Narrative features. How did the stories we tell shape how we think about the future, the present and the past?
What is speculation for? And how might we construct better narratives for a better future?
Narrative Futures is a podcast coming to you from Futures Thinking.
A research network housed in the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities.
My name is Chelsea. Hey, I'm a doctoral researcher in the faculty of English here at the University of Oxford.
Joining me for the fifth episode of Narrative Futures is Jared Sharen to discuss the coaches awards, literary institutions and indie publishing.
This podcast is interactive, following the interview,
you'll be treated to to writing prompts designed by novelist and creative writing tutor extraordinaire Louis Greenberg.
We invite you to share your response to these with us via email at.
You just thinking at torch dot o x or AC dot UK.
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,
writers and ideas that we discuss as the world so radically changes.
We hope these conversations and ideas give you insight and inspiration to think about how else we might live and create collectively going forward.
Jared Sharon has been nominated for several Hugo Awards, which I mistakenly thought he'd won.
He co-founded Jurassic London indie publishers of dozens of genre bending anthologies and authors,
and as one of the founders of the coaches awards for progressive,
intelligent and entertaining works containing an element of the speculative or fantastic amount of much energy.
Jared's day job is in Ezekial advertising as the head of planning at Amante Saatchi Weld's services.
I'm wondering what you think about the genre taxonomy debates, particularly the designation of speculative fiction.
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.
OK. A few thoughts about this.
I think ultimately, I just don't care, which I don't.
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.
I think it's you know, as long as there are physical bookshops, books have to go into singular,
discrete locations, which means we have to figure out what genre a book most is.
I think genres are great ways to search for things. They're a great way to understand that.
If I like X, I will like all of these X like thing with it actually comes to publishing a book.
It's one of the questions you sort of ask yourself later on as Jurassic.
At least we never got a book thinking, what genre is this?
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,
I now have to force this into one bucket because that's the other way Waterstones will understand it.
What's the best bucket for it outside of sort of publishing directly?
I was one of the founders of the Kitchens Awards and that was set up about 10 years ago to celebrate intelligence,
entertaining and progressive science fiction and fantasy.
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.
And so that's Rhasaan. Ray labels are incredibly important.
And although we wanted to look into science fiction and fantasy books primarily about that's how we saw the remit of the award,
as soon as you say we are a prise for science fiction, everyone else sees it as a certain sort of prise.
They submit certain sorts of books and they expect a certain sort of behaviour.
Similarly with with fantasy. So the language we used there was all of those things, you know, intelligent,
progressive, entertaining books with some element of the speculative or fantastic in it.
And that allowed us to really dance around putting ourselves into a category.
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,
we could talk to publishers and say, you know, listen, this is a wonderful.
I mean, I remember we got Andrew Motion's Silver, which is a sequel to to Treasure Island, and that is only the loot.
You'll never find that shelf did fantasy. But that is absolutely a novel with with an element of the fantastic in it.
And it really allowed us to extend our remit and make sure that we were proving that value
of the of the speculative and the fantastic more than it had previously been bounded by,
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
long time meant that they aren't included in sort of literary fiction prises.
Obviously, that's changing now. But I like what you say about, you know, including an element of another genre.
You know, the genres of the of horror and sci fi and the speculative generally in books that are otherwise,
you know, considered literary in some way or, you know, as you say, intelligent and provocative.
I wonder if there's something and I apologise because this is really coming out of left field.
But these are the only two genres that the actual name of the genre has fiction in it.
I mean, fantasy is, you know, by definition, it's the genre of books that are fantasy.
They're completely made up. They're completely wild. They're they're total. They're total lies.
And science fiction is again in the title.
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.
All of those don't they aren't labelled as fiction, as untruth in the same way that science fiction and fantasy are really.
That's really funny to me, I think, because fiction is by definition entirely made up there.
I, I totally agree.
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.
Yes. Yeah. It's kind of sense that there's a replication of of reality.
But but there cannot be.
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.
Going back to Hugo Guns back and, you know, the pulp magazines and the idea of.
It was about science, particularly. And then obviously the difficult tensions and academic writing about these genres,
about, you know, fantasy being sort of excluded by by the likes of Dorkus even.
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.
And I'm thinking about form here, particularly thinking about the short story collections versus telling stories in long fiction form, such as novels.
And what do you think the benefits of each of those forms are for writing, presenting kind of narratives of these genres?
That's an excellent question. I'm a big believer in the themed anthology, just in general, whether it's, you know,
whether it's about gin or like outcaste, ours is about the night and sort of the concept of living at night.
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.
Anthology about rowdy sort of theme. And I think themes are wonderful. And that's really where the.
Difference between a short story and a novel comes out because a novel is ultimately one perspective and it is one wonderfully detailed,
wonderfully deep dive into one person's perspective, into a theme, into a topic, into a particular vision.
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,
probably across all media. I think the, you know, the immersion of a good novel is pretty much impossible to beat.
Short stories are there, not immersive in that way. And they can't be.
They they don't have they don't have the time or the space to do so.
But what you get by compiling short stories is a collection of narratives and a collection of perspectives, all sorts of different visions.
It's sort of a exhausted parable, but that idea of the sort of blind man and the elephant.
And if you want to really understand something big and something incredibly deep or broad or global, or I am,
you know, something that is experienced in a lot of different ways, I think that's where you need short stories.
You know, going back to the Jim Falls in love. I mean,
Ginne are a global myth on a scale and with a history and with a presence that actually probably no other mythological
creature has certainly been very hard to find another another creature with that sort of global prevalence.
And there are fantastic novels about the jinn, but they are that one perspective from a one one culture,
one viewpoint, one one way of encountering the gene, and that that doesn't do them justice.
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.
And that's not to say that this anthology does or any anthology can,
but at least you can start to see the shape of the elephant by having a few more hands
on it rather than just relying on on one person with particularly sensitive fingers.
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.
A reader will notice immediately reading the contents page that the authors come from all over the world.
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.
Yeah. Sort of fantastical body of nerve endings.
I'm thinking about thinking about that, that concept.
So on that collection, I'm kind of wondering about the role of folklore and myth in the modern world and in modern literature.
And and sort of integration of those things with. Yeah, what these genres.
And with a very kind of technologically advanced world. This kind of interest and return.
These old stories. The kind of stories of a beginning. Right.
I completely agree. And I think if there's one thing I learnt from editing Gin,
it's that the distance between the our contemporary modern scientific world and this sort of mysterious, mythic past is really there.
There's really the boundaries between them are incredibly fat.
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,
that the cultures of dealing with gin are still built into everyday life.
I've seen in my neighbourhood in London, I have friends that still understand and react to the presence of gin.
So they're not in it's not a myth that's in the distant past.
It's of folklore that is ingrained in modern culture as well.
And, you know, in.
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,
where he explains the myths as the the science of the time.
And it's just it's the way of understanding the universe and making sense out of it.
And for many parts of the world and for many cultures and for many people all over the world,
Ginner are still very much playing into that sensibility and that that world view at that,
a capacity to understand what's happening in the world around you.
And then on the I suppose the other side of the coin is that you have stories ingen like Sami Shor's reap,
which I think is a fantastic use of creating a separation between those two worlds.
It has parallels between drones and Jim. And it's an incredibly powerful story because it shows how there these are two very,
very, very different things, the sort of mythic, I suppose, and the scientific. But they have the same emotional and physical impact.
And you wind up replicating these patterns over and over again in in really sinister ways.
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's something really important in this.
The eye and the idea of Jan and these these myths as ways of explaining the world for thinking about alternative knowledges and the
ways that these kinds of stories teach us something about how how we've constructed knowledge in the West and how that's come,
unfortunately, to be so dominant and kind of in academic spaces around the world.
And I think that these kinds of short stories go go a long way to repairing some of those damages.
One of the anthologies we published as Jurassic was called Irregularity, and it might be May I be my favourite?
I don't think anyone's ever really allowed to say that. Whatever. I think it was my favourite.
And it's certainly the if everyone sort of looks back at their body of work and think, oh,
that's the one that should have got more attention and done better than it
deserved irregularity we did in partnership with the National Maritime Museum.
And the theme was The Age of Reason.
And that is a absolutely fascinating brief for what is ultimately a science fiction and fantasy anthology.
Absolutely. Because very loaded. Just so much fun.
Because, you know, you have an era of human history where everyone is doing their damnedest to put everything into patterns and
into boxes and bring order out of chaos and sort of stomp out all the superstition that that came before.
But then at the same time, you have an era where due to, you know,
advances in science and knowledge and thinking and travel and exploration, they're also finding more unknowns than ever before.
And it's such fertile ground for stories because we've got some absolutely brilliant ones.
But they are about that sort of intersection of, look, I'm completely confident.
I have ordered the world at, oh, my God, what is that thing over there that doesn't fit into a box?
But I've always. Really been fond of that one for trying to tackle head on.
I think what is an incredibly difficult team, which theme, which is, you know,
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.
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.
You're absolutely right. How how easy it is for things to sort of fall apart.
Yeah, the centre really cannot hold. So I want to talk a little bit about Jurassic London that you set up with your partner.
And I want to ask you a little bit about how you got into small press publishing arrogantly.
And and I we're both bloggers, actually.
At the time, we were about four or five years into what was then a fairly successful sort of genre fiction blog.
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,
we thought we do about 200 percent of a thing and we could do it better than anyone else.
And we heard, you know, our our belief, which I think runs pretty much parallel with yours,
is that speculative fiction and fantasy and science fiction are incredibly valuable tools in helping make sense of the world,
in helping engage people in really difficult themes and topics,
that it's sort of an underutilised resource in connecting people with social goals and greater advancement of humanity.
Something like that. So things I think we're trying to work through out myself.
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.
And Martin is just an absolutely ludicrous author.
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.
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.
But he makes them all look a bit the same. And it's very, very pulpy in a way to be at Tate.
And we looked at that. We're like, oh, my God, this stuff. You know, it's it's 2011.
If something has apocalypse is about the apocalypse is about dystopia is like that's super cool in publishing right now.
And here is Tate Britain doing this massive exhibition of apocalyptic art.
Like, why is there not a book to go with it? And we spoke to a few editors and publishers that we knew.
And they're all like, that exhibition is three months away.
That's impossible. And no one would want it. So we're like three months.
Who? Everyone can make a book in three months. Like, how hard is it? You just put words on paper.
Oh, I'd be just you know, we we were helped out immensely by friends that knew better than we did.
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.
We called in sort of every favour we ever knew with every author that we could sort of blackmail we.
And we put together what is actually a I think a really good book called Stories of the Apocalypse.
And it launched and we completely blagged a relationship with Tate Britain and said, look, we just conveniently have this story,
this book of stories coming out at exactly the same time as your exhibition that happens to be about John Martin.
What are the odds?
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.
And we probably shouldn't have done that. But, you know, next time we think of ourselves like six months or nine months,
that sort of thing, and we just kept going over it, sort of a five year run.
There were probably somewhere between 40 and 50 different Voracek publications of all sorts of shapes and sizes.
And it's an incredible volume of just just ludicrous.
And, you know, we were determined to only do two things a year so that that worked well.
But there was always something to experiment with.
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,
you know, a new piece of art that needed something to go along with it or a new idea or something to scheme with.
And, you know, there were two of us and lots of enthusiasm and the willingness to fail,
which I think is incredibly important when it comes to publishing.
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
Britain or to the National Maritime Museum or to the Egypt Exploration Society or to English pen.
You know, we were helping extend what they did and explain what they did to a completely new audience using the medium of fiction.
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,
you know, the painting as the inspiration for the collection.
And then the collection is a draw card for new, well, new viewers,
new people to interact with these kind of all these different media and kind of on these on these topics that are also important.
Exactly. And it is this is going back to that role of stories and to fiction.
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.
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.
And it just makes it that much more appealing. Absolutely.
I think what you're saying here about having having a story to make sense of something
and previously that story is kind of using stories to make sense of the world.
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.
Can you talk a little bit more about that? So I work in a very specific offshoot of advertising.
I'm not a specialist division of the agency MNC Saatchi.
And what we do is work to create social impact using all of the sort of traditional tools of advertising and marketing and communications.
So we work with the development sector and we work with governments and NGOs and transnationals to help
them use communications to tackle some of the more complex and challenging problems in the world today.
You know, communications is an incredibly powerful tool, as we've been talking about, you know,
the ability of a story to help people understand something, to help bring a behaviour to life, to help shift people's attitudes.
And obviously, that needs to be underpinned with the presence of a solution.
Communications can't be the answer in and of itself,
but communications can really help bring that answer to life and make it more compelling for people.
And we see that a lot in the development sector and working with governments.
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.
You need to make sure that people understand why and how and emotionally engaged with that to.
Absolutely anything. Yes. The role of stories. Stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, what we are as a society.
Right. Which is in part what the role of marketing advertising is.
This is what you are enough. Therefore, this is what you may need.
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.
That's absolutely right. Talking about what we're seeing now in the U.K.
They spend.
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.
And I think we've been able to see over the past few months, you know,
what the differences between a behaviour that's made compelling or a behaviour that has sort of a strong narrative underpinning,
you know, do this to protect the NHS, to save lives versus behaviours that seem arbitrary or hypocritical or are nonsensical.
And the ability of, you know, narratives to bring to life what is a honestly, you know, intangible,
invisible sort of aethereal threat and make it personal and give people the not just the tools,
but also their hope on how to get through that I think is is incredibly important.
Absolutely. I see a lot of stuff on Twitter, which is really interesting in terms of narrative izing the pandemic,
but also narrative ising movements for resistance to oppression, narrative surrounding Black Lives Matter, for example.
And and those these all seem like narratives about you.
Yes. About the future or future oriented, because it's about what do we want the world to look like soon.
Yes, I think that's incredibly important. And I think the Black Lives Matter movement is.
All the more impressive because of what it's done in helping people be aware
of the narratives that we've already been subscribing to without realising.
Absolutely.
I suppose most importantly, it's about creating a new, positive, inclusive, fantastic narrative that we can all look forward to in the future.
But the power that it has in helping people question the narratives that we've already been consuming have been subscribed to.
Absolutely.
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?
I suppose, like everyone else by reading during lockdown has been.
Erotic ads buy behaviours have changed really, really wildly since it began.
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.
I set myself the reading challenge of trying to find and read every Debu winner of the Edgars.
And the editors are the prise by the mystery writers of America.
And the debut category goes back to, I think like 1950 or spent close to that.
And, you know, I'm a mystery reader. I'm in everything reader, I think.
But to me, it's been a very interesting quest over about nine months to find a lot of these books,
many of which are forgotten or lost or completely impossible to track down.
But see how.
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.
You know, how it treats race and gender and sexuality. You know what it thinks of as permissible drama and permissible behaviour.
What you know, what crime used to shock or not shock over the years.
And of course, just the the trends in what makes for a popular mystery is kind of fun.
I've kind of wrapped that up and was trying to think of, like, OK, what's the next sort of equivalent challenge?
I could set myself at I discovered these spur awards for Western fiction, which also goes back to about 1940.
Right. Which is which is amazing. I you know, I.
And it just shows what happens when you start looking in categories you don't normally sort of tinker around with.
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,
but it seems to change quite a bit sort of over the years.
So it's it's reflecting more contemporary fiction and all sorts of interesting authors and voices.
And I think right now, the reason I have started picking up Westerns is, again, I want to see how everything changed over time.
But as an American and in an election year, that feels incredibly critical to, you know, what is the heart and soul of America.
Westerns are such an iconic American genre that it feels that being able to sort of skip around it.
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.
And how has that changed over 70, 80 years?
You know, how how do people talk about America and how do people talk about what it what it means to be American?
And I'm really interested to see where that leads me, because right now that is you know,
that's a conversation that everyone is having over the Internet and in their hearts and in November.
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.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that there's definitely an element of the kinds of national pride in particular genres,
the the West and as you mentioned, for America and, you know, Agatha Christie in Britain.
Oh, you're absolutely right. And I think that's it's really interesting.
I mean, it is, you know, going back to statues and things like that.
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.
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.
And it made me think about what you said about communities that surround institutions like these prises and awards and around the you know,
the communities that surround Hugo's offices, Clark and the you know,
the quite profound shifts in the ideologies of those communities in the last five years,
thinking particularly about the puppies controversy and and how brilliantly the genre scene is changing to reflect concerns of the left,
but also of equality. I completely agree.
Paul Puppis protest was just I mean, and, you know,
we've seen it mirrored across games and comics and films and and sort of every other form of culture where people start
protesting that something's become too political because all of a sudden they realise that they don't share those politics.
But science fiction has always been deeply political.
That's that's its point. It. I mean, it's it's about examining the world from a different lens.
But I think it's you're absolutely right. I mean, all of these institutions, you know, every award has a you know,
a vision or a motive or a community around it has a has a different way of looking at the world.
And I mean, I'm not a huge fan of the Hugo Awards.
I've never been in that like literally like I'm not a fan.
Like the taste of the Yuko's has never particularly reflected my own reading taste in the same way that say,
like the Shirley Jackson Award or the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Those those reflect my reading taste really, really strong. But that's that's great.
That's why it's really important to have all sorts of these institutions and not just one,
because an award is just a particular type of recommendation that is constructed in a in
a particular way with all sorts of politics and communities and attitudes around it.
And I love that they all exist. And by my stance has always been the sort of the more the merrier and the border.
Diverse and eclectic and strange that we can make them the better it is, because then we have more and more recommendations out there.
And the challenge is to find, you know, the recommendation engine that best matches your own taste.
Absolutely. And to find yourself pushed in some ways as well by recommendations made in other genre institutions.
Yeah, that's a appropriate way of putting it. And, you know, I have something like the Shirley Jackson Awards where like, OK,
they are there enough on my wavelength that they recommend something that I haven't read.
I know I should cheque it out. And then similarly, you know, one of my favourite awards is the Good Reads Choice Awards.
You know, every year where they just have the massive public vote. And those books are so far out of my normal taste.
I mean, I really just don't like any of them at all.
But it's really, I think, handy and valuable and fun for me to go to use that to discover new genres.
So I love it when the kid reads Trisk comes out because that I go and I learn about now,
which are the historical romances that are incredibly popular in that community,
you know, which are that which are the comic books that are really popular in that community.
And it's a really it's a really nice way of discovering like mainstream's like Geist of various genres lately.
And when you when you think about what is important to people and what I mean you not your own reading challenges.
Thinking back to, you know, mystery and and Westerns and thorough for the longest time,
a lot of these genres have depended on what's popular, not only what is celebrated.
Right. Because there's kind of a disjunct there.
We know we all know that romance sells best. But we know that or not.
But and that reflects well, it reflects a demographic of the reading public, but it also reflects what people are concerned about.
And I think maybe we see that with the as you as you were saying earlier about the John Martin
exhibition and your accompanying collection and the the the move to dystopia and the rise of dystopia,
as you know, as a popular zeitgeist. I totally agree that, yes, nodding profusely, narrative future for those writers and speculators listening.
Stay with us now for writing prompts and exercises designed to encourage putting pen to paper or hands to keyboard,
as well as reflection on the writing process. This section is designed and presented by Lee Greenberg.
Jerry cheering refers to rubbish grades, Greek myths and suggestive mythology with the science of the time,
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.
Find a news story from today. Don't agonise too much about the choice and reimagine it as a myth.
For our purposes, one of the key elements of myth is that it gives reason to phenomena.
And another is that characters, rather than the events themselves, take centre stage.
The phenomena are personified. Your chosen news story may well be one of random seeming misfortune or disaster.
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.
For example, a raging wildfire may be the result of God's dissatisfaction or a petty argument.
A Record-Breaking football score might be the result of magic boots supplied by an angel as creators and readers order.
Suits says that some art chooses to deny and resist comforting order.
Do you think I should disrupt or don't want I asserted my.
She runs a council of his publishing adventures, are amusing and insightful,
Jurassic London introduce civil writers from around the world to new readers.
But as writers, we're all too aware of the corporate backbone of publishing and the struggles of independent publishers,
booksellers and distributors to find a foothold in the industry. This is your chance to imagine your ideal publishing company.
What would your publishing goals be, making money, democratising or decolonising the industry,
making it environmentally beneficial or making beautifully designed artefacts?
What stories would you publish and why? How would you make money?
Would you raise charitable funding? Would you interest enough book buyers to make the business profitable?
In your ideal world, would public funding sustain publishing? Can you imagine any future technology that would assist your publishing goals?
Jot down a business plan on a scrap of paper or a napkin and store it.
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.
That's a wrap on Episode five, many thanks to Jared Shern for joining us in the next episode.
E.J. Swift shares her negotiations with Form and Content, discusses climate fiction and nested narratives.