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

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

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

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

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

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Ken Loo joins us in this episode of Narrative Features to discuss alternative technologies,

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realism vs. speculation and how narratives can produce erroneous national mythologies.

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This podcast is interactive, following the interview,

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

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We invite you to share your response to these with us via email at Futures Thinking at torch dot o x, dot ac dot UK.

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

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

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

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Can lose the multiple Hugo Award winning author of SILC punk epic trilogy, The Dandelion Dynasty,

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as well as two collections of short stories, the paper, The Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and other stories.

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He has also won a nebula, a world fantasy awards prise, a locus prise and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

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He is also widely praised for his translation of Surján. Lew's work can also works in programming and law.

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Though he is an author first and one whose work is particularly well suited to screen adaptation.

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His highly lauded short good hunting was adapted for the popular Netflix series Love, Death and Robots,

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and the film's beautiful dreamer and real artists are also based on canned short fiction.

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What you'll hear next is an extract from Ken Story Staying Behind,

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which explores existential questions of life after artificial general intelligence or the singularity.

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This is from staying behind like. After the singularity, most people chose to die.

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The dead videos and collars left behind. As if we were the unfortunate souls who couldn't get to a life raft in time.

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I cannot fathom the idea that we might choose the state. And so, year after year, relentlessly, the dead tried to steal our children.

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I was born in year zero, the singularity, but the first then uploaded into a machine.

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The pope denounced the digital atom. Girardi's celebrated.

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Everyone else struggled to make sense of the new world.

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Always wanted to live forever, said that Adam ever the founder of Everlasting and the first to go.

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In the form of the recording, its message was broadcast across the Internet.

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Now we get.

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Well, Everlasting build its massive data centre and Stuhlbarg nations around the world scrambled to decide if what happened there was murder.

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For every uploaded man, there was a lifeless body left behind the brain, a bloody hoping this after the destructive scanning procedure.

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But what really happened to him, in essence, is for lack of a better word.

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So. Was he now an artificial intelligence or was he still somehow human with silicon?

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Graphing performing the functions of neuro?

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Was it merely a hardware upgrade for consciousness or has he become a mere algorithm, clockwork imitation of free will?

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It began with the old and the terminally ill. It was very expensive.

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Then there's the price of admission, lowered hundreds now and the Millet's lined up.

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Let's do it. That's it. When I was in high school, by then, the world was falling to pay out.

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Half the country was depopulated. Commodity prices plunged.

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The threat of war and actual war were everywhere. Conquests, reconquest and the slaughter.

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Those who could afford it left on the next flight, Svalbard. Humanity was abandoning the world, destroying own.

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Well, I reached out and helped that. No, she said.

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They think they can cheat that. But they died the minute they decided to abandon the real world for assimilation.

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So long as there's sin, there must be death. It is the measure by which five games mean.

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She was a lapsed Catholic. Nonetheless, yearn for the certainty of the church and her theology always seemed to me a little.

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The couple together, she believed that there was a right way to live and the right way to die.

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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,

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thinking about narratives of the future, sort of narratives that we tell ourselves that might change this age.

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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.

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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

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this notion that the singularity it seems to be always about 30 years in the future.

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It was that way back in the 60s and the 70s, 80s, the 90s.

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And now the 20, 20 turns and 20, 21.

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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.

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The very idea of. A machine intelligence being objective and therefore able to solve the problems,

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we cannot solve the kind of literally deus ex machina that will save us.

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I think it's an ideologically driven notion and it's a it's a displaced form of religious fervour.

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I don't think it's actually particularly interesting. As a matter of technology, it's much more interesting.

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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.

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It's a kind of avoidance. You know, it's trying to avoid the real issue.

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Right. Right. Displacing it and saying that a machine will come and save it.

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It's no different than the idea. Know many people have a next generation will solve the problems we have.

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You know, their hope, their future. Well, unfortunately, I think that's always going to be the case.

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Saying that just means that we're we're not taking up our own responsibility.

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It's all very problems that we already know about and that we shouldn't be working.

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Absolutely. Yeah, I find that that narrative. You know, the youth of the future.

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And we kind of create these these future selves, slave Balts, that can resolve the harm that we've done,

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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.

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And it's very much feels like, as you say, a replacement for religion.

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It's called for atheists.

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And you mix these ideas really beautifully with sort of these ideas about tech, with the emotional consequences, really, basically.

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And another story of yours, cool thoughts and prayers.

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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.

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And I really like that kind of playing with multiple potentials that you do.

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And what draws you to one particular kind of concern over another?

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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?

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So this is this is my theory about futurism and technology oriented sci fi in general.

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I think oftentimes sci fi is understood as some sort of future prediction, futurism.

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Either it's constructing possible futures or it's about imagining what the future should be, something like that.

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And often when when folks who aren't writing sci fi, especially when they're trying to make a case for why sci fi,

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it's relevant or mainstream, quote unquote, readers, the the the the the approach they take.

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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.

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You see people using tablet. You see that. I mean, sci fi predicts the future.

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Yeah. Magic happened long before they were they were really there.

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And my response to that is that's a profound misunderstanding point of sci fi and the value of sci fi.

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Number one, those kind of predictions are more relevant than useless.

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There have been many so-called stories about people being inspired by salivating then things.

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None of them have turned out to be true. And even if there were some level of inspiration,

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it's it's the it's no more than people getting inspired by the ancient myth, people flying to an aeroplane.

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You know, I don't think sci fi is really ultimately about the future at all.

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It's really only about the present, as all storytelling tends to be.

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You know, when we tell stories about historical historical episodes, we're not really interested in history either.

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We're only interested in ourselves.

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Stories about the past are really stories about the present and stories of the future are really old stories about the present.

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I think of sci fi as a kind of particular technique of representing the present.

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So-called realism is one way. It's like an oil painting.

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Sci fi is more like abstract art. It's ultimately about the seeing the world around us.

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It's a way of it's a filter, right.

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It highlights certain things in the present but are otherwise hard to see.

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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.

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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.

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These are actually ultimately stories about humanity and about the present.

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They're about the anxiety, the the challenges, the hopes and even the lies that the present tells itself.

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That's what sci fi actually is about. It just tries to do it in a way that emphasises certain things and not others.

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It tries to extrapolate from current trends into an imagined future.

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But if you actually study the history of technology and history of how society falls,

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extrapolation, it's probably the worst way to do future prediction.

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It almost never works that way. Nothing increases in this linear exponential, whatever manner.

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Something all strange, unexpected always happens. That's what keeps were unpredictable.

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Interesting. So for me, when I'm doing sci fi in different stories,

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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.

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I try to tell stories about them, but ultimately these are storytellers.

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At the moment we're living through. They're not about some kind of possible future, really.

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They're about seeing the present more clearly in the same way that when you apply a certain kind of filter to a photograph,

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you can see features you don't otherwise see. That's what. I love the idea of sci fi being abstract art.

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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,

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sort of what we think of as traditional sci fi comes out of the period after modernism.

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It's kind of part of some kind of surrealist postmodern art period where you're trying to evoke something of the present.

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I mean, so much sci fi is is embrace it in a postmodern theory, as someone like Frederick Jemison has made very clear.

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And I love I love the ideas about, you know, so-called realism,

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because there is the presumption that realist texts present the world that is real and that sci fi is not mainstream.

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So the reason that it doesn't. And yet, as you say, sci fi is about the present.

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Right. I mean, realism is a very interesting technique.

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You know, you can go back and look at the way literature was written in the time of Milton, for example.

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Right. You know, it's Paradise Lost, a real piece of work.

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In some ways it is. But the very notion of realism had to be constructed.

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You know, you looked at the earliest novels like Clarissa and compare them to what we think of spill is now.

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You can see distinct shifts. You know, the very notion that a realistic character is a character with a great deal of

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interior depth that you get to know by reading is a fairly modern invention.

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You know, Clarissa was not like that at all. That was considered to build its narrative at its height.

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So even the way that we think of something that's being real or characters being real

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and the way we value certain literary representations of reality has changed over time.

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Like you were saying, you know, sci fi, I thought that because of it,

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the sci fi writer who I think it's closest to Picasso would be somebody like Philip K. Dick.

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Yes, he really had that kind of vision of the world.

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And I think that's what he was trying to write about, is his robots and androids were not really robots and enjoyed.

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So they were better for it, for the incredible alienation and spiritual emptiness of modernity.

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And that's what, you know. Do Androids dream of electric? Cheap was really about. It's not about Android.

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The fact that we all feel like other people around us are somehow not real, that they're not people at all.

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Yeah. And likewise, Vonnegut. Right. Except, you know, sometimes he's not described as a sci fi writer for whatever reason.

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Yeah. And there's so many writers who aren't. And I think I mean, you yourself are kind of on the cusp.

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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.

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I saw you at a convention in Cape Town in twenty seventeen when I was still living there.

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You were on a panel, I think titled Speculative Fiction. Yes.

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Yeah. And you were you were the Hannant about not being labelled that way.

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And it really it's really stuck with me into my thesis work.

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And I was wondering how you felt about that kind of those kind of generic distinctions.

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You know, I was never a big fan of genre distinction.

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I think I've always said that when I choose to read, I don't particularly care about which section of the bookstore.

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You know, books from NY.

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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.

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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.

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If we want we if we really wanted to respect our conventions originally, we'd still be writing golden age sci fi.

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Now, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. I do understand that some readers find these distinctions very valuable because they

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help guide them to the type of stories they like and they help make sense of things.

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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.

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But in a sci fi story, you might think that literally means the eyes actually fell out.

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Your robot or something like that.

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So I understand that no genre labels do have some meaning in the sense that it sets your expectations of the reader.

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It helps to interpret the work. But I think the benefits are very limited and the harm is far greater.

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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.

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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.

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That's a metaphor. But I would tell a story in which a mother's love would make these paper animals come to life.

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Literally, they they actually move around and jump around and talk.

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That's, you know, and an example of the. Kinds of federalising metaphore that I do when I do things like that.

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If if the metaphore that's being made literally true, it's not explained.

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People usually call that fantasy. If there is some sort of plausible or pseudo plausible explanation for why that happens.

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People call that sci fi. I don't particularly care either way.

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I happen to be very interesting in technology. Having worked with the technologist for some years.

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So I enjoy using the language of technology as part of the metaphore.

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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.

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And that's not what I care about.

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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.

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And it just happens to be the case that technology is such an important part of our modern world.

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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.

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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.

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Yeah, but then you've got the Dandelion Dynasty trilogy, which kind of sits on the other end of those kinds of concerns.

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But I think in the same way uses metaphor all to talk about kind of present day concerns.

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Right. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the the Denzil's dynasty is a set.

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They're called epic fantasy books.

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And I call them silk punk, mainly because they are a fantasy, of course, because they take place in that second third world.

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That's not our world. And there are no magical creatures and gods who are literally V0 and they actually interact with the characters.

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But on the other hand, it's really not a fantasy book in the sense of Tolkien, for example, there.

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There is some magic, but very little of it. The primary speculative element is the technology in the secondary world.

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It's a world that is just discovering electricity, if you will.

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And because the technology tradition of the world is based on materials and engineering practises, practises prevalent in classical East Asia,

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in our world, there is a very distinct sense in which the technology evolution that's going down with different brout.

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So I call it cell phones because, you know, it's sort of an extrapolation of East Asian engineering principles into a fantastical world.

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But in some ways, you can sort of view the entire till your books as a kind of celebration of engineering.

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As equally important, it's magic. The great heroes in my epic fantasy novels are not wizards, but engineers.

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And by focussing so much on their language of technology. I ended up really talking about the world that we're living in.

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You know, there their early modern people and we're sort of post-modern.

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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?

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What does it mean to have a shared biology?

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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?

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Who gets excluded from it? You know, these are the struggles that the United States is going through right now.

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And I think around the world, other countries are going through the same thing, a reckoning with our history.

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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.

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Some of us have known that to be not true for a long time.

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Others are just discovering yet. But at least here, here's a moment.

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While we're all trying to come to terms with it and trying to figure out how do we.

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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.

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But all of us can believe it. I mean, that's ultimately what these revolutions are about.

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It turns out that no, my. My epic fantasy books were written over a period of a decade.

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And so some of them were started. The earliest books were started before at the present moment, of course.

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But it turns out that many of the concerns in these books are very much the concerns about the present.

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So as I was writing them, I was obviously not thinking about some faraway place that has nothing to do with this.

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I was very much thinking about the same problems plaguing us.

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Human nature is in some ways universal, and the problems of fantastical peoples, I imagine,

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are not particularly different from the problems that we have to go through in our own lives.

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And that, in some ways is both what makes literature interesting and what makes it hard.

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Yeah, I love the idea about your sort of your fascination with the engineering characters

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and how they are kind of contributing to the building of a sort of a new world.

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And then the link that that has obviously to America's conception of itself,

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as well as both conception by the colonial conquistadors as the new world and then and

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then the kind of the sense of as the people as some white invaders moved across America,

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they became and or America became this kind of frontier space constantly.

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And we have a kind of present concerns about the Internet as being a fairly kind of Wild West space.

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And it's unregulated and and nationalists. That's right.

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I mean, you're you're you're talking about this idea that we're always reconceiving and retelling the story in

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which we are the builders were the makers and the stories denying our roads as agents of destruction.

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You know, as you point out, the settlement colonisation of the United States, it's a process of destruction.

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Yes. But it's often told in a way that suggests that it's merely a story about construction.

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The rise of Silicon Valley is the same way. I mean, you know, I talk about foundational mythologies.

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A lot of mythologies are very important, far more important than people give them credit for, you know.

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So, for example, right.

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Every year, the smartest people, the smartest college grads in the states go where Silicon Valley and people when you try to ask people,

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you know, why do they think this is? The general answer is always up because that's where the money is.

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That's actually not the best answer. It's often not actually helpful to think of things that way.

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And I'll say, why? Because having worked in the tech industry myself, I have some sense of this.

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The smart people that the Valley companies are recruiting, ah ah, of course smart that they can make money in any number of ways.

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And there are lots of ways to make money that has nothing to do with Silicon Valley.

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Wall Street would be a much better way to make money if they that's what they wanted and cared about.

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But nonetheless, many people decide to go into Silicon Valley, not Wall Street,

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mainly because they are they go there because they actually believe in ideals and

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ideals are that this is a world in which if you know how to code an even better,

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if you know how to use the shattering art, you can make a dent in the universe.

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You can really change the world. Technology is a magnificent force multiplier and software is our, I think, poetry.

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So if you really wanted to change the world and make a difference.

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Technology is where you go, right? This is the same narrative that I was talking about.

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It's like if you're a person of great ambition and you belong to the Wild West, quote unquote, to build things.

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So if you're a person of great ambition and great ideals and lots of hope and have lots of hope,

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then you go to Silicon Valley because you can build things. You can you can you can create a new world.

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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.

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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

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that culture in which the only problems you're interested in solving our problems.

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Technology can solve and they become the problems of a particular class or demographic or group of people at the time and place.

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And your vision becomes narrowed down. Those are the only problems that you see and you think are worth solving.

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And furthermore, you end up in a position where you convince yourself that everything you do is for the ultimate good of everyone.

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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,

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quote, unquote, change the world and have them basically come up with ways to sell you more ads.

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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.

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And then that happens because the mythology of Silicon Valley is what technology do is so powerful.

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The stories we tell ourselves about what we're doing and who we are.

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They are far more important than we give credit for.

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And I want to talk a little bit about time in your work.

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You've spoken about this before, but I think it's really fascinating.

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And I think anyone listening to this will we'll find your ideas really interesting.

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I think the presumption that time is is linear is something that your work and I feel throws out

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and you're far more interested in kind of a non-linearity of time in the way that you you know,

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you weave myths and technology and human relationships together, I think is really indicative of that.

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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.

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I mean, this is a well known phenomena. Our nerves actually are not purely fast conductors of signals.

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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.

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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.

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It takes almost that long to get all the way up to your brain. So. The fact is,

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you don't feel even though it is objectively true that your brain is trying to integrate signals coming from different parts of your

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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.

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You don't experience that delay, really. You don't. You don't experience that some.

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You experience this integrated, unified body and everything happens to you spontaneously.

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And that's the result of essentially of any illusion that your brain constructs.

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You're bringing us to take all these disparate signals coming at you from different moments of time and integrate into one coherent whole.

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So in some ways, you're always probably already. Just you're integrating a swath of time into a single point simultaneously.

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Your when when ever you remember something from the past, you know,

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the way it works is you're actually living that moment in your mind, your time travelling again and that kind of time travelling.

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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,

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how they motivate themselves, what they're trying to do, how we should respond.

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We're always telling these stories and living our past in the process, trying to understand our own thinking and other people's intentions.

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The way we experience time isn't, you know, some sort of objective reality.

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It's a thing that we have to construct. So I find that very fascinating.

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And so a lot of my stories try to play with that idea of finding Connexions and integrating different moments of time into one.

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In some ways, I feel like we're always living with not just one moment, but in all of history.

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You know, when you're walking through the streets of London or visiting Cairo or going through taking a trip to Japan or something,

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you're always living through thousands of years of history all around you.

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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.

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But. Some of these points of light are hundreds of millions of light years away.

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Some of them are just dozens of light years away.

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And so the light from different moments of time, different moments of the universe are reaching you all at the same time.

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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,

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you're walking through layers of ghosts and all the history of those who paint for the people who were slaughtered,

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the people who did the slaughtering, all the people who whose blood flows through your veins and no other victims as well.

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You know, all all of history is always with you at all times.

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And to me, you know, that's that's just a very important thing to keep in mind when when we tell stories,

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we're never telling stories in a vacuum for times or in the context of all the stories that came forward

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and all the stories that gave that story any time isn't something that just goes out towards the future.

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You always have to do back and integrate the past and revitalise it and bring the past forward with you.

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That's the only way it's such a beautiful idea that you're kind of you're walking through ghosts

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and yet a very heavy and quite difficult thing to to hold onto and to work with and to live with.

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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.

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I suppose, you know, when I think about history in the past, I was just thinking that it's all in the past.

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Everything has happened in order to have to just have me be born.

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You know, this kind of self-centred view is, I think, very much the default state of modernity.

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But after I had hit it, really the centre things, I suddenly no longer saw the world that way.

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I saw the world. It's you know, I'm just another link in this long, unbroken change from the past into the future.

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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.

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If I can do that, I can really honestly say I did that, then that's not bad.

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And that's that's not easy to accomplish. But but that's a worthy goal to strive for.

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I'm not you know, the end of history are not all that important.

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I'm really just one link in a very long chain about that that matters and that the centring of

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the self gave me a much better sense of how important everything else in the path really was.

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And I think in some ways that's what we're going through now as a nation trying to do centre ourselves from.

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From the idea that we're big, we're special. We're not. We're connected to the past.

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The sins of the past are our sins. And we have to come to terms with it and recognise how to do better.

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Here is the problem. Perhaps second, capitalism. This is so fascinating.

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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.

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And then these ethics really quiet and the quiet, very different forms and styles.

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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.

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And yeah, I was wondering if you had a if you felt a particular way about how you approach

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writing short stories as opposed to the ethics and how you think about time in those.

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Well, I do approach them very differently.

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I will say that, you know, the pleasures that they bring to me as a writer are very different.

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You know, I worked on epic fantasy series Dental Dynarski for 10 years.

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The Graves of Things was written back in 2010 and now it's 20/20.

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And I just finished the last book out next year, hopefully.

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Yes. Although with publishing. Who knows? Of course it is down.

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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.

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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.

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You end up knowing it so well. I mean, somebody.

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I feel like I know the world dhara, which is epic fantasy, better than I know the real world, which is a frightening thing.

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And also the series is about the same age as my older daughter.

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So, you know, in some ways it's like my third child grew up right alongside.

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And I think it's and it's you know, I put a lot of myself until I did.

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And Fields, you feel kind of relationship to this.

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This thing that God has for love with you all this time, you feel about it very differently and plot wise.

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You know, it's like trying to tell the story.

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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.

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They're more like snapshots of where I was as a writer at that moment.

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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.

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And because they're snapshots, they can afford to be a little bit less detail in the way the world is perceived.

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You know, when I'm telling the short story, I don't need to match the entire society, entire world.

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I just need to see a corner of it clearly to tell the story.

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And so I can leave all the rest of it in the dark. So, you know, it's in this huge canvas.

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I'm really just using a tiny corner of it. So I paint bevelled or corner in great detail.

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But I don't need to fill in the rest of the picture at all with epic fantasy.

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It's very different. I really have to get the whole thing in there.

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Look at the whole picture. And then so it's a different kind of mindset and different kind of mental exercise, writing short fiction.

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I can keep the entire story in my head and work with it and contemplate it in its entirety with an epic fantasy.

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That's never possible. I can only focus on a little piece of it at a time.

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And when I zoom out, I lose the details. I cannot hold the whole thing in my head.

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And so it's a very different composition process. Mm hmm. Yeah.

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That's really interesting that so much of it is about worldbuilding.

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And you you said elsewhere that you kind of you you play with some of the engineering ideas that you write about.

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I thought that was a really fascinating way into some of the some of the concepts.

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So the silken silk demotic force.

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Yeah. That even said you've just built. And then.

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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.

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I tend to learn things by doing that.

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I can't really just read about them or read a summary of it and things that I understand.

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I mean, you know, when I was writing about a I, for example,

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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.

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Right. I can write about it when I was writing these epic fantasy novels,

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because they make use of electoral statics, which is really not a technology route that we've taken.

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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.

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And then basically what they do and how it feels to work with this kind of technology.

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It just it to me, you know, when you're when you're writing about stuff like this,

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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.

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Let's actually do it and participate in the thing that you're talking about.

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It gives you a sense of understand. Can't get otherwise. For those writers and speculators listening,

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

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

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In this interview, Ken Lou reminds us that realism is not a default.

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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.

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To test this assertion, it's become conscious about the decisions involved and trying for neutral realism in a realistic way.

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Briefly, describe yourself pouring some water to drink, sticking to the facts as far as possible.

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You might like to pause here, write the description, then come back.

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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?

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First, think of the surroundings you chose not to describe.

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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.

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Did you follow the instruction and write about yourself? Or someone else.

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What did you actually, Bill, and write a character? What narrative perspective did you choose?

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First, that person, third person. What does the environment and narrative, voice and surroundings say about the protagonist?

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Did you choose details that would illuminate their character? How much detail did you put in?

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Was the scene deliberately overwritten or badly written? What does this say about your view of realism?

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Even trying to be as neutral and factual as possible. You have carefully curated your description.

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Lewis drawn to stories in which metaphors are presented as true for this exercise.

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Literary lines are a metaphor. Choose a favourite of striking metaphor.

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My legs were jelly. My head nearly exploded. There's an elephant in the room.

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All right, a very brief scene in which this is literally true. Often the simple exercise can unlock a lot more story.

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We crack open a door to a whole new world where anything is possible. That's the prompt, loosen your imagination.

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Can you imagine a few more scenes in this story?

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That concludes this penultimate episode of Narrative Futures, thanks to Ken Lu for joining us on the podcast.

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The final episode to be released next week features Todd Thompson, author of the Wormwood Trilogy.

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Joining us to discuss the metaphor of alien invasion, psycho analysis and the NOMO Awards for speculative fiction by African authors.

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Narrative features.