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.
Ken Loo joins us in this episode of Narrative Features to discuss alternative technologies,
realism vs. speculation and how narratives can produce erroneous national mythologies.
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 Futures Thinking at torch dot o x, dot 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.
Can lose the multiple Hugo Award winning author of SILC punk epic trilogy, The Dandelion Dynasty,
as well as two collections of short stories, the paper, The Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and other stories.
He has also won a nebula, a world fantasy awards prise, a locus prise and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
He is also widely praised for his translation of Surján. Lew's work can also works in programming and law.
Though he is an author first and one whose work is particularly well suited to screen adaptation.
His highly lauded short good hunting was adapted for the popular Netflix series Love, Death and Robots,
and the film's beautiful dreamer and real artists are also based on canned short fiction.
What you'll hear next is an extract from Ken Story Staying Behind,
which explores existential questions of life after artificial general intelligence or the singularity.
This is from staying behind like. After the singularity, most people chose to die.
The dead videos and collars left behind. As if we were the unfortunate souls who couldn't get to a life raft in time.
I cannot fathom the idea that we might choose the state. And so, year after year, relentlessly, the dead tried to steal our children.
I was born in year zero, the singularity, but the first then uploaded into a machine.
The pope denounced the digital atom. Girardi's celebrated.
Everyone else struggled to make sense of the new world.
Always wanted to live forever, said that Adam ever the founder of Everlasting and the first to go.
In the form of the recording, its message was broadcast across the Internet.
Now we get.
Well, Everlasting build its massive data centre and Stuhlbarg nations around the world scrambled to decide if what happened there was murder.
For every uploaded man, there was a lifeless body left behind the brain, a bloody hoping this after the destructive scanning procedure.
But what really happened to him, in essence, is for lack of a better word.
So. Was he now an artificial intelligence or was he still somehow human with silicon?
Graphing performing the functions of neuro?
Was it merely a hardware upgrade for consciousness or has he become a mere algorithm, clockwork imitation of free will?
It began with the old and the terminally ill. It was very expensive.
Then there's the price of admission, lowered hundreds now and the Millet's lined up.
Let's do it. That's it. When I was in high school, by then, the world was falling to pay out.
Half the country was depopulated. Commodity prices plunged.
The threat of war and actual war were everywhere. Conquests, reconquest and the slaughter.
Those who could afford it left on the next flight, Svalbard. Humanity was abandoning the world, destroying own.
Well, I reached out and helped that. No, she said.
They think they can cheat that. But they died the minute they decided to abandon the real world for assimilation.
So long as there's sin, there must be death. It is the measure by which five games mean.
She was a lapsed Catholic. Nonetheless, yearn for the certainty of the church and her theology always seemed to me a little.
The couple together, she believed that there was a right way to live and the right way to die.
That's lovely. Thank you. I mean, that gives us a perfect sort of jumping off point to talk about the ideas in this podcast and also in your own work,
thinking about narratives of the future, sort of narratives that we tell ourselves that might change this age.
And the idea of the singularity and, you know, the the Silicon Valley quest to upload and sort of transcend the fallibility of the of the human body.
What do you think about the ethics of that? You know, I think one of the most fascinating things I've observed over my career in technology is
this notion that the singularity it seems to be always about 30 years in the future.
It was that way back in the 60s and the 70s, 80s, the 90s.
And now the 20, 20 turns and 20, 21.
It always seems to be just about 30 years away. So my sense is that it's it's less a technological thing, more of an ideological thing.
The very idea of. A machine intelligence being objective and therefore able to solve the problems,
we cannot solve the kind of literally deus ex machina that will save us.
I think it's an ideologically driven notion and it's a it's a displaced form of religious fervour.
I don't think it's actually particularly interesting. As a matter of technology, it's much more interesting.
It's a way of basically abandoning our responsibilities to solve our own problems and to think that machines will somehow do it for us.
It's a kind of avoidance. You know, it's trying to avoid the real issue.
Right. Right. Displacing it and saying that a machine will come and save it.
It's no different than the idea. Know many people have a next generation will solve the problems we have.
You know, their hope, their future. Well, unfortunately, I think that's always going to be the case.
Saying that just means that we're we're not taking up our own responsibility.
It's all very problems that we already know about and that we shouldn't be working.
Absolutely. Yeah, I find that that narrative. You know, the youth of the future.
And we kind of create these these future selves, slave Balts, that can resolve the harm that we've done,
then all of the work that things like the climate strikes or a school strike for climate will will sort of coalesce into a utopian future.
And it's very much feels like, as you say, a replacement for religion.
It's called for atheists.
And you mix these ideas really beautifully with sort of these ideas about tech, with the emotional consequences, really, basically.
And another story of yours, cool thoughts and prayers.
And you kind of you vary across your short fiction in kind of what sort of futures you're imagining or you think of possible.
And I really like that kind of playing with multiple potentials that you do.
And what draws you to one particular kind of concern over another?
How do you kind of intermingle all of these technological ideas with, you know, the richness of the myth that also infuses so much of your work?
So this is this is my theory about futurism and technology oriented sci fi in general.
I think oftentimes sci fi is understood as some sort of future prediction, futurism.
Either it's constructing possible futures or it's about imagining what the future should be, something like that.
And often when when folks who aren't writing sci fi, especially when they're trying to make a case for why sci fi,
it's relevant or mainstream, quote unquote, readers, the the the the the approach they take.
That's to argue that sci fi invents the future. You know, they they'd bring up examples like, you know, in 2001, A Space Odyssey.
You see people using tablet. You see that. I mean, sci fi predicts the future.
Yeah. Magic happened long before they were they were really there.
And my response to that is that's a profound misunderstanding point of sci fi and the value of sci fi.
Number one, those kind of predictions are more relevant than useless.
There have been many so-called stories about people being inspired by salivating then things.
None of them have turned out to be true. And even if there were some level of inspiration,
it's it's the it's no more than people getting inspired by the ancient myth, people flying to an aeroplane.
You know, I don't think sci fi is really ultimately about the future at all.
It's really only about the present, as all storytelling tends to be.
You know, when we tell stories about historical historical episodes, we're not really interested in history either.
We're only interested in ourselves.
Stories about the past are really stories about the present and stories of the future are really old stories about the present.
I think of sci fi as a kind of particular technique of representing the present.
So-called realism is one way. It's like an oil painting.
Sci fi is more like abstract art. It's ultimately about the seeing the world around us.
It's a way of it's a filter, right.
It highlights certain things in the present but are otherwise hard to see.
If you use the real lens and it brushes over other aspects of reality that are not relevant for the people or sorry that you're trying to tell.
So all sci fi, whether you imagining, you know, 50 years in the future, a thousand years in the future, or some other planet or some other species.
These are actually ultimately stories about humanity and about the present.
They're about the anxiety, the the challenges, the hopes and even the lies that the present tells itself.
That's what sci fi actually is about. It just tries to do it in a way that emphasises certain things and not others.
It tries to extrapolate from current trends into an imagined future.
But if you actually study the history of technology and history of how society falls,
extrapolation, it's probably the worst way to do future prediction.
It almost never works that way. Nothing increases in this linear exponential, whatever manner.
Something all strange, unexpected always happens. That's what keeps were unpredictable.
Interesting. So for me, when I'm doing sci fi in different stories,
what I'm really trying to do is to explore different aspects of the present that I find worrisome, troubling or hopeful and extrapolating them out.
I try to tell stories about them, but ultimately these are storytellers.
At the moment we're living through. They're not about some kind of possible future, really.
They're about seeing the present more clearly in the same way that when you apply a certain kind of filter to a photograph,
you can see features you don't otherwise see. That's what. I love the idea of sci fi being abstract art.
I have a Picasso postcard on my on my desk. Pinboard. And I'm thinking about how no sci fi comes out of the period after modernism,
sort of what we think of as traditional sci fi comes out of the period after modernism.
It's kind of part of some kind of surrealist postmodern art period where you're trying to evoke something of the present.
I mean, so much sci fi is is embrace it in a postmodern theory, as someone like Frederick Jemison has made very clear.
And I love I love the ideas about, you know, so-called realism,
because there is the presumption that realist texts present the world that is real and that sci fi is not mainstream.
So the reason that it doesn't. And yet, as you say, sci fi is about the present.
Right. I mean, realism is a very interesting technique.
You know, you can go back and look at the way literature was written in the time of Milton, for example.
Right. You know, it's Paradise Lost, a real piece of work.
In some ways it is. But the very notion of realism had to be constructed.
You know, you looked at the earliest novels like Clarissa and compare them to what we think of spill is now.
You can see distinct shifts. You know, the very notion that a realistic character is a character with a great deal of
interior depth that you get to know by reading is a fairly modern invention.
You know, Clarissa was not like that at all. That was considered to build its narrative at its height.
So even the way that we think of something that's being real or characters being real
and the way we value certain literary representations of reality has changed over time.
Like you were saying, you know, sci fi, I thought that because of it,
the sci fi writer who I think it's closest to Picasso would be somebody like Philip K. Dick.
Yes, he really had that kind of vision of the world.
And I think that's what he was trying to write about, is his robots and androids were not really robots and enjoyed.
So they were better for it, for the incredible alienation and spiritual emptiness of modernity.
And that's what, you know. Do Androids dream of electric? Cheap was really about. It's not about Android.
The fact that we all feel like other people around us are somehow not real, that they're not people at all.
Yeah. And likewise, Vonnegut. Right. Except, you know, sometimes he's not described as a sci fi writer for whatever reason.
Yeah. And there's so many writers who aren't. And I think I mean, you yourself are kind of on the cusp.
Right. Because you you you shift between these genres that you have these have these boundaries that don't make sense to the person who's writing.
I saw you at a convention in Cape Town in twenty seventeen when I was still living there.
You were on a panel, I think titled Speculative Fiction. Yes.
Yeah. And you were you were the Hannant about not being labelled that way.
And it really it's really stuck with me into my thesis work.
And I was wondering how you felt about that kind of those kind of generic distinctions.
You know, I was never a big fan of genre distinction.
I think I've always said that when I choose to read, I don't particularly care about which section of the bookstore.
You know, books from NY.
But I don't set out with the idea that I'm going to write a hard sci fi story, so I'm going to follow the conventions of hearts.
I thought because I to be to be frank, I don't really think those conventions are particularly stable and I don't think they need to be expected.
If we want we if we really wanted to respect our conventions originally, we'd still be writing golden age sci fi.
Now, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. I do understand that some readers find these distinctions very valuable because they
help guide them to the type of stories they like and they help make sense of things.
For example, you know, if if I say I'm looking at something, I'm so shocked by ISIL, a real is there to understand that's a metaphor.
But in a sci fi story, you might think that literally means the eyes actually fell out.
Your robot or something like that.
So I understand that no genre labels do have some meaning in the sense that it sets your expectations of the reader.
It helps to interpret the work. But I think the benefits are very limited and the harm is far greater.
The issue is I'm drawn to narratives in which some aspects of reality that we normally think of as metaphorical is represented as literally true.
Those are the kind of stories I like to tell. So, you know, metaphorically, we may think that someone's love brings the world to life.
That's a metaphor. But I would tell a story in which a mother's love would make these paper animals come to life.
Literally, they they actually move around and jump around and talk.
That's, you know, and an example of the. Kinds of federalising metaphore that I do when I do things like that.
If if the metaphore that's being made literally true, it's not explained.
People usually call that fantasy. If there is some sort of plausible or pseudo plausible explanation for why that happens.
People call that sci fi. I don't particularly care either way.
I happen to be very interesting in technology. Having worked with the technologist for some years.
So I enjoy using the language of technology as part of the metaphore.
So that's why even though a lot of my stories are considered sci fi as a result, I don't really write them with that.
And that's not what I care about.
As I mentioned earlier, I want to just look at reality through a different filter, trying to reveal aspects that are otherwise not easily seen.
And it just happens to be the case that technology is such an important part of our modern world.
It's hard to not draw its implications out and to extrapolate from that and to use it as the foundation of liberalising metaphors in my stories.
And so that's why a lot of my short fiction tends to be sci fi in the traditional sense, just like the story I was reading from.
Yeah, but then you've got the Dandelion Dynasty trilogy, which kind of sits on the other end of those kinds of concerns.
But I think in the same way uses metaphor all to talk about kind of present day concerns.
Right. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the the Denzil's dynasty is a set.
They're called epic fantasy books.
And I call them silk punk, mainly because they are a fantasy, of course, because they take place in that second third world.
That's not our world. And there are no magical creatures and gods who are literally V0 and they actually interact with the characters.
But on the other hand, it's really not a fantasy book in the sense of Tolkien, for example, there.
There is some magic, but very little of it. The primary speculative element is the technology in the secondary world.
It's a world that is just discovering electricity, if you will.
And because the technology tradition of the world is based on materials and engineering practises, practises prevalent in classical East Asia,
in our world, there is a very distinct sense in which the technology evolution that's going down with different brout.
So I call it cell phones because, you know, it's sort of an extrapolation of East Asian engineering principles into a fantastical world.
But in some ways, you can sort of view the entire till your books as a kind of celebration of engineering.
As equally important, it's magic. The great heroes in my epic fantasy novels are not wizards, but engineers.
And by focussing so much on their language of technology. I ended up really talking about the world that we're living in.
You know, there their early modern people and we're sort of post-modern.
But in some ways, our concerns are very similar. We have the same kinds of worries about what does it mean to be a nation?
What does it mean to have a shared biology?
What does it mean when that story turns out to be not the story of everyone who gets to tell the story of the founding of the nation?
Who gets excluded from it? You know, these are the struggles that the United States is going through right now.
And I think around the world, other countries are going through the same thing, a reckoning with our history.
You know, when you have a foundational mythology that you thought everyone shared in America and then you realise that that's actually not true.
Some of us have known that to be not true for a long time.
Others are just discovering yet. But at least here, here's a moment.
While we're all trying to come to terms with it and trying to figure out how do we.
Take the old story, revitalise it, cast away pieces that are no longer fit and turn it into a more inclusive, more hopeful, a better story.
But all of us can believe it. I mean, that's ultimately what these revolutions are about.
It turns out that no, my. My epic fantasy books were written over a period of a decade.
And so some of them were started. The earliest books were started before at the present moment, of course.
But it turns out that many of the concerns in these books are very much the concerns about the present.
So as I was writing them, I was obviously not thinking about some faraway place that has nothing to do with this.
I was very much thinking about the same problems plaguing us.
Human nature is in some ways universal, and the problems of fantastical peoples, I imagine,
are not particularly different from the problems that we have to go through in our own lives.
And that, in some ways is both what makes literature interesting and what makes it hard.
Yeah, I love the idea about your sort of your fascination with the engineering characters
and how they are kind of contributing to the building of a sort of a new world.
And then the link that that has obviously to America's conception of itself,
as well as both conception by the colonial conquistadors as the new world and then and
then the kind of the sense of as the people as some white invaders moved across America,
they became and or America became this kind of frontier space constantly.
And we have a kind of present concerns about the Internet as being a fairly kind of Wild West space.
And it's unregulated and and nationalists. That's right.
I mean, you're you're you're talking about this idea that we're always reconceiving and retelling the story in
which we are the builders were the makers and the stories denying our roads as agents of destruction.
You know, as you point out, the settlement colonisation of the United States, it's a process of destruction.
Yes. But it's often told in a way that suggests that it's merely a story about construction.
The rise of Silicon Valley is the same way. I mean, you know, I talk about foundational mythologies.
A lot of mythologies are very important, far more important than people give them credit for, you know.
So, for example, right.
Every year, the smartest people, the smartest college grads in the states go where Silicon Valley and people when you try to ask people,
you know, why do they think this is? The general answer is always up because that's where the money is.
That's actually not the best answer. It's often not actually helpful to think of things that way.
And I'll say, why? Because having worked in the tech industry myself, I have some sense of this.
The smart people that the Valley companies are recruiting, ah ah, of course smart that they can make money in any number of ways.
And there are lots of ways to make money that has nothing to do with Silicon Valley.
Wall Street would be a much better way to make money if they that's what they wanted and cared about.
But nonetheless, many people decide to go into Silicon Valley, not Wall Street,
mainly because they are they go there because they actually believe in ideals and
ideals are that this is a world in which if you know how to code an even better,
if you know how to use the shattering art, you can make a dent in the universe.
You can really change the world. Technology is a magnificent force multiplier and software is our, I think, poetry.
So if you really wanted to change the world and make a difference.
Technology is where you go, right? This is the same narrative that I was talking about.
It's like if you're a person of great ambition and you belong to the Wild West, quote unquote, to build things.
So if you're a person of great ambition and great ideals and lots of hope and have lots of hope,
then you go to Silicon Valley because you can build things. You can you can you can create a new world.
You know, what's what's not said is the amount of destruction you're going through and you're you're going to have it in a week.
And the fact that ultimately when you go work in Silicon Valley, what you're really doing is you end up being co-opted and slowly assimilated into
that culture in which the only problems you're interested in solving our problems.
Technology can solve and they become the problems of a particular class or demographic or group of people at the time and place.
And your vision becomes narrowed down. Those are the only problems that you see and you think are worth solving.
And furthermore, you end up in a position where you convince yourself that everything you do is for the ultimate good of everyone.
So this is why, you know, you can. Silicon Valley companies convince the world's smartest people to go work for these companies in order to,
quote, unquote, change the world and have them basically come up with ways to sell you more ads.
And they still think that they're changing the world for the better. This is, you know, the great con that's being pulled right in front of our eyes.
And then that happens because the mythology of Silicon Valley is what technology do is so powerful.
The stories we tell ourselves about what we're doing and who we are.
They are far more important than we give credit for.
And I want to talk a little bit about time in your work.
You've spoken about this before, but I think it's really fascinating.
And I think anyone listening to this will we'll find your ideas really interesting.
I think the presumption that time is is linear is something that your work and I feel throws out
and you're far more interested in kind of a non-linearity of time in the way that you you know,
you weave myths and technology and human relationships together, I think is really indicative of that.
Thank you. So one of the things that fascinates me is the idea of time being in some ways it's a consequence of the way our consciousness works.
I mean, this is a well known phenomena. Our nerves actually are not purely fast conductors of signals.
You know, when you stab your foot or something actually takes a bit of time for that signal to go all the way from your toe into your brain.
So essentially, when you're walking around, the sensations that you're feeling from the bottom of your feet is, you know, almost a second.
It takes almost that long to get all the way up to your brain. So. The fact is,
you don't feel even though it is objectively true that your brain is trying to integrate signals coming from different parts of your
body and therefore there is a delay between parts of your body that are far compared to parts of the body that are close to your brain.
You don't experience that delay, really. You don't. You don't experience that some.
You experience this integrated, unified body and everything happens to you spontaneously.
And that's the result of essentially of any illusion that your brain constructs.
You're bringing us to take all these disparate signals coming at you from different moments of time and integrate into one coherent whole.
So in some ways, you're always probably already. Just you're integrating a swath of time into a single point simultaneously.
Your when when ever you remember something from the past, you know,
the way it works is you're actually living that moment in your mind, your time travelling again and that kind of time travelling.
It's actually very important in terms of our cognitive abilities, the way we anticipate and those stories about what other people's intentions are,
how they motivate themselves, what they're trying to do, how we should respond.
We're always telling these stories and living our past in the process, trying to understand our own thinking and other people's intentions.
The way we experience time isn't, you know, some sort of objective reality.
It's a thing that we have to construct. So I find that very fascinating.
And so a lot of my stories try to play with that idea of finding Connexions and integrating different moments of time into one.
In some ways, I feel like we're always living with not just one moment, but in all of history.
You know, when you're walking through the streets of London or visiting Cairo or going through taking a trip to Japan or something,
you're always living through thousands of years of history all around you.
It's sort of like when you're standing out there under the night stars, you look around and you see all these points of light.
But. Some of these points of light are hundreds of millions of light years away.
Some of them are just dozens of light years away.
And so the light from different moments of time, different moments of the universe are reaching you all at the same time.
Your faith in the entire history of the universe, literally in the same way that when you're walking through the streets of your hometown,
you're walking through layers of ghosts and all the history of those who paint for the people who were slaughtered,
the people who did the slaughtering, all the people who whose blood flows through your veins and no other victims as well.
You know, all all of history is always with you at all times.
And to me, you know, that's that's just a very important thing to keep in mind when when we tell stories,
we're never telling stories in a vacuum for times or in the context of all the stories that came forward
and all the stories that gave that story any time isn't something that just goes out towards the future.
You always have to do back and integrate the past and revitalise it and bring the past forward with you.
That's the only way it's such a beautiful idea that you're kind of you're walking through ghosts
and yet a very heavy and quite difficult thing to to hold onto and to work with and to live with.
And I wonder how you how you reconcile it or how you think other people reconcile kind of having those multiple histories with them or not.
I suppose, you know, when I think about history in the past, I was just thinking that it's all in the past.
Everything has happened in order to have to just have me be born.
You know, this kind of self-centred view is, I think, very much the default state of modernity.
But after I had hit it, really the centre things, I suddenly no longer saw the world that way.
I saw the world. It's you know, I'm just another link in this long, unbroken change from the past into the future.
And I have a role to play, and that is to solve many of the problems as I can and try to make the world a little bit better than when I found it.
If I can do that, I can really honestly say I did that, then that's not bad.
And that's that's not easy to accomplish. But but that's a worthy goal to strive for.
I'm not you know, the end of history are not all that important.
I'm really just one link in a very long chain about that that matters and that the centring of
the self gave me a much better sense of how important everything else in the path really was.
And I think in some ways that's what we're going through now as a nation trying to do centre ourselves from.
From the idea that we're big, we're special. We're not. We're connected to the past.
The sins of the past are our sins. And we have to come to terms with it and recognise how to do better.
Here is the problem. Perhaps second, capitalism. This is so fascinating.
I just cognisant of the time. I do want to quickly pick your brain about form because you write your shorts and your short stories and then.
And then these ethics really quiet and the quiet, very different forms and styles.
And I'm one of the things that's so instinctive about your short story writing is how much plot you can squeeze into a short story.
And yeah, I was wondering if you had a if you felt a particular way about how you approach
writing short stories as opposed to the ethics and how you think about time in those.
Well, I do approach them very differently.
I will say that, you know, the pleasures that they bring to me as a writer are very different.
You know, I worked on epic fantasy series Dental Dynarski for 10 years.
The Graves of Things was written back in 2010 and now it's 20/20.
And I just finished the last book out next year, hopefully.
Yes. Although with publishing. Who knows? Of course it is down.
But I'm hoping that it will still happen next year. But I have to live with these characters for, you know, a decade, which is a very long time.
And I have to really delve into the world a lot. And so what you keep on returning to the same world over over again.
You end up knowing it so well. I mean, somebody.
I feel like I know the world dhara, which is epic fantasy, better than I know the real world, which is a frightening thing.
And also the series is about the same age as my older daughter.
So, you know, in some ways it's like my third child grew up right alongside.
And I think it's and it's you know, I put a lot of myself until I did.
And Fields, you feel kind of relationship to this.
This thing that God has for love with you all this time, you feel about it very differently and plot wise.
You know, it's like trying to tell the story.
You really get to know your characters in a very deep, intimate way that I think I don't necessarily do with my short story or of fiction.
They're more like snapshots of where I was as a writer at that moment.
You know, when I look back on the short time, both what I'm seeing really is a snapshot of my concerns and struggles and interests in that moment.
And because they're snapshots, they can afford to be a little bit less detail in the way the world is perceived.
You know, when I'm telling the short story, I don't need to match the entire society, entire world.
I just need to see a corner of it clearly to tell the story.
And so I can leave all the rest of it in the dark. So, you know, it's in this huge canvas.
I'm really just using a tiny corner of it. So I paint bevelled or corner in great detail.
But I don't need to fill in the rest of the picture at all with epic fantasy.
It's very different. I really have to get the whole thing in there.
Look at the whole picture. And then so it's a different kind of mindset and different kind of mental exercise, writing short fiction.
I can keep the entire story in my head and work with it and contemplate it in its entirety with an epic fantasy.
That's never possible. I can only focus on a little piece of it at a time.
And when I zoom out, I lose the details. I cannot hold the whole thing in my head.
And so it's a very different composition process. Mm hmm. Yeah.
That's really interesting that so much of it is about worldbuilding.
And you you said elsewhere that you kind of you you play with some of the engineering ideas that you write about.
I thought that was a really fascinating way into some of the some of the concepts.
So the silken silk demotic force.
Yeah. That even said you've just built. And then.
Yeah. Thinking, you know, thinking about the silk punk elements of good hunting, which is is one of your most famous and well-loved stories.
I tend to learn things by doing that.
I can't really just read about them or read a summary of it and things that I understand.
I mean, you know, when I was writing about a I, for example,
I had to actually built my own your own networks and feed it data, see what it does to get an intuition for how it works.
Right. I can write about it when I was writing these epic fantasy novels,
because they make use of electoral statics, which is really not a technology route that we've taken.
I ended up having to build some of these machines that I described in my books, prototypes and models so I can understand how they function.
And then basically what they do and how it feels to work with this kind of technology.
It just it to me, you know, when you're when you're writing about stuff like this,
it's just to me it's much more fun and much more just gives a layer, a level of depth that you can't achieve otherwise.
Let's actually do it and participate in the thing that you're talking about.
It gives you a sense of understand. Can't get otherwise. 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.
In this interview, Ken Lou reminds us that realism is not a default.
It's a series of choices. This links back to points other writers in the series have made about realism and the place of magic in everyday life.
To test this assertion, it's become conscious about the decisions involved and trying for neutral realism in a realistic way.
Briefly, describe yourself pouring some water to drink, sticking to the facts as far as possible.
You might like to pause here, write the description, then come back.
Once you've written your description, think of where you've seen a set. Is it in a kitchen, an office, a restaurant in the countryside?
First, think of the surroundings you chose not to describe.
Consider how your water source, a tap bottle will and your container a glass cup, your hand may be different from five other people's.
Did you follow the instruction and write about yourself? Or someone else.
What did you actually, Bill, and write a character? What narrative perspective did you choose?
First, that person, third person. What does the environment and narrative, voice and surroundings say about the protagonist?
Did you choose details that would illuminate their character? How much detail did you put in?
Was the scene deliberately overwritten or badly written? What does this say about your view of realism?
Even trying to be as neutral and factual as possible. You have carefully curated your description.
Lewis drawn to stories in which metaphors are presented as true for this exercise.
Literary lines are a metaphor. Choose a favourite of striking metaphor.
My legs were jelly. My head nearly exploded. There's an elephant in the room.
All right, a very brief scene in which this is literally true. Often the simple exercise can unlock a lot more story.
We crack open a door to a whole new world where anything is possible. That's the prompt, loosen your imagination.
Can you imagine a few more scenes in this story?
That concludes this penultimate episode of Narrative Futures, thanks to Ken Lu for joining us on the podcast.
The final episode to be released next week features Todd Thompson, author of the Wormwood Trilogy.
Joining us to discuss the metaphor of alien invasion, psycho analysis and the NOMO Awards for speculative fiction by African authors.
Narrative features.