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.
Our guest for this fourth episode of Narrative Futures is Mahvish Murad, joining us to discuss editing speculative fiction,
the art of the short story and the narrative and aesthetic value of Tick-Tock.
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.
Mahvish Mirrored is an editor and voice artist from Karachi, Pakistan, who currently lives in Kuala Lumpur.
She is the editor for the Apex Book of World S.F. Vol. four and co-editor of the World Fantasy Award nominated short story collections,
The Jen Falls in Love and Other Stories and the Outcast Hours.
She writes about books regularly for Pakistan's leading English newspaper, Dawn and for dot com.
So you want a longtime podcast's around midnight in Karachi where you've interviewed the likes of Margaret Atwood,
Emily Sinjin, Mendo, Medea Carful and Sami Shah, who also appears on this podcast.
You also edit anthologies extensively and review frequently. So there's a few media forms that you work in.
Do you have a preference for writing? No, I have a preference for reading.
I write answer for I have a purpose in reading and I have a preference for stories and that that's my answer.
I'm going to stick to it. Absolutely. So when you're reading, do you have a favourite kind of form?
So I'm thinking about obviously the outcast hours and the Djinn falls in love and other stories and of course,
the Apex Book of World Asef Volume four that you edited.
What draws you to a short story? I'm going to answer this, but I'm not being facetious.
The thing that struck me most to a short story is if it's actually short and I think brevity is key to a great deal of short stories,
an end to the impact a short story makes. And this is something that I wanted very much to do with Jim.
And I think Jode knew it from the start because people would ask us what we were doing, promo work for that anthology.
What makes a good story? And I read what makes a good short story.
And I would always say if it's short, because I think overindulgent editors also let some writers just write too much.
But that can be said for novels, too. Yeah, I think that there's I think there's something really special about getting a short story to that perfect
intersection of being concise and and also kind of leaving you or or never leaving you rather me.
My favourite short stories are the ones that just never go away. I think so.
Shows reefers is something like that. Yeah. I'm really proud of Reep and.
I knew him socially and grazi much before he started writing fiction or I
started doing this and I knew when I was putting DJed together that I needed.
There was no way I could put this together without somebody from Karachi. And so it was the perfect person for it.
And he is really great about his fiction because he's not precious about editing.
I could flash out large chunks and say, you don't need this. You don't need this.
Don't get carried away. And he can handle it. And it just ends up with a fart data through Saffy's.
It's the tightness. It's almost the way we describe music, right. With the tightness of the short story and the like, the tightness of a band.
And that's kind of what what creates that quality in your editing work.
What are you looking for when you are thinking about taking on somebody or, you know,
you're reading something that's been published and you just kind of trying to draw out what is what is special about that text?
It depends on who it is. When you ask about what I'm looking for in a short story, if I'm thinking about commissioning somebody,
then to be perfectly honest, we don't have any sort of open goal for these anthologies for Djin or Outcaste.
We had a very long list of writers and Jardín.
I'm not afraid to ask people who, you know, short of being dead, are impossible.
We have no problems getting knows for an answer, but people were also amazing.
As you can see from the table of contents, we had all sorts of amazing people who said yes for both anthologies.
So ultimately, if I look for somebody that somebody from whom I would just want to read a short story,
not necessarily edit one and not of course, everyone wants or needs editing.
I guess we've been very lucky because all our writers have been very open to suggestions. But, you know, I'm not going to lie.
It was really tough writing to Marina Warner, Dave Marino and saying, look, you we need to take a second look at your opening.
That was not easy now, but I think it's the task of a good a good editor to go in and no matter the status, do a bit of fixing.
I can think of some writers who are doing very well and are very lauded,
who have kind of recent work makes me think, oh, I think your editors are just letting you do whatever.
Oh, absolutely. And so many I see there's so much in fixin's.
Well, and it comes back to lenth for me sometimes because there are books that I read that are good.
But at the end of it all, I want to hold that book up and to shake it.
So all the excess falls off.
And I feel like the editor has not done that because the writers, you know, published 20 books or won 500 awards or whatever it is.
But at some point you have people like let's not take names, but you have famous writers who are just playing famous writers to not end it.
Yes. So I think an editor needs to be a little more responsible to the story and less to the writer.
I think it's certainly during the writers service. And you'd be doing the story a disservice if he didn't try and kind of mine it from the rough.
But at the same time, you have to keep in mind that's one perspective. Right. If I can go back to some is read as an example.
If I remember correctly, he and I did five jobs. I mean, he did five draughts.
I just gave him opinions on five jobs. And then eventually he made a case for the fourth job that made more sense.
And we went back to it. Luckily, he wasn't precious about the fact that he did a whole extra job that wasn't used,
but it didn't mean that my opinion was 100 percent at the end.
Right. He made a good case for it. And we went with the fourth draught and it ended up being the best one.
So it is still a matter of perspective. At some point, I guess you have to.
The way to trust each other. I think a good story is a good story.
Mm hmm. And that's it. I completely agree. I think it's like when he uses the literary geto phrase.
Yeah. How do you feel about about that debate? I don't like the ghettoising of genre fiction.
Out to the lines, the ghettoising of people of colour or women and my least favourite D word, which is diversity.
I think we need to do that in order to judge. Good story.
I love the dynamic that Edward Liquid had and the fact that they would write about
each other and that clearly they had a deep admiration for each other's work.
And yet Atwood, who is a complete hero of mine as liquid, was Auntie Peggy, as I think of her, my head.
She always insists she is speculative because like you've just pointed out, she doesn't want to be ghettoised in that way.
And as much as I think it's silly, I kind of understand where she's coming from because speculative on genre fiction can be,
I guess, cliquish in certain ways. And once you get in there, we'll really take you back.
Well, they're not. It's strange to me. Why is that there? When did when did that happen to me?
Everything is metaphore, right? I mean, the greatest joys, as far as I'm concerned, are speculative fiction at some level or the other.
One of my favourite books of all time is Toni Morrison's Beloved.
You tell me that's not a zombie story. You tell me that's not a ghost story.
I completely agree. Yeah, and there's a sort of failure in in, I suppose, the in the academy, too,
to recognise the inherent literary ness that can be built into or be completely inherent to a zombie story or a ghost story or a story about djinn or,
you know, monsters coming from the sea or aliens landing in Nigeria.
Yeah, I think Margraf was trying to be practical in some way.
But I just tried to work within the system, I suppose, which doesn't make the system OK.
Absolutely. So thinking about another kind of Sean or ghettoised genre.
When we talk about dystopian fiction and I suppose the huge popularity of that.
And you said that you're a huge fan of dystopian fiction. What do you I mean, how do you how do you think about dystopia?
You know, what kind of tropes do you identify in it and what draws you to those?
So I have to say, my entire perspective has changed, given what 20-20 has been like for everyone all over the world.
And I realised that as much as I thought reading lots and lots of dystopian fiction,
starting from nineteen eighty four from what I was probably too young to have read it and onwards,
everything else that I read to know, I thought I was prepared for the apocalypse.
But what I didn't think about is that I'm not prepared for the actual apocalypse.
I prepared for what comes after the apocalypse isn't always one big crash, boom, bang and everything falling apart.
Sometimes it is a very slow, grinding halt of the machine.
And the stock isn't as extreme as you think it is. It's what we now call the new normal.
So it's been very strange for me to watch all of this happen because I do think that having
learnt everything I know about survival in a dystopia from fiction has to be reanalysed.
Yeah, that I love that idea of the slow, grinding halt of the machine.
The perfect example of that is H.G. Wells is the machine stops, which I kept suggesting.
Everyone I knew read when the quarantine set in the lockdown set in,
at least here in Malaysia, which might be a little earlier than other parts of the West.
But I think that to me is the classic slow, grinding halt. Oh, I'm sorry.
That's H.G. Wells. Why? I always think that's impulsive. Wednesday.
No, no. There's also, I suppose, the the argument about what kind of author is a literary author versus what kind of author of the genre.
Author because we don't think of the enforcer as a absolute as a speculative author.
And then, of course, Emily Sinjin Mandel had the same thing happen to her when she wrote Station 11.
She was like, oh, so if it's set in the future now, it's speculative. Yeah, well, you can't.
This is my Freudian slip right there. Right. Why do I say H.G. Wells?
I know it's not H.G. Wells, but my brain doesn't compute. It's not someone considered a science fiction writer who wrote The Machine Stops.
So there's a lot for how my brain's been socialised about all this. Yeah.
And it's a weird it's it's interesting to think about it as the kind of socialisation. Right.
Because we have to kind of work against it. It's a little bit like inherent misogyny or inherent racism's that you kind of then have a
little you have to fight back against because it's it's part of a larger power structure.
Absolutely. And I think I mentioned to you earlier in our e-mails that I grew up in Karachi.
She was born and raised there. And my university years were spent in Montreal.
University is real life. So let's leave those three years out of it.
But genuinely, when I entered this world of publishing,
there is yet so much that I do not understand because I wasn't socialised to sort of, you know, geared that way.
Jared and I read a very long column on Tawakol on a reread of Dragon Lungs,
and I had no clue until I was an adult that those stories were based on tabletop games.
I didn't know what Dungeons and Dragons was. I read those books because I found them in a bazaar in Karachi or, you know, moth eaten paperbacks.
And that's all I thought they were. I thought they were original fiction. So there's a lot of things that I'm still trying to figure out,
and sometimes I wonder if my the fact that my perspective is so skewed is a good thing or a bad thing.
I have not yet decided. I mean, I think it's entirely necessary kind of value judgements and good or bad.
Entirely aside, I think it's really, really useful.
And I think what you know, what Taus Head Patrick has said about the present being the golden age of science fiction,
because now for the first time, perspectives that are not those that would already know about a tabletop game or,
you know, just men writing, you know, space, fascism, you know, that that era is over and that we now have, you know,
people who are writing stories that are said in the future will have a speculative element or fantastical in some way.
But it's almost more about the characters and the worldbuilding is not put to the side.
But no. The key thing, because it's what people do in different circumstances, I think, which is what we're interested in.
Right? We are. And I, I can't agree with them fully because I don't think it's that I think it's starting.
But I think there's still I genuinely believe diversity is a ghetto and I don't know when we'll get out of that.
So I have huge problems with those judgements or bringing in the whole diversity angle.
I don't understand why they're doing it. But it's still.
Don't accept it quite so easily. For example, I had to actively choose a few years ago to say that I'm not going to talk about diversity.
To say that you cannot just ask me my opinion of something as a Pakistani woman because I have
opinions and other things that have nothing to do with the fact that I'm a Pakistani woman. And so I think it's complicated.
The whole diverse thinking thing is complicated. I'm really glad that publishing is opening up.
I do still think it's not open enough, of course, because what is enough read how to have a completely open, fair playground.
You can't when everybody is coming with different baggage or different lack of exposure or education or whatever it is, I'm summarising greatly here.
But yeah. So I think it's going to take a long time for us to get to that point. I think it's opening up.
I do think, interestingly, if you bring this back to dystopia.
There are perspectives that I read in their books that I read and I think, oh, this is Karachi in 1996, you know,
and then I'll read reviews where people talk about how there's this awful, terrible, dystopic vision in this book.
And I just laugh because the onus so much of that is on the reader.
And it's so much of a reader as baggage that they bring into every story.
So someone might think that this is the golden age of science fiction.
I'm not going to agree because I come from a completely different perspective, and I think this stuff just a lot more work to be done.
I think part of this problem, right,
is the idea that you can slap diversity on on a on a publisher's Web site and be done with it rather than actively engaging in those power,
know those power structures that, you know, that limit or that in some way exalts also size, alternative perspective.
So much so much of that exists.
And, you know, show at some level, I suppose all of us are meant to be grateful that we have the chance of representing,
you know, unfolds at a wider world view in this quest for diversity.
But at the same time, it's, you know, risk of being fetishising the exotic sites.
And that's that whole what it would say. You call it. It's Orientalism.
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, think if we're thinking about worldbuilding here and the idea of Orientalism,
I mean, what do you think the dos and don'ts, if any, of worldbuilding with that?
With our conversation in mind? I think this is too hard.
This is so hard to describe, to understand, to even have a.
One solid opinion on it. You know what I mean, because it's growing and changing so much.
I would never tell somebody who was someone in the West, a white person in the West.
I would never say to them, oh, you're not allowed to write a broad character.
Of course not. You know what I mean? Human experience is a completely shed.
Why would I not want you to have people of all sorts.
In your book. Well, that in my mind or anyone else's mind, is that line crossed.
And are you appropriating of leading to a certain audience? Where then are you crossing a line between representing a world that we live in?
Or sticking diversity as a little sticker on your Goodreads reviews.
You know what I mean? So when I like it, it's not I don't have an answer for you on this.
I don't think anyone does to some extent. I want to say it comes from the writers intent.
Like, you know, how much is this is the authenticity of this story or not.
But at the same time, it's. Sometimes the stories just not.
OK, good. So it doesn't work out either way.
Yeah, and I think, as you said earlier, there's also the readers baggage, right?
So when when we're reading particular texts in the West, you know, I'm speaking to you in Kuala Lumpur from Oxford.
But, you know, texts that I read here are very different to those that I read in Johannesburg growing up because those contexts are so different.
Have everyone have access to everything? I just don't know what kind of global platform that would be.
I mean, let's first started getting people to read more. Or just let's see.
Let's take it a step further back. Well, this is the thing people complain about,
about people not reading enough or I suppose those of us who read too much complain about those who don't read enough.
I mean, I don't know what reading enough entails or what that would be, what that would look like.
But I think, yeah, going further back is a question of literacy, of what kind of knowledge is kind of count as literacy.
Right. And what kind of culture we develop.
Kids who, again, we're told by privilege, overdog, by kids who have been taught to read or have access to things to read.
And even within that tiny, privileged lot, are we creating a culture of storytelling?
Mm hmm. Yeah. Or is it all Instagram and ticktock?
Well, this links us, I think, quite closely to the title of the podcast, which is Narrative Futures and thinking about what kind of kind of I mean,
the very short ness of the narratives on something like Tick Tock or Snapchat or Instagram, for example.
And also a curated narrative, these being very, very different ways of expressing oneself or communicating.
And I think, yeah, I think it's really interesting to to think about different ways that we construct narrative.
I mean, what are the things that you're seeing that you're most interested in or struck by?
I've actually mentioned four things that I'm afraid of.
It is literally I have a 12 year old daughter, so she's out there and she's always been a reader, which is great.
But she's at that point where electronics are more interesting. Her friends are getting smartphones.
They have Instagram girls, which I keep. That's completely illegal because you're underage.
But, you know, it's all happening. My fear is and I see this as an adult in myself with the constant use of my phone.
For example, the concentration spans of everyone are decreasing so much.
And I worry that will not result in better short stories.
It will result in absolute trash. All tick tock passing off as I don't know.
Creative expression or creative narratives. And I'm sure that there are people who are using things like the dog.
I'm not on to talk that old enough about it. Let me preface with that.
But I'm sure there are people saying valid things on tick tock.
But I think I fear that it would be a sort of a cancer where the good will get of burnt out by the bad.
Mm hmm. And then my fear is that that's what we end up with, is just a bunch of, like, little mini Tick-Tock dances.
And is that really going to be our what our representation is off of the next generation's creative art or narrative?
I really hope a big, really extreme. That right now seems to be like the worst case,
dystopic future that could be right now because everybody's locked in their homes that all they've got is the Internet and their phones.
Yeah. I think it's some I think the idea of kind of being locked in with our phones with which are portals essentially.
You know what? We're all we're all time travelling all the time.
Time and space shopping. And it's a great connexion, but it's so easy to make into a completely superficial collection as well.
Yeah. And then there's and then I suppose there's the presumption that we we think about
particular kinds of travel time and space travel is as permissible and good,
you know, and others is as less good. But then, well, it comes back to the author's intention.
Right.
Or the creator's intention in this case, as well as the as well as whoever is receiving it begins in the second to the narrow geology of Tick-Tock.
The two of us have gone out. I mean, I'm not even onto jokes.
I'm really basing this on the little idle.
And I'm hoping that someone would write in that state that I'm completely wrong and I would want to hear that I am.
But it's interesting what you say about Fawn's being portal's bucks on your article, Morsan.
Hobbies. I had a book out a couple of years ago called Exit West.
Yes. In the second chapter of my thesis. Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, the book that's you know, that it's about portals or doorways that suddenly pop up all over the world.
Yes. And these are not metaphorical is the physical door that you can walk through and you enter another space in the same time, but another space.
And so you have essentially refugees going from one space to the other and moving all around.
And then the portals get guarded because the ones that are entering first world countries, everybody wants to storm into.
But, you know, there are people with guns on the other side making sure you can't come in.
But the ones entering your poorer country is a wide open because no one wants to go there.
I mean, it ends up being quite literally of literally being taken as a doorway because that's what it is.
But to me, the first half of that book was essentially a portal fantasy, no different from Narnia or anything like that.
And I know Mawson and I know that he's a science fiction geek as a child he had been.
And that sort of stays in him. And I wish he pushed further with that in the second half of the book.
But I really enjoy the fact that we look at.
Refugees or people wanting to move to a better life as people who are trying to live out their fantasies.
Because what else is migration, if not a fantasy?
So I found that particularly interesting because I think forms do that for us as well.
They are little doorways. They are little portals. And through them we enter into the space.
And very often it's wish fulfilment when we walk through that portal.
Yeah, that's really, really beautiful. Very profound. I think I think thinking about most Mohammed's exit west and movement across space and time,
and I think the fact that Nadia and Sade's sort of city of origin is never named is really important to that,
because it's kind of this coming from nowhere to somewhere. But obviously, it's it's I mean, it's kind of characterised as Lahore or Islamabad.
Yeah. In my mind, it was Lahore because Muslims from Lahore in Lahore.
My father's from Lahore. I have family there. I know it well.
It's interesting that you mention the name of the city because I recently wrote an essay on Exar, the West.
Let's not go into for where? For it to be published in a book. But the person who was editing it wrote back and said, Well, you left.
You said it's the name the city. And some reviewers have thought that this was somewhere in Iraq or somewhere somewhere else.
And do you want to talk a little bit more about this?
And I wrote back to this editorial comment saying, who are these reviewers who don't know that Pakistan?
Because you're amazing to me. And so that's what I mean about the readers on us.
If you don't know anything about Pakistan,
you will assume that it is a country like Iraq that you might have heard more about in the news, for example.
Or you might think it's a country like Jordan which is flooded with refugees from Palestine.
You know what I mean? Or you might think it's Lebanon, but you don't think it's possible because you don't know enough about like that,
whereas somebody who knows anything about Mossad or Pakistan would immediately know that this is Lahore.
Yes. You never appeared to have left it nameless, of course, but it was yet again an example to be of the readers,
understand, and what the reader brings to what they're reading. Mm hmm. I mean, I think so.
I think some of the stories thinking about what gin's are. So the stories in the jinn falls in love.
You know, this idea that there are that there are some myths or.
Yes, some kind of folkloric myths that pervade kind of all cultures and appear in different ways.
But then, you know, it's it's the. Yes. The readers kind of context that that fills in the you know, that fills in the colour, I suppose.
I think that you've spoken previously.
I think to Atwood about about, you know, the role of folklore in in the narrative and how now how that plays out.
Yeah, we have. I mean, what else would you speak to Mark Lunsford about that?
Well, a lot of other things, I suppose. But the thing with Jeff was very simply was just logistically represented to me the other.
And that's not something that is lacking in any culture in the world.
There is always. The idea of the other someone who is not you and yet you is something uncanny.
It's hard to avoid regardless of whether it stems from Islamic folklore or not.
And I think that's what made the idea of, you know,
the real reason they wanted to put together the reason I pitched a gerontology to Jonah in the first place was because I said,
why on earth isn't there one? Because the story is I want to read, because there was so many that we grew up with.
It made sense to just have everyone from all over the world because it wasn't something that anybody.
I think even right as we all just had to think very hard about it.
Is that kind of a universal idea? Yeah, absolutely.
That is I think that's really interesting that that that sense of it being something universal.
And when we think about, you know, think about narrative and we think about knowledge in different cultures,
kind of use narrative in different ways and different places. And, you know, I'm South African.
So there's a lot of discussion around oral narrative and oral traditions and literatures.
And yet the chin manifests everywhere. I can think of South Africa's version of that, too.
God knows how we accidentally managed to ask people from all over the world.
Like, that's not possible. Know you think it was hard or something shocking.
Yeah. Good achievements. But it's. Yeah, exactly. But.
But but it's not. Yeah. I mean, did you have the same experience with the outcast.
I was absolutely like. I mean, you don't. Like I said, I make these long lists and I always joke with them saying short of people being dead.
We will just put them on our list. Because you know what? What's the worst that can happen? Someone will say no big deal.
We'll just you know, we'll keep talking. We works, as you can imagine, on John Malone and keep asking people.
But we ask writers, we want to read and we think we'd just write really interesting stories.
So even without cars, we put together that. And again, shocking that you end up with a list that other people would call diverse.
I won't use that word. And, you know, has as many women in it are women writers.
And so I always think, what if I can manage this without much of an effort?
Everybody else who says that they have to really try to put that together.
That throws me you know, it means there's something inherently wrong in how you're doing this or more importantly,
something inherently wrong with how you're reading. Because I think if you're reading only a certain bracket or, you know, kind of writer.
Yeah, demographic. There's a will demographic. That's the word. And then you was an editor of.
Are going to find it difficult to step outside the demographic and not see people don't make an effort.
Of course people do. There are plenty of anthologies out there that have wide ranging demographic of writers and for whom I have great respect.
But I do not believe that that is a very difficult thing to do.
Narrative features. 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.
Mahvish Meuron says that from an editor's point of view, brevity is key.
I'm going to keep this brief. Take what you're working on right now and summarise it first.
The story idea in a 200 word paragraph. Second, a one line elevator pitch.
If you're not working on anything now, choose something you've written recently.
After that planned access to the last book you read or film you watched, does this access tell you anything about your story?
Does it help clarify your intentions in any way, comparing your work in progress with the produced film or book?
Is it easier to find the synopsis or pitch in one or the other? Do you prefer books or films whose central point is easily identifiable?
Murad tells us that the djinn represents the figure of the other and connects it with an uncanny mirroring,
the gene is clearly a powerful psycho mythological Murchie throughout the world.
Tokoloshe is an leprechaun's and Jekyll's and Trickster's and started in every culture, boogie under every bed and in every jar in the corner.
For your next exercise. Describe your own personal gym.
What specific little monsters scared you as a child? Why do you think it was scaring you to keep you in line?
To warn of dangers, to offer a sense of the supernatural or the other?
To what purpose? Describe what they look like and how they communicate and behave.
What do they do? Are they malicious? It's a tricky psychological that is internal or social and external.
Can you imagine a story playing out with this character? If you can plot it up briefly.
Thanks to Mahvish for joining us on this episode of Narrative Futures.
Next week, we'll be hosting Mahvish as co-editor and collaborator Jared Suran to discuss indie publishing,
the coaches awards and literary institutions and the genres that defy them.