be different in the future based on a few the fundamental axioms. And so I think, in her case, like that was really very much often her project was to ask a few simple questions. And whether that was the question on the last of Do people really want you utopia? Or whether that’s a question Left Hand of Darkness about what would a world without gender really be like? She’s always kind of trying to point her stories towards an exploration of those problems. In I think, a kind of a clear sighted way, that that is a lot like those worlds that are made of nothing but water.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah. And I think that her thing is that, like, her general scientific approach is a sociological one. Right? Which, you know, amongst certain, or maybe most snooty physicists, they would roll their eyes as I Oh, that’s not a science. It’s like, well, it’s as much of the sciences. Anything else I would say. But I do think that it’s interesting because she, her focus wasn’t on the whiz bang gizmos, it was on, how would people be different, you know, if this problem existed, or if this problem were not present? And I think that’s an interesting approach as well. Right? Is always coming home the one that sort of like, like a fictional California that has like even a made up language and everything, right? Yes,
Simon McNeil
it was one that was the one where she started doing language work. Gotcha.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I’ve been meaning to pick that one up, because it sounds interesting, but I may just completely, I bounce off, it’s so hard, I land up, I end up in the stratosphere or something. Who
Simon McNeil
knows? It’s hard, but it’s really worth it. If you can, if you can, if you can fight your way through that book. I would absolutely recommend it. It is a masterclass in, in welling world building, really, because it really is nothing but the world building.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Do we want to talk a little bit about like some of the assumptions in world building? I would say that it is very odd to me that especially amongst like more silver age, sci fi, there was always this assumption that the people that were exploring space were going to be Americans. Yeah, the only marginalized people are robots or aliens. How weird is that?
R.S. Benedict
Here’s something that drives me crazy with a lot of fantasy or sci fi this assumption of monocultures. Like Hi, I’m an alien from the planet Blargh. I’m called a bargain and I speak Portuguese, which is okay. I’m from a country called the United States. I am called an American. I speak English. Not I’m from United States. I’m called United States seeing I speak United States these you know, these are not all the same words. In real life. Linguistic boundaries and cultural boundaries do not line up perfectly with national borders, because national borders are not real man. They are an illusion, fucking book and get on that. Yeah, it’s not real. Well, I think
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
that this this sort of intersects a little bit with like the imperialism of the US in general, and how often sci fi, I mean, whether it intends to be or not can be a type of soft power. Like it’s exporting culture, and creating a bit of a monoculture in and of itself, right. It’s very strange to me
R.S. Benedict
right at the enterprise is the SS enterprise. It’s not the HMS enterprise. Yeah, I mean, it’s a utopian future England no longer exists. So that’s
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
- Sadly, it fell to the Irish unification.
R.S. Benedict
Hell yes. Here this year, this year. It’s happening. Get on it, Ireland. Oh, they already toppled the Queen Charles is not long for this world. He’s going down. Look, he can’t do anything
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
with those sausage fingers. I’m sorry. He can’t even gesture to his troops in the right direction that will get confused as like, wait, is he pointing backwards? Or four? Where’s the fingers to two wide I don’t even know where it’s pointing towards. But yeah, like, I think that there is like this weird assumption. And it’s slowly coming around. I think that you still get the odd story where you know, like, you know, there aren’t any Latinos but there’s robots for some reason, you know, but but I think it’s coming around slightly. I don’t know can
R.S. Benedict
even Heinlein had like more diverse future guys. Heinlein who could be very reactionary. I mean, fucking Rico. The dude is named Rico. He
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
goes, Uh, Phil, is the Filipino living in Buenos itis
R.S. Benedict
or something like credit for that most writers weren’t doing that in the 60s. Little
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
did we know that Rico is actually a direct descendant of one of the word Pinochet’s
R.S. Benedict
version I think strongly implied
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah, my bad that would be that would be chilly but but close close. I forget the Argentinian guy. God anyway. Yeah. Three Days of the Condor Highland style baby but yeah, like I think that that is something that still still is around you know? I think if we can go back to dune real quickly Oh, yeah. To think that
R.S. Benedict
worldbuilding fucking June Yeah. Lawrence of Arabia in space with more cocaine. I’m onboard. Hell yeah.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Well, not to mention just the the the weird dichotomy of the past existing in this far future, like landed gentry and aristocrats in space, who are all like fucking strung out on a spice, which might be spices, like in the medieval spice trade, or it could be oil, more or less what I think Herbert was, was sort of like trying to evoke with the spice Melange,
R.S. Benedict
and that they’re still solving these giant political differences by two guys attacking each other with pointed objects. Yes. Do do to have a knife fight.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
That was that was the the solution to scaling back full on nuclear war,
R.S. Benedict
of course, right. That’s how they solved the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yeah. Nikita Khrushchev and, and JFK just duped it out in a parking garage. They know it’s secret. Nikita
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Khrushchev has thrown all his shoes at him. Hairdo would have repelled everything man Yeah, Dune is a great example of like a mono cultural quote monoculture in the sense that it’s one planet one ecology. And granted, it’s it’s used for essentially, just to simplify things and just make a point. I think I think Herbert does a good job of just leaning into it and just not really trying to hem and haw about it. It’s like fuck it. They’d been terraforming it. They’d be like, they’d been using the sandworms to terraform the rest of the planet fuck you doing does
R.S. Benedict
commit so many sins of like world building where it’s just okay, this fantasy race is very obviously a stand in for an ethnic stereotype. This is just that that is just this, but it’s so fucking weird that it kind of rules and I forgive it anyway, just just because of how bonkers the whole fucking thing is.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
What part of it I think part of it is speaking of, you know, like, these constraints and how the society works is precisely he follows exactly like these Byzantine politics that are designed to just like, just obliterate each other. This is how literal Byzantine politics were right? Like, oh, you’re appear who wears the purple, and a rival family suddenly got an edge over yours? And they’re, you know, they’re gonna put forward their air to the to the throne. You know what? Let’s just pay a couple people in the alleyway to throw some fucking acid in their faces. No one wants to vote for. No one wants a fucking ruler that has a messed up face. And that’s ableist for sure. But at the same time, that is how the world worked in business in Byzantium. I’m sorry. Like, if you were sure
R.S. Benedict
it would still work here. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Part of why
Simon McNeil
Herbert gets away with this, because he was really good at problematizing all that. Like, yeah, Paul tradies is Lawrence Arabia in space. But is Paul actually a good guy? Like, kinda? No, and the book wants you to know that it’s not in the sequels.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Look, I Simon I only read half of the book. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Paul is awesome. He he rules. He’s the best guy and,
Simon McNeil
and definitely nothing happens to change him in between the first book or the second.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Nope. Perfect. Chosen One.
Simon McNeil
I mean, it’s right. Absolutely. Totally doesn’t become worse than him. Space Hitler. Nope.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Not even. And his kids, they do not grow up to be assholes.
Simon McNeil
No, no, no becoming the enemy of all humankind in order to force them into some sort of vast species wide struggle session.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
He becomes like, worm Satan. Worm Lucifer.
R.S. Benedict
Yes, his girlfriend. Would you still love me if I was a little worm?
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
What if it was a big worm?
R.S. Benedict
It was a really big worm. Sure, sure. Paul, I believe you. I don’t believe your answer. I’m gonna test you.
Simon McNeil
Yep, throws him off a bridge. He’s like, no.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
But yeah, like, I think that I think that to your previous point, Simon. Herbert does also get away with it. Because yeah, like, his main problem is politics. Don’t trust them. politicians that are charismatic. Do not fucking trust them. Trust me.
Simon McNeil
Herbie was an odd guy politically because like, like, yeah, he was just McCartney’s cousin. He was a Republican speechwriter. But then Watergate happened. And he was like, I don’t want anything more to do with these fuckers. And, like, he disliked charismatic leaders. But he also hated bureaucracy. He was basically almost entirely anti governmental.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I mean, yeah. Yeah, we were joking offline that, you know, anarchist, or libertarian, and I think my answer was like, yeah, he, he might go anarchists, but honestly, I feel like he just ended up libertarian, it’s just too easy, especially in the US. Yeah.
Simon McNeil
Yeah, he probably would have, he kind of was heading down that path,
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
not to psychologize someone who’s, you know, long, long dead. But, but that’s my take, at least, do we want to talk a little bit more about dune or,
Simon McNeil
I mean, I could always talk more. But I mean, we could look at it, we could look at it from the perspective of being a book about ecology and about how ecology is an open system then becomes simultaneously political, and also the place in which you live. Like Caracas is very much a political object, but it’s also somewhere where people, you know, need to drink water and eat food.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah. And they also, just so happened to produce one of the most important substances in the known universe, which is the spice for lunch, I think you had referred to this as a labor issue, which absolutely is, and the minute it becomes a labor issue, and there’s questions of, like, how do you sustain the people who actually work for sort of processing melange? And also, like, Where does my lunch come from, because that is something that we find out later, I forget if it’s in the appendices of the original dune book, or if it’s later, but essentially, Milan jizz created, if I remember correctly, when a sandworm encounters water, like a sufficient water for it to react, and generally what happens is that they’re so hydrophobic that they explode. And that explosion causes space.
Simon McNeil
So a lot of that actually is explained right in the novel during the bit where liegt kinds is like left out in the desert to die drew Drew, okay. And, and he’s kind of going through his attempt to come to terms with the fact that the planet is going to kill him by like, intellectualizing it all. Which, like gets back to that idea that part of what makes worldbuilding work is when you tie all the things together from the problem, you’re trying to solve the somatically the way your prose is working, the setting and the characters So are in that setting? Absolutely.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Yeah. Yeah. Like, like, that’s a perfect example of like, the constraints of the setting are exactly what are gonna kill the kinds. And people know this, like, this is something that is, I believe it’s it’s actually like a political punishment right? You can be sent out in the desert without a steel suit and you’ll be dead very soon. But also like, that’s part of how the speaking of the politics and the political expediency This is how Paul starts to see a an opportunity in the quote problem, the political problem the Fremen, right? Because the Fremen are occupying a space that everyone in the known universe wants, because it’s vastly rich. And so they want in Arachis without a wreck, Cassini Ian’s Simeons I don’t even know without without people on it. So they can just come in and just extract extract and extract which is what you know, like the heart, Conan’s did, essentially.
Simon McNeil
But of course, this gives the Archon is a problem because it is a labor problem. And if you kill all the people who’s going to extract your spice for
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
you, oops, this is a great example of Herbert knowing exactly how that problem pans out. Right. And eventually the party shot emperor, like, Okay, you heard Conan’s know, you fucked it up, get out, get out, we’re gonna give it to the trainees for a little a little while. And essentially, it’s just a move to sort of stabilize things before, you know, bringing the the shock troops in again. But But essentially, you know, like, the, the idea is that Iraq is should be a point of extraction, and not a political entity in and of itself, which is what Paul sees finally, and turning that is what basically like, that’s the, quote, desert power that he talks about in the book, right? Like this idea that you can sort of agitate an army that that is an army and all but name, who has already been in your word to struggle and hardship. Because Iraq is like, in like, the Emperor’s training planet Solace is it sounds like Indus SaLuSa Secundus, or whatever it’s called, is a crucible plant is produced, it’s essentially a type of plant that produces like shock troops. And that’s what Paul season’s like, well, let’s put these guys to work.
Simon McNeil
Yeah. And you get this really interesting kind of multifaceted critique of the idea of regime change within within Empire there because I mean, on one hand, you’ve got the parish Emperor by using the tradies he’s able to be like look it’s not that the Emperor The Empire is bad it was just those those governors over there and see we got rid of the bad governors some years ago governors, but at the same time, you’ve also got Paul then basically reconstructing Empire just with a different set of thugs running the show with you right
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
right. It’s the to mix two things together. It’s you had someone stabbed and someone else holds the knife to see was a got rid of the bad the bad guy that stabbed you it’s another guy holding the knife it’s no problem. It’s better if either a system is going to kill you Well, why not just say fuck it and try to change it?
Simon McNeil
Yeah, I’m reminded a little bit of there’s something I saw recently was a panel from 2008 Econic and it showed at the top it showed a bunch of guys kind of in ragtag almost uniforms and it was talking about how this horrible militia had been disbanded. This horrible anti mountain militia had been disbanded. That the bottom it was the same exact guys wearing cleaner uniforms. And it was and the leader has established this police force. We’re going to be truth and justice throughout the land.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Oh, boy. Hoo, boy. That’s that’s a little too on the nose. I feel
Simon McNeil
2000 ad wasn’t always very subtle.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
guy called Judge Dredd. Subtle. I really just love at least the original dune novels. They’re just so exceedingly strange. And like I said, I think the dialectic of past versus future is just so well sort of captured there. Let me put it to this way I still find it sort of nutty that in like Star Wars, you have princesses and like Emperor’s and whatnot. But here it makes sense. It’s weird. It’s like a feudal monarchy, but it has a corporation. It has a route like a majority stake in the is it the show I’m the aggregate you Yeah, yeah. So it’s like a weird, like, it’s just it seems so strange to me.
Simon McNeil
And I think that this kind of is circling back to something that is some good advice that can be given to people who are are doing world building is to not be afraid to get weird with it. Whether it is like Gothic bones have Fallen Empires poking out of your landscape or whether it is this bizarre culture set in a strange world below. Impossible aliens. Like, get weird with it. Don’t be afraid to limit yourself to verisimilitude.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
I remembered what I forgot. I was gonna say, see, you don’t want to horror. It’s the meme is there’s a deer. And it’s fucked up. In weird fiction. There’s a city, but it’s fucked up.
Simon McNeil
Yeah, and that’s why we love it. We
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
love fiction because of this. Do we want to talk about like other approaches to world building?
R.S. Benedict
I mean, we
Simon McNeil
all had some really cool books that she was looking at. I
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
forgot we we met we should probably mention piers Anthony, which is like you
R.S. Benedict
Hamsun mentioned piers Anthony, aka the Florida man by
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
by choice. By choice. He says, fuck you England. I’m going to a more fucked up place. Florida. friendship ended with England. Yeah, I love your like speaking of like, look, I’m never going to credit Pierre Xanthi with being a fantastic pro stylist. I was pretty sure he was writing dreck when I was like 14. But it was like, who cares? You’re you’re more or less I think it also speaks to those are deeply deeply problematic books. They have no baggage. They have not aged in any way, shape or form. Well,
R.S. Benedict
not great ideas about women. Oh, no, no, not great ideas about women in those books. Oh, no,
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
no, no, no, no, no. But I will say that, you know, he sort of knew that he was writing silly shit. So why bother making this complicated map? It’s Florida. It’s magical Florida and sometimes overlaps with real Florida.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I know. You pointed out that the map of his fantasy Kingdom is literally just Florida rotated 90 degrees.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
Not even 90 degrees. No, it’s just Florida. Just notice your name seriously,
R.S. Benedict
it is just Florida it is Florida.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
And it is Canada. It is canon that it will it will be in superposition with real Florida every once in a while. That is the that is a plot in I believe is book five, which is called most of his novels names are very, our buttons. So I believe book five was Centaur IO Yes, yes, I know. I know. I thought this was high humor when I was 15 Rick I’m sorry.
R.S. Benedict
Okay, tell you so offended
Simon McNeil
I got I got an embarrassing secret that I have to reveal because not only did I read some sans books and I was like 14 but I also read like all the incarnations and mortality
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
oh hey incarnations of immortality had a couple of good ones in there they’re not again don’t look to Pierre Xanthi for pro style but I do think that like his his first one the death one was was pretty good. I think that’s that’s one that has like maybe five out of the seven there’s like maybe three that are pretty good or at least good
Simon McNeil
good on a slide
R.S. Benedict
like hearing your finger quotes
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
interesting premise but I do think that to your point incarnations of immortality does have like inbuilt problems in the sense not not I’m not talking about like the weird like piers Anthony just loved and including like weird like mind teasers like scenarios in his in his books as part of like a challenge or like I found it sort of endearing in a way that he was trying to include like something where you needed to think that it wasn’t just like you you could just like punch someone or or fight and complete the challenge or whatever. But at the same time, like the problem is okay, so can you get rid of death? Can you get rid of like the the incarnations of immortality were like the like seven different things like the made the world work or whatever, like avatars have, like abstract concepts like death and nature, right time war, that type of thing. And as you can see, right, right off the bat, you have like a problem built in that the characters then need to do something like war needs to actually not create war. Yeah, and so on. Good that
Simon McNeil
that one was actually my favorite of the series. Interesting. Not gonna lie wielding around the sword. Okay, um, when I, when I was 14, that’s the one that really clicked with me. Because I thought it was fascinating to be raising this problem of what would what do you do with a protagonist? Who, if the world is ever without war completely, will fucking die? Yeah. And coming to the realization that what he’s looking for is actually to find some sort of balance or, or, or fairness within it, rather than an abolition of it, which, I mean, there’s there’s some politics there that as a more mature reader, I can interrogate pretty heavily. But as a 14 year old, it was obtained a fascinating problem to explore. Yeah, yeah. Well, I
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
mean, the time one where he actually he ages backwards. So you know, the avatar of time, eventually ages backwards until he’s a baby. If he’s and, you know, like, he’s supposed to actually hand off like his little artifact, to somebody else to so that they can be the avatar before he becomes a full baby. Otherwise, you know, just can’t do it. It’s a baby. Yeah.
R.S. Benedict
You hearing Miss Annie the cat, which signals actually we’ve been, we’ve been recording for an hour and 20 minutes. And I love this topic. But I think we need to wrap it up because my cats are gonna eat me alive because it’s time for their treats, and they’re getting upset. But before we go, guys, is there anything you’d like to plug? Yes, I really am enjoying this episode because my cats are getting beyond the time to feed
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
them. They the cats will eat you. They just
R.S. Benedict
choose not you’re getting? You’re getting antsy.
Karlo Yeager Rodriguez
All right. Well, I mean, I would argue that I do have I do have. Speaking of worldbuilding I tried my hand at this. And I do have what is as the short to the tides. So blood calls to blood. And I hope I wrote another thing in that same setting that hopefully hopefully knocking on wood will get picked up somewhere. But nice. But yeah, like we could probably include the link to the to the ich Ioad page or just directly to the beneath ceaseless skies page, it doesn’t really matter. And see how I tried my hand at it and what the problem in my world is.
Simon McNeil
Well, I had a little essay that I put into type or magazine that apparently a lot of people found really interesting to talk about.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, there was no controversy. Oh, absolutely not. No, everybody loved it. Yes.
Simon McNeil
And and there was absolutely no complaints whatsoever.
R.S. Benedict
No one was mad.
Simon McNeil
But honestly type our magazines just really great. I really enjoyed working with them. I hope to do so again in the future. And I would suggest people check them out.
R.S. Benedict
Yes. All right. Well, thank you guys for coming on the show. And thank you all for listening. If you like what you heard, please head to patreon.com/ritegud. And subscribe. Until next time, keep writing good.