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Narrative features. How did the stories we tell shape how we think about the future, the present and the past?

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What is speculation for? And how might we construct better narratives for a better future?

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Narrative Futures is a podcast coming to you from Futures Thinking.

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A research network housed in the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities.

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My name is Chelsea. Hey, I'm a doctoral researcher in the faculty of English here at the University of Oxford.

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Joining me for the fifth episode of Narrative Futures is Jared Sharen to discuss the coaches awards, literary institutions and indie publishing.

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This podcast is interactive, following the interview,

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you'll be treated to to writing prompts designed by novelist and creative writing tutor extraordinaire Louis Greenberg.

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We invite you to share your response to these with us via email at.

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You just thinking at torch dot o x or AC dot UK.

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We'll share these on the blog where you'll also be able to find the full transcript of each episode with links to the books,

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writers and ideas that we discuss as the world so radically changes.

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We hope these conversations and ideas give you insight and inspiration to think about how else we might live and create collectively going forward.

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Jared Sharon has been nominated for several Hugo Awards, which I mistakenly thought he'd won.

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He co-founded Jurassic London indie publishers of dozens of genre bending anthologies and authors,

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and as one of the founders of the coaches awards for progressive,

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intelligent and entertaining works containing an element of the speculative or fantastic amount of much energy.

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Jared's day job is in Ezekial advertising as the head of planning at Amante Saatchi Weld's services.

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I'm wondering what you think about the genre taxonomy debates, particularly the designation of speculative fiction.

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You just weren't going to start with an easy question. Let's let's go back to debating of whether or not I want to.

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OK. A few thoughts about this.

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I think ultimately, I just don't care, which I don't.

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I don't mean to say that any sort of like belittling or dismissive way, because I am I think marketing categories matter a lot.

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I think it's you know, as long as there are physical bookshops, books have to go into singular,

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discrete locations, which means we have to figure out what genre a book most is.

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I think genres are great ways to search for things. They're a great way to understand that.

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If I like X, I will like all of these X like thing with it actually comes to publishing a book.

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It's one of the questions you sort of ask yourself later on as Jurassic.

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At least we never got a book thinking, what genre is this?

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We got a book and then fell in love with it, published it and then later tried to figure out, OK, what's the you know,

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I now have to force this into one bucket because that's the other way Waterstones will understand it.

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What's the best bucket for it outside of sort of publishing directly?

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I was one of the founders of the Kitchens Awards and that was set up about 10 years ago to celebrate intelligence,

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entertaining and progressive science fiction and fantasy.

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And the difficulty with any award is that you you do have to create that sort of universe of books that you are are setting out to judge.

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And so that's Rhasaan. Ray labels are incredibly important.

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And although we wanted to look into science fiction and fantasy books primarily about that's how we saw the remit of the award,

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as soon as you say we are a prise for science fiction, everyone else sees it as a certain sort of prise.

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They submit certain sorts of books and they expect a certain sort of behaviour.

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Similarly with with fantasy. So the language we used there was all of those things, you know, intelligent,

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progressive, entertaining books with some element of the speculative or fantastic in it.

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And that allowed us to really dance around putting ourselves into a category.

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And in turn, it meant that when we were talking about the prise of the sorts of books we were expecting to read and reward,

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we could talk to publishers and say, you know, listen, this is a wonderful.

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I mean, I remember we got Andrew Motion's Silver, which is a sequel to to Treasure Island, and that is only the loot.

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You'll never find that shelf did fantasy. But that is absolutely a novel with with an element of the fantastic in it.

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And it really allowed us to extend our remit and make sure that we were proving that value

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of the of the speculative and the fantastic more than it had previously been bounded by,

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I suppose. And I completely agree. I think you're absolutely right. There's this this kind of sense that the pulp quality of those genres has for a

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long time meant that they aren't included in sort of literary fiction prises.

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Obviously, that's changing now. But I like what you say about, you know, including an element of another genre.

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You know, the genres of the of horror and sci fi and the speculative generally in books that are otherwise,

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you know, considered literary in some way or, you know, as you say, intelligent and provocative.

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I wonder if there's something and I apologise because this is really coming out of left field.

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But these are the only two genres that the actual name of the genre has fiction in it.

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I mean, fantasy is, you know, by definition, it's the genre of books that are fantasy.

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They're completely made up. They're completely wild. They're they're total. They're total lies.

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And science fiction is again in the title.

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It's fiction. And you don't get that with crime. You don't get that with romance. You don't get that with literature.

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All of those don't they aren't labelled as fiction, as untruth in the same way that science fiction and fantasy are really.

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That's really funny to me, I think, because fiction is by definition entirely made up there.

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I, I totally agree.

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So it's sort of it's almost redundant in those titles, whereas I don't know, the others seem to be aspiring to be something more than that.

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Yes. Yeah. It's kind of sense that there's a replication of of reality.

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But but there cannot be.

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I think there's also something interesting about the misnomer of science and fiction that is important, I think, to the history of the genre.

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Going back to Hugo Guns back and, you know, the pulp magazines and the idea of.

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It was about science, particularly. And then obviously the difficult tensions and academic writing about these genres,

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about, you know, fantasy being sort of excluded by by the likes of Dorkus even.

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So I want to talk to you a little bit more about Gine Falls in Love and the Outcast Hours that you edited together with Mahesh Murad.

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And I'm thinking about form here, particularly thinking about the short story collections versus telling stories in long fiction form, such as novels.

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And what do you think the benefits of each of those forms are for writing, presenting kind of narratives of these genres?

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That's an excellent question. I'm a big believer in the themed anthology, just in general, whether it's, you know,

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whether it's about gin or like outcaste, ours is about the night and sort of the concept of living at night.

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And other anthologies I've been able to work on are, you know, they could be around London or mummies or you could do it.

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Anthology about rowdy sort of theme. And I think themes are wonderful. And that's really where the.

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Difference between a short story and a novel comes out because a novel is ultimately one perspective and it is one wonderfully detailed,

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wonderfully deep dive into one person's perspective, into a theme, into a topic, into a particular vision.

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And a novel has the ability to bring one person's vision or one person's narrative to life and honestly had a completely unparalleled format,

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probably across all media. I think the, you know, the immersion of a good novel is pretty much impossible to beat.

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Short stories are there, not immersive in that way. And they can't be.

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They they don't have they don't have the time or the space to do so.

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But what you get by compiling short stories is a collection of narratives and a collection of perspectives, all sorts of different visions.

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It's sort of a exhausted parable, but that idea of the sort of blind man and the elephant.

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And if you want to really understand something big and something incredibly deep or broad or global, or I am,

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you know, something that is experienced in a lot of different ways, I think that's where you need short stories.

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You know, going back to the Jim Falls in love. I mean,

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Ginne are a global myth on a scale and with a history and with a presence that actually probably no other mythological

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creature has certainly been very hard to find another another creature with that sort of global prevalence.

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And there are fantastic novels about the jinn, but they are that one perspective from a one one culture,

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one viewpoint, one one way of encountering the gene, and that that doesn't do them justice.

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It could be an absolutely wonderful novel and it will do that perspective justice, but it won't do the entirety of the Jim Justice.

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And that's not to say that this anthology does or any anthology can,

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but at least you can start to see the shape of the elephant by having a few more hands

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on it rather than just relying on on one person with particularly sensitive fingers.

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Absolutely. And you kind of you articulate that in the in the introduction to Jane Falls in love with the multiple spellings of the word.

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A reader will notice immediately reading the contents page that the authors come from all over the world.

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And you're you know, you're sourcing ideas, as you say, kind of globally. And, yeah, you've got lots of different hands on kind of sharing.

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Yeah. Sort of fantastical body of nerve endings.

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I'm thinking about thinking about that, that concept.

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So on that collection, I'm kind of wondering about the role of folklore and myth in the modern world and in modern literature.

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And and sort of integration of those things with. Yeah, what these genres.

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And with a very kind of technologically advanced world. This kind of interest and return.

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These old stories. The kind of stories of a beginning. Right.

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I completely agree. And I think if there's one thing I learnt from editing Gin,

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it's that the distance between the our contemporary modern scientific world and this sort of mysterious, mythic past is really there.

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There's really the boundaries between them are incredibly fat.

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And, you know, as I learnt through this, there are there are huge swathes of the world that still understand and react to the presence of gin,

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that the cultures of dealing with gin are still built into everyday life.

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I've seen in my neighbourhood in London, I have friends that still understand and react to the presence of gin.

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So they're not in it's not a myth that's in the distant past.

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It's of folklore that is ingrained in modern culture as well.

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And, you know, in.

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To be honest, I think I think one of the best books on this is I've always been taken by Robert Graves's version of The Greek Myths,

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where he explains the myths as the the science of the time.

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And it's just it's the way of understanding the universe and making sense out of it.

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And for many parts of the world and for many cultures and for many people all over the world,

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Ginner are still very much playing into that sensibility and that that world view at that,

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a capacity to understand what's happening in the world around you.

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And then on the I suppose the other side of the coin is that you have stories ingen like Sami Shor's reap,

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which I think is a fantastic use of creating a separation between those two worlds.

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It has parallels between drones and Jim. And it's an incredibly powerful story because it shows how there these are two very,

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very, very different things, the sort of mythic, I suppose, and the scientific. But they have the same emotional and physical impact.

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And you wind up replicating these patterns over and over again in in really sinister ways.

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Yeah, absolutely. I think there's something really important in this.

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The eye and the idea of Jan and these these myths as ways of explaining the world for thinking about alternative knowledges and the

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ways that these kinds of stories teach us something about how how we've constructed knowledge in the West and how that's come,

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unfortunately, to be so dominant and kind of in academic spaces around the world.

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And I think that these kinds of short stories go go a long way to repairing some of those damages.

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One of the anthologies we published as Jurassic was called Irregularity, and it might be May I be my favourite?

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I don't think anyone's ever really allowed to say that. Whatever. I think it was my favourite.

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And it's certainly the if everyone sort of looks back at their body of work and think, oh,

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that's the one that should have got more attention and done better than it

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deserved irregularity we did in partnership with the National Maritime Museum.

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And the theme was The Age of Reason.

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And that is a absolutely fascinating brief for what is ultimately a science fiction and fantasy anthology.

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Absolutely. Because very loaded. Just so much fun.

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Because, you know, you have an era of human history where everyone is doing their damnedest to put everything into patterns and

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into boxes and bring order out of chaos and sort of stomp out all the superstition that that came before.

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But then at the same time, you have an era where due to, you know,

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advances in science and knowledge and thinking and travel and exploration, they're also finding more unknowns than ever before.

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And it's such fertile ground for stories because we've got some absolutely brilliant ones.

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But they are about that sort of intersection of, look, I'm completely confident.

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I have ordered the world at, oh, my God, what is that thing over there that doesn't fit into a box?

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But I've always. Really been fond of that one for trying to tackle head on.

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I think what is an incredibly difficult team, which theme, which is, you know,

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what is what is the place for fantasy and in chaos and irregularity in a world that prides itself on making everything very ordered and tidy.

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I think we're I think we're learning a lot at the moment about how order and tidiness are perhaps not sustainable in any kind of long term way.

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You're absolutely right. How how easy it is for things to sort of fall apart.

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Yeah, the centre really cannot hold. So I want to talk a little bit about Jurassic London that you set up with your partner.

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And I want to ask you a little bit about how you got into small press publishing arrogantly.

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And and I we're both bloggers, actually.

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At the time, we were about four or five years into what was then a fairly successful sort of genre fiction blog.

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And. Had that sort of dangerous, almost understanding of how publishing worked and like everyone that sort of knows about 10 percent of a thing,

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we thought we do about 200 percent of a thing and we could do it better than anyone else.

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And we heard, you know, our our belief, which I think runs pretty much parallel with yours,

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is that speculative fiction and fantasy and science fiction are incredibly valuable tools in helping make sense of the world,

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in helping engage people in really difficult themes and topics,

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that it's sort of an underutilised resource in connecting people with social goals and greater advancement of humanity.

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Something like that. So things I think we're trying to work through out myself.

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Absolutely. That it's. And so we we spotted that at Tate Britain, there was going to be a new exhibition of the art of John Martin.

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And Martin is just an absolutely ludicrous author.

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You sort of Turner ask if you've not seen the stuff, but it's just sort of it's all like if Turner did volcanoes.

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And so it's just tiny figures basically just being devoured by smoke and fire and visions of hell and heaven and, you know, the Midlands.

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But he makes them all look a bit the same. And it's very, very pulpy in a way to be at Tate.

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And we looked at that. We're like, oh, my God, this stuff. You know, it's it's 2011.

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If something has apocalypse is about the apocalypse is about dystopia is like that's super cool in publishing right now.

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And here is Tate Britain doing this massive exhibition of apocalyptic art.

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Like, why is there not a book to go with it? And we spoke to a few editors and publishers that we knew.

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And they're all like, that exhibition is three months away.

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That's impossible. And no one would want it. So we're like three months.

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Who? Everyone can make a book in three months. Like, how hard is it? You just put words on paper.

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Oh, I'd be just you know, we we were helped out immensely by friends that knew better than we did.

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That could taught us how to do layouts. That taught us how to use software that literally like lent us fans to to take books from point A to point B.

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We called in sort of every favour we ever knew with every author that we could sort of blackmail we.

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And we put together what is actually a I think a really good book called Stories of the Apocalypse.

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And it launched and we completely blagged a relationship with Tate Britain and said, look, we just conveniently have this story,

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this book of stories coming out at exactly the same time as your exhibition that happens to be about John Martin.

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What are the odds?

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And they supported it and they were absolutely lovely, you know, at the end were like, well, OK, that was a really, really terrible idea.

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And we probably shouldn't have done that. But, you know, next time we think of ourselves like six months or nine months,

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that sort of thing, and we just kept going over it, sort of a five year run.

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There were probably somewhere between 40 and 50 different Voracek publications of all sorts of shapes and sizes.

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And it's an incredible volume of just just ludicrous.

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And, you know, we were determined to only do two things a year so that that worked well.

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But there was always something to experiment with.

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You know, there was always a new story that needed a home or there was always a new printer we wanted to try or there was always,

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you know, a new piece of art that needed something to go along with it or a new idea or something to scheme with.

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And, you know, there were two of us and lots of enthusiasm and the willingness to fail,

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which I think is incredibly important when it comes to publishing.

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And it was really, really, really fun. We had a a good pitch to cultural institutions because what we were doing is bringing people to take

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Britain or to the National Maritime Museum or to the Egypt Exploration Society or to English pen.

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You know, we were helping extend what they did and explain what they did to a completely new audience using the medium of fiction.

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So important. The extending of you know, I was thinking about that when you were speaking about John Martin's work and the intersections of,

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you know, the painting as the inspiration for the collection.

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And then the collection is a draw card for new, well, new viewers,

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new people to interact with these kind of all these different media and kind of on these on these topics that are also important.

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Exactly. And it is this is going back to that role of stories and to fiction.

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It gives you a different perspective on what you are seeing as a museum visitor or a gallery visitor or a student of history or whatever you might be.

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You know, if there's also a story about it, it it helps bring it to life or give you give you another way of thinking about it or interacting with it.

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And it just makes it that much more appealing. Absolutely.

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I think what you're saying here about having having a story to make sense of something

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and previously that story is kind of using stories to make sense of the world.

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I want to speak a little bit about your, um, your your day job and what you've described as using narrative to effect change.

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Can you talk a little bit more about that? So I work in a very specific offshoot of advertising.

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I'm not a specialist division of the agency MNC Saatchi.

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And what we do is work to create social impact using all of the sort of traditional tools of advertising and marketing and communications.

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So we work with the development sector and we work with governments and NGOs and transnationals to help

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them use communications to tackle some of the more complex and challenging problems in the world today.

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You know, communications is an incredibly powerful tool, as we've been talking about, you know,

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the ability of a story to help people understand something, to help bring a behaviour to life, to help shift people's attitudes.

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And obviously, that needs to be underpinned with the presence of a solution.

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Communications can't be the answer in and of itself,

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but communications can really help bring that answer to life and make it more compelling for people.

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And we see that a lot in the development sector and working with governments.

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You know, it's not just enough to have the right path out there or to have the solution or the vaccine or the handwashing behaviour.

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You need to make sure that people understand why and how and emotionally engaged with that to.

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Absolutely anything. Yes. The role of stories. Stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, what we are as a society.

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Right. Which is in part what the role of marketing advertising is.

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This is what you are enough. Therefore, this is what you may need.

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And I think that's really interesting, particularly at the moment when we're thinking or we're experiencing kind of radical shifts in cultural norms.

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That's absolutely right. Talking about what we're seeing now in the U.K.

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They spend.

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A lot of, you know, new rules and new guidelines and new expectations of how we behave and how we consume and what we should and shouldn't be doing.

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And I think we've been able to see over the past few months, you know,

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what the differences between a behaviour that's made compelling or a behaviour that has sort of a strong narrative underpinning,

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you know, do this to protect the NHS, to save lives versus behaviours that seem arbitrary or hypocritical or are nonsensical.

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And the ability of, you know, narratives to bring to life what is a honestly, you know, intangible,

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invisible sort of aethereal threat and make it personal and give people the not just the tools,

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but also their hope on how to get through that I think is is incredibly important.

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Absolutely. I see a lot of stuff on Twitter, which is really interesting in terms of narrative izing the pandemic,

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but also narrative ising movements for resistance to oppression, narrative surrounding Black Lives Matter, for example.

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And and those these all seem like narratives about you.

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Yes. About the future or future oriented, because it's about what do we want the world to look like soon.

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Yes, I think that's incredibly important. And I think the Black Lives Matter movement is.

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All the more impressive because of what it's done in helping people be aware

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of the narratives that we've already been subscribing to without realising.

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Absolutely.

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I suppose most importantly, it's about creating a new, positive, inclusive, fantastic narrative that we can all look forward to in the future.

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But the power that it has in helping people question the narratives that we've already been consuming have been subscribed to.

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Absolutely.

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So I'm wondering now a little bit about your reading habits in the last while and also what do you read that helps you think about the future?

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I suppose, like everyone else by reading during lockdown has been.

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Erotic ads buy behaviours have changed really, really wildly since it began.

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So I've got a. It is it is breeding that I'm doing now, but I am going to stretch it back a bit.

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I set myself the reading challenge of trying to find and read every Debu winner of the Edgars.

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And the editors are the prise by the mystery writers of America.

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And the debut category goes back to, I think like 1950 or spent close to that.

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And, you know, I'm a mystery reader. I'm in everything reader, I think.

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But to me, it's been a very interesting quest over about nine months to find a lot of these books,

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many of which are forgotten or lost or completely impossible to track down.

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But see how.

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You know, to read seven decades of crime fiction, of popular crime fiction and see how the category has has changed and how it reflects society.

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You know, how it treats race and gender and sexuality. You know what it thinks of as permissible drama and permissible behaviour.

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What you know, what crime used to shock or not shock over the years.

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And of course, just the the trends in what makes for a popular mystery is kind of fun.

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I've kind of wrapped that up and was trying to think of, like, OK, what's the next sort of equivalent challenge?

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I could set myself at I discovered these spur awards for Western fiction, which also goes back to about 1940.

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Right. Which is which is amazing. I you know, I.

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And it just shows what happens when you start looking in categories you don't normally sort of tinker around with.

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So it goes back to 1940. It's got you know, I have no idea of what the sort of community or even the processes around this award,

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but it seems to change quite a bit sort of over the years.

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So it's it's reflecting more contemporary fiction and all sorts of interesting authors and voices.

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And I think right now, the reason I have started picking up Westerns is, again, I want to see how everything changed over time.

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But as an American and in an election year, that feels incredibly critical to, you know, what is the heart and soul of America.

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Westerns are such an iconic American genre that it feels that being able to sort of skip around it.

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Look at what did Western fiction say about America and American values and American dreams and sort of a certain sort of hope and vision of America.

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And how has that changed over 70, 80 years?

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You know, how how do people talk about America and how do people talk about what it what it means to be American?

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And I'm really interested to see where that leads me, because right now that is you know,

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that's a conversation that everyone is having over the Internet and in their hearts and in November.

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But there are going to be having at the at the polling booth. And I'm curious to see how fiction might inform that over time.

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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that there's definitely an element of the kinds of national pride in particular genres,

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the the West and as you mentioned, for America and, you know, Agatha Christie in Britain.

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Oh, you're absolutely right. And I think that's it's really interesting.

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I mean, it is, you know, going back to statues and things like that.

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It's sort of it's. They are. Books wind up being sort of moments in time that capture what's important to the author and often to the reader.

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And it does it kind of gives you changing sense of what kind of concerns are relevant to the, you know, to the period that you're reading around.

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And it made me think about what you said about communities that surround institutions like these prises and awards and around the you know,

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the communities that surround Hugo's offices, Clark and the you know,

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the quite profound shifts in the ideologies of those communities in the last five years,

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thinking particularly about the puppies controversy and and how brilliantly the genre scene is changing to reflect concerns of the left,

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but also of equality. I completely agree.

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Paul Puppis protest was just I mean, and, you know,

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we've seen it mirrored across games and comics and films and and sort of every other form of culture where people start

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protesting that something's become too political because all of a sudden they realise that they don't share those politics.

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But science fiction has always been deeply political.

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That's that's its point. It. I mean, it's it's about examining the world from a different lens.

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But I think it's you're absolutely right. I mean, all of these institutions, you know, every award has a you know,

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a vision or a motive or a community around it has a has a different way of looking at the world.

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And I mean, I'm not a huge fan of the Hugo Awards.

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I've never been in that like literally like I'm not a fan.

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Like the taste of the Yuko's has never particularly reflected my own reading taste in the same way that say,

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like the Shirley Jackson Award or the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

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Those those reflect my reading taste really, really strong. But that's that's great.

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That's why it's really important to have all sorts of these institutions and not just one,

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because an award is just a particular type of recommendation that is constructed in a in

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a particular way with all sorts of politics and communities and attitudes around it.

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And I love that they all exist. And by my stance has always been the sort of the more the merrier and the border.

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Diverse and eclectic and strange that we can make them the better it is, because then we have more and more recommendations out there.

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And the challenge is to find, you know, the recommendation engine that best matches your own taste.

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Absolutely. And to find yourself pushed in some ways as well by recommendations made in other genre institutions.

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Yeah, that's a appropriate way of putting it. And, you know, I have something like the Shirley Jackson Awards where like, OK,

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they are there enough on my wavelength that they recommend something that I haven't read.

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I know I should cheque it out. And then similarly, you know, one of my favourite awards is the Good Reads Choice Awards.

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You know, every year where they just have the massive public vote. And those books are so far out of my normal taste.

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I mean, I really just don't like any of them at all.

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But it's really, I think, handy and valuable and fun for me to go to use that to discover new genres.

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So I love it when the kid reads Trisk comes out because that I go and I learn about now,

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which are the historical romances that are incredibly popular in that community,

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you know, which are that which are the comic books that are really popular in that community.

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And it's a really it's a really nice way of discovering like mainstream's like Geist of various genres lately.

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And when you when you think about what is important to people and what I mean you not your own reading challenges.

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Thinking back to, you know, mystery and and Westerns and thorough for the longest time,

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a lot of these genres have depended on what's popular, not only what is celebrated.

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Right. Because there's kind of a disjunct there.

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We know we all know that romance sells best. But we know that or not.

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But and that reflects well, it reflects a demographic of the reading public, but it also reflects what people are concerned about.

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And I think maybe we see that with the as you as you were saying earlier about the John Martin

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exhibition and your accompanying collection and the the the move to dystopia and the rise of dystopia,

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as you know, as a popular zeitgeist. I totally agree that, yes, nodding profusely, narrative future for those writers and speculators listening.

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Stay with us now for writing prompts and exercises designed to encourage putting pen to paper or hands to keyboard,

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as well as reflection on the writing process. This section is designed and presented by Lee Greenberg.

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Jerry cheering refers to rubbish grades, Greek myths and suggestive mythology with the science of the time,

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a way to make sense of what we see around us. Let's use that tool to try to make sense of what's happening around us now.

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Find a news story from today. Don't agonise too much about the choice and reimagine it as a myth.

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For our purposes, one of the key elements of myth is that it gives reason to phenomena.

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And another is that characters, rather than the events themselves, take centre stage.

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The phenomena are personified. Your chosen news story may well be one of random seeming misfortune or disaster.

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It may be of lack of progress. Maybe a huge uncontrollable forces make up a reason for the events in your story, and a character embodies it.

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For example, a raging wildfire may be the result of God's dissatisfaction or a petty argument.

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A Record-Breaking football score might be the result of magic boots supplied by an angel as creators and readers order.

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Suits says that some art chooses to deny and resist comforting order.

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Do you think I should disrupt or don't want I asserted my.

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She runs a council of his publishing adventures, are amusing and insightful,

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Jurassic London introduce civil writers from around the world to new readers.

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But as writers, we're all too aware of the corporate backbone of publishing and the struggles of independent publishers,

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booksellers and distributors to find a foothold in the industry. This is your chance to imagine your ideal publishing company.

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What would your publishing goals be, making money, democratising or decolonising the industry,

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making it environmentally beneficial or making beautifully designed artefacts?

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What stories would you publish and why? How would you make money?

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Would you raise charitable funding? Would you interest enough book buyers to make the business profitable?

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In your ideal world, would public funding sustain publishing? Can you imagine any future technology that would assist your publishing goals?

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Jot down a business plan on a scrap of paper or a napkin and store it.

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This dream is for you to keep the peace. Feel free to share any of your previous exercise vest by email at Fut. thinking a torch dot o x dot ac dot.

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That's a wrap on Episode five, many thanks to Jared Shern for joining us in the next episode.

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E.J. Swift shares her negotiations with Form and Content, discusses climate fiction and nested narratives.