Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/11/17/14-46-unusual-resources/

 

Key Points: How do you take a fantastical resource and use it to power magic or technology, or somehow interact and change the world? What are the ramifications, how does it affect the economy, the social conventions? Pay attention to scarcity. Consider seed corn, and how do we bootstrap things. How do you assign value to a fantastical resource? Pattern it on real-world things, relative scarcity. How much labor is need to produce it? Relate it to food. Use orders of magnitude. Do you worry about a fantastical resource breaking supply and demand or economy? Yes, but... ignore it, and tell the story! Do think about supply and demand, but tell the story first. Don't forget Realism vs. the Rule-of-Cool!

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 46.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Unusual Resources.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm out of air.

[Brandon] Howard, you're our unusual resource.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Peculiar resource, at any rate.

 

[Brandon] This is a very common trope of science fiction and fantasy, where you make a fantastical resource of some sort, that can either be a MacGuffin to power your magic or your technology, or in other ways interact and change the world. So we're going to talk about worldbuilding these. How we have come up with them when we've used them, what we think works and what we think doesn't work? Obviously, my favorite, which I've talked about a lot, is the spice from Dune which kind of when I read that as a teenager changed my whole perspective on economics in science fiction and fantasy. You can see that reverberating through a lot of the books I write. Where I really, really like it when my magic has some sort of connection to an economic resource in some way. Most obviously, in Mistborn where people use rare metals to do magic. So… But even in Stormlight… This comes directly from Dune, this idea that magic has… Or the resource has an effect on the world other than just the magic. If you haven't read the Stormlight books, people collect magical power in little pieces of gemstone inside of glass, and then use that to light their houses or to power their magic. What have you guys done? Why have you made the choices you have, and how has it worked?

[Mary Robinette] So I did this in a science fiction short story that I have on a colony world. It's called Salt of the Earth. It's a planet that is very low in salt. Which is something that people actually need. So it becomes… There's entire industries around reclaiming salt. When you go to a funeral, one of the things that you do is you've got tissues and you catch the tears under your eyes and put them in an offering thing, so the family can reclaim the salt that you have shed on their behalf.

[Brandon] Why did I not write this story?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I love salt, for those who don't know. I salt everything. Man, that is really [garbled]

[Howard] Probably because it just would have depressed you. That level of shortage.

[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I was thinking about like what are the ramifications of having this thing that's absolutely necessary for survival, but is incredibly rare on this planet. How does that affect all of the social conventions, how does that affect the economy? The main character's family is from a salt-rich family. So these are the things that you kind of look at. It's in some ways not that different from the economics of Dune, because that's how scarcity works.

[Brandon] How did… What inspired that? Where… What made you start this story?

[Mary Robinette] Honestly, I was taking Orson Scott Card's Literary Boot Camp. Which was a great camp, all other things aside. He had us do five story seeds, one of which was a story seed based on research. I went in… He told us to go into the bookstore and find a nonfiction book. There was a book called Salt.

[Brandon] It's quite actually a famous one, if it's the same one.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one of the things that then happens to me in the real world is I start noticing all of the things from when salt was a precious resource. Like Salzburg. It's like, "Oh, right. Salzburg is Salt City. Oh, yeah."

 

[Margaret] A project that I worked on recently is the new Netflix series coming in 2019. Or perhaps already arrived in 2019. Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, which of course ties to the original, Dark Crystal, the film made by the Jim Henson company and Jim Henson. Where really that entire story ends up revolving around the resource of essence, which is the life force of Gelflings, which the Skeksis decide they want, they need, it's what's keeping them young…

[Brandon] It makes them young.

[Margaret] And alive and it's like, "Aha! We've already destroyed our planet, but we can pretend we didn't if we suck the life out of Gelflings or Podlings." That just traumatized an entire generation of young people who went to see that film not knowing what they were in for.

[Brandon] Traumatized some of us, the rest of us, it turned into fantasy or science fiction novelists who think it's cool.

[Mary Robinette] And then some of us became puppeteers.

[Margaret] Traumatized and inspired are not mutually exclusive conditions. But yeah, that was a really interesting thing to look at, because there is definitely that ecological side. As we're told, the Skeksis have really done a number on Thra.

 

[Brandon] By the time this comes out, this episode, hopefully your series will have released.

[Margaret] Yes.

[Brandon] So we're going to make that our book of the week, is go watch Dark Crystal: Age of…

[Margaret] Age of Resistance.

[Brandon] If it's not out for some reason by now, then go watch the original, because it's fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] It is fantastic.

[Margaret] It's very exciting.

[Howard] In multiple definitions of the word.

[Brandon] Definitions of fantastic.

 

[Brandon] Howard, fantastical resources?

[Howard] The one that leaps to mind is the post-transuranics in the Schlock Mercenary universe. I took the concept of islands of stability, and, as other science fiction writers have done, postulated islands of super stability with massive nucleus elements, and then said that if you want to build a power plant that converts neutronium into energy in a way that gives you artificial gravity cheaply, you really have to build the whole powerplant out of post-transuranics. The best way to create post-transuranics is to have a really high density power source, like one built out of post-transuranics. So I built a system whereby the corn and the seed corn are incredibly… Well, I mean, they're obviously related, but there is very much a resource divide here. A lot of the story, especially here in the final couple of years of the story, asks the question, "Where did we bootstrap this stuff? If it's so difficult to make, unless you already have it, who made it the first time?" It's a fun question to ask, it's a fun question to answer… No, I'm not going to tell you the answer here. But it's tied into the Fermi paradox. Why haven't we seen aliens yet? Why, in the science-fiction universe that I've created, aren't people asking, "Why wasn't the galaxy already colonized a billion years ago? 2 billion years ago?" All of it came down to looking at the economics of this resource and what happens when it's fought for.

[Brandon] One of my favorite other things you've done with fantastical resources is kind of a different take on it. You have a person who got cloned several hundred thousand times, and made… You basically…

[Howard] 900 million times.

[Brandon] 900 million times.

[Howard] 900 million Gavs.

[Brandon] So, suddenly, a very unique and scarce resource, maybe not super valuable, but still… Is suddenly… You have 900 million of them. Which is a really interesting change in a little subtle way… Of course, in a very large way.

[Howard] The economic impact… The real life person upon whom Gav was originally based, Darren Bleuel, loves Guinness. You cannot feed the existing supply… You cannot make 900 million Guinness lovers happy…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] With the existing supply of Guinness. Some'pins gotta give.

 

[Brandon] So let me ask this question of you guys. How do you value a fantastical resource? How do you decide what its value in the economics of your story is going to be? You've made it up wholesale…

[Mary Robinette] I tend to pattern it based on real-world things. So I look at the relative scarcity of the thing. When we're talking about a resource… So far, we've been talking about things where it's the item itself is scarce, but there's also the labor involved. So sometimes, something is a scarce resource because it is difficult to produce or refine. Sometimes it's because there's just not… It doesn't exist very much. But either way, what that tells me begins to tell me is how difficult it is and how expensive it is. So aluminum is a good example.

[Brandon] Yeah. It's a great example.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Because aluminum used to be super, super expensive to refine.

[Brandon] I think we've mentioned it on the podcast before, like, Napoleon had his gold plates, his platinum plates, and then his aluminum plates.

[Garbled]

[Margaret] Which were oh, super fancy.

[Mary Robinette] The top of the Washington Monument has an aluminum cap on it that the ladies of Washington DC fund raised for to put this amazingly precious thing up. Now it's like I wrap my leftovers in aluminum. Because we've solved that problem. So… But what that shows me is the way something is treated when it is precious. It goes… It's something that we layer on things to say this is special. We reserve it for special occasions.

[Brandon] Right. Aluminum's a really interesting one, because aluminum is a way more useful metal in most cases than gold. You might say, "Oh, well. Something is valuable because it's really useful." But gold, a lot of times in a lot of cultures, wasn't that useful. It was pretty, but it was not a useful metal. So different cultures have treated it differently based on who wants it and how badly they want it.

[Mary Robinette] And whether they have it in their ground.

[Brandon] Yeah. Go ahead.

[Margaret] I was about to say, another interesting variant on that is you look at a resource like diamonds. Which are not actually that rare, but they have value, because value has been attributed to them, and because there's a monopoly on the global supply.

[Howard] Well, there's a monopoly on the global supply of natural diamonds.

[Margaret] That's true.

[Howard] We now have the technology to very, very easily make really, really useful and pretty… If you stick impurities in them… Diamonds. But the money generated by the original landowning diamond folk has been used to influence…

[Margaret] The market itself.

[Howard] Influence the market so that you can't make a diamond ring out of something that came out of a press.

[Margaret] But I feel like I occasionally do see that in fantasy stories, where you'll have the very precious resource or magic is very tightly controlled because it is very valuable. The Trill symbionts kind of fall into this mode, as well. Then you discover it is more common than we thought.

[Brandon] One of the things…

[Margaret] What happens to the people in power then?

[Brandon] That I did which was kind of a little bit of… I wouldn't call it a cheat, but when I was looking at how to value things in the Stormlight Archive, I made it so that you could use this magic, the light that you collect in the crystals, to make food. Then I was able to price how much the food was. Of course, not everyone can do this, so there are other market supply things. But in an economy that can one-to-one translate this stuff to food, I can then value or price how much the gemstones and things go for, because of the amount of grain it creates.

 

[Howard] I look at orders of magnitude. The model I use is sock, shoe, bicycle, car, airplane. Where… Whatever my universe needs that are analogs for those, how much of this resource is required for each of those things. I use orders of magnitude because I don't need to hit it on the nose, I just need to be in the right neighborhood, so… There should be something between airplane and car, I know, but…

[Margaret] As valuable as it needs to be for the story.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing about this also is the narrative that attaches to the thing. So if we attach a narrative, like a shoe… You say shoe, bicycle? Okay. I have seen shoes that are priced more than any bicycle.

[Howard] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] That is because of the narrative that is attached to them. Because of the… And because of the scarcity. The Dutch tulip craze is a fine example of a resource that exists because of narrative. Because people have this love of tulips, and they venerate the tulip, and all of this. Then…

[Howard] There are automobiles that cost more than private planes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And there are automobiles that cost less than bicycles.

[Margaret] Thank goodness a commodity bubble like that could never happen again!

[Chuckles] [Whew!]

 

[Brandon] So how about this? What do you do in your story… Have you ever worried about breaking things like basic supply-demand or breaking your economy of your story with a fantastical resource, just completely in half?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes, I do worry about that.

[Howard] I live in terror of that.

[Margaret] I don't know if this applies, but it's a funny anecdote that I would like to share. I was… In my D&D campaign, at one point, the characters had undergone a five-year gap. So we're all coming back together. It's like, characters are bringing each other gifts. My character had had two kids since anyone had seen her. So one of the magic using characters is like, "Okay." Magic is new in this world. People are just figuring out how to make magic items. She's like, "Prestidigitation is a very low-level spell. I could put this on a diaper. Oh, like, we have self-prestidigitating diapers!" Then we started thinking, like, "Why are we adventuring? Why aren't we just billionaires making self-prestidigitating diapers? And chamber pots? Why are there sewers in our world anymore, because clearly, this is just what everyone could do?"

[Howard] No matter how expensive the spell Continual Light is, if the spell exists, the candle makers are out of business forever.

[Mary Robinette] This was ex… I had this problem in Glamorous Histories. It's why the glamour does not cast actual light. Because then it stops being an alternate history and starts being… Or a historical fantasy and starts being something completely different… Because why candles? Why fireplaces? Why any of those? None of those things would ever exist.

[Brandon] Perpetual energy. Yeah.

[Margaret] We were all there around the table, and one guy looks like, "Yep. No, that's true, and we're going to totally ignore it and move on with our adventure now."

[Brandon] Let's add the suggestion that using game mechanics… If you played a lot of video games or pen-and-paper role-playing games, they are built to be fun. Not economically sound. So just keep in mind the different goals of the medium.

[Mary Robinette] It does depend on the game, but by and large, you cannot… You do have to think about supply and demand.

[Brandon] At some point, you do have to, with your story, do what Howard said last month, which is at some point I'm just I want to tell a story rather than be right. Rather than writing an economic simulation in book form, I want to tell a story. So that is a line to walk.

[Howard] In the Planet Mercenary book, in the sidebar comments, someone says almost exactly that.

[Brandon] Yeah. Well, we will have talked…

[Howard] "There's the abstraction of economics. You abstracted this to the point that the economics aren't even real." Somebody else said, "That's because we wanted them to play a game, not figure out that they're not being paid enough."

[Margaret] it's… I think Star Trek does this with the idea that the Federation… Nobody uses money, nobody gets paid, and yet we have this gold pressed latinum economy going on, and why can't you replicate it? Everyone's like, "Yeah. No." We can technobabble around it. For the most part, we just kind of hand wave past, as if we know what we're about.

 

[Brandon] I'm going to have to wrap us up. If you're really interested in more of this, two weeks ago we did a podcast, Realism Versus Rule-Of-Cool. Which I'm sure was really, really a great podcast.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It will have been amazing.

[Mary Robinette] It will have been amazing.

 

[Brandon] Let's do our homework. Howard, you have our homework.

[Howard] Yes. Take something common. Super common. Maybe you've got a lot of it, maybe lots of people have a lot of it. Something that is super common. Now, make it super valuable. Maybe it's super rare. Maybe it's superpowered. But now, whatever it is, it's like the gold standard. It's like currency. Then, write about how your life, the lives of the people around you, change as a result of this common thing now being either incredibly rare or incredibly valuable. Or both.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

[Brandon] I'm sorry if you dislike the fact that I used wholesale instead of whole cloth. If you've already written your comment in the comments section before finishing the podcast, I still love you.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 40.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Vs. Wide.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] I've shared this story before on Writing Excuses, but it is one of my favorite stories. I once read a review of a videogame that was an RPG game that was known for having an expansive world. The review was critical because they said, "Yes, it's really, really expansive, but it's like an ocean that's an inch deep. Every town you go to has the exact same copy-and-pasted rooms and things. There's nothing to explore. All the dungeons are exactly the same. Yeah, there's 4000 of them, but if you just copy-and-paste the same three dungeons 4000 times, then you're not exploring 4000 locations, you're going into three places 4000 times." This has stuck with me, because the more I worldbuild, the more I realize that I prefer as a writer to have depth to my worldbuilding. I ran into this policy early in my career, where I had started to get popular. I had three magic systems in the Mistborn series, and fans are starting to hear that I was working on something new, the Stormlight Archive, which was going to be big. They started asking me, "How many magic systems do you have in this one? You had three and your previous one, how many are in this one?" I would be like, "There's 30. There's 30 different magic systems." I kind of fell into this more is better sort of philosophy. When I actually started working on the book, I realized one of the things that had made the Way of Kings fail in 2002 when I tried to write it the first time was this attempt to do everything a little bit, to have 5% worldbuilding and characterization across a huge, diverse cast and a huge setting, where the book had failed because nothing had been interesting, everything had just been slightly interesting. So I want to ask the podcasters, with that lengthy introduction, what constitutes a deep story to you, specifically when you're talking about worldbuilding? What draws you to those stories, and how do you create it in your own fiction?

[Mary Robinette] For me, it's looking at causal chains, the ways things link together. A lot of times when I see something that is shallow, there is an item, but it doesn't appear to have any ripple effects, it doesn't have any effects on the rest of the world. Whereas with deep things, you can see that there's a history, and you can also see that there are consequences to having this thing in the world. When I'm teaching my students, I talked to them about, and when I'm doing it myself, I think about why. Why did this thing arise? What was the need that caused this piece of technology or magic to occur? How does it affect everyone, and what is the effect, with what effect does using it? It's not like necessarily the personal toll, but what is the effect on the society? That's the piece, for me, like looking at how it affects the society, that I feel like a lot of worldbuilders fall apart, because they think about the effect on the individual magic user, but not the connections between those things.

[Dan] So, during the time that I was writing the Mirador series, there was a cyberpunk TV show called Almost Human with Karl Urban, if you remember that one. They did that, they had this very shallow worldbuilding. I remember in one of the episodes, a guy walked by an electronic billboard in a mall, and it like read his retina or did facial recognition and knew who he was and called up his shopping history and offer him a product. I'm like, "Oh, that's a cool detail." But if they have that technology, it would be in so many other places in the city. It would enable so many other things. They didn't explore any of that. It really frustrated me. So when I started building my cyberpunk, I'm like, "Well, I can't do that with everything. I'm going to do that with… Here are three or four branches of technology's, and just drill really deep into them and try to figure out how is this going to change society?" How will the entire city feel different if all cars drive themselves, for example? Just really dig into those and try to figure out what the ramifications are.

[Howard] For me, the decision point on deep versus wide occurs after I've only gone deep on as many things as I go deep on, because I will find the one which in conjunction with the others, gives me surprising yet inevitable. Gives me all of the pieces I need for the story to unfold in a way that it's going to do the things that I want it to do. At that point, I feel like… Whatever that thing was, and whatever pieces it touched in order to function in that way, that is where the depth has to be. Everything else, I'll go wide, and, if I have more budget, all sink an extra couple of holes over here as red herrings. But for now, that's the research that needs to be done.

 

[Brandon] You bring up an important point, which is that you can't go deep on every topic. We've been talking about this concept all through the year. But this idea that sometimes you do need to touch lightly on things, basically to pitch yourself ideas that you can catch in later books or later scenes.

[Howard] I wanted to tell a joke about the history of our solar system 75 million years ago. I was wondering how old Saturn's rings were. So I started doing research. What I determined is that in 2006, Saturn's rings were as old as the solar system. In 2018, when we dove Cassini through the rings, Saturn's rings are about 100 million years old, and will probably be gone in the next 200 million. The more I looked into this, the more interesting it got. The reasoning behind, the math of all this, which I'll spare all you. At the end of that session, I had four hours of information in my head, and zero jokes.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Now that's familiar.

[Howard] So, I left all of that out, because I realized, "Yeah, I totally write things about that. But it's not going to move my story forward, it's going to make people argue because it's not every… Some people know the 2006 science." I just have to give it a wide miss. The point here is that portions of my week are absolutely lost in that way. I'll research something and come away with nothing useful. But I don't get to have useful things if I don't do at least some of that research.

[Brandon] For me, where I went wrong on Stormlight Archive, looking back at it, when I first tried to write it, was I was a big fan of the Wheel of Time, which was, at that point, on its 10th book, 11th book soon to come out, I believe. I was trying to compare my series with one that had been going for 12 years.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] I wanted to jump in at the 12 year mark and say, well, this is what I love about the Wheel of Time. So I'm going to write a book that evokes those same feelings without doing the groundwork and characterization that the Wheel of Time had been doing for over a decade in order to create a really spectacular experience later in the series. What I ended up doing is, I ended up just touching lightly on all these things that I had spent my worldbuilding time on preparing. I ended up with a story that just wasn't satisfying because of that. Have you guys ever been working on a book and realized I need to do a deep dive on this one topic? What made you decide to do that, and what was it?

[Mary Robinette] I'm actually in the process of doing that right now on the Relentless Moon. One of the things that I went a little shallow on in the Fated Sky was the political situation on Earth. Because most of the book takes place on the way to Mars. Well, the Relentless Moon is a parallel novel that takes place on Earth and the moon, while Fated Sky is going on. Which means that I actually have to dig deep. In order to dig deep into the political situation on Earth, I have to do some… A deeper dive on the climatology of the planet after the asteroid strike. Because I'm like… Like, I have actually no idea as we are recording this whether or not the jetstream is still functional. Because where that asteroid strike was, it's like it may not be. I… So, I have to sit down… I've got an appointment with a… Someone who specifically does computer modeling of this kind of thing to figure out what the climate looks like. Because I didn't need to know. Now I do. It's… Yeah, it's…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Irradiation…

[Mary Robinette] Totally stalled on the novel right now.

[Howard] The secondary radiation of the regolith, the soil, the dirt, the whatever on a world where there is no magnetic field shielding you from radiation, and deep dove on this and came up with a quote from a Russian scientist who was asked, "Which one's worse on the moon, the solar radiation or secondary radiation from the regolith?" The Russian scientist said, "They are both worst."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Which means if you don't shield against one of them, you die. You have to shield against both. But again, this is a case where I was reading for four hours before I found that moment, where… For me, this is a moment where I laughed. Out loud. I'm like, "Okay. I even say that with a Russian accent." I'm not even going to put it in the book. But the idea that the dirt can be as dangerous as sunlight on a planet where there's no magnetic field… I tell jokes on that until the radioactive cows come home.

[Dan] In Partials, I am… That whole series deals with a lot of different kinds of science, but there was only one of them that was in the outline. It said, part of my thinking was, "And then Kira figures out how to cure the disease that's killing everybody."

[Laughter]

[Dan] Which meant that I had to figure out how to cure disease. Right? I could totally gloss over all the ecology, all the genetics, all the everything else, but, and I've said this before, I never want to write the sentence, "Then she did some science." So if I have my character actually using a science or a technology or a magic or whatever to solve a problem, I need to know how that works. So I did actually enough study into virology that I was later able to convince a doctor that I knew what I was talking about when my father was in the hospital. So finding out which one is key to the plot, which one hinges a whole story, that's the one I focus on.

[Howard] As a side note, writers tend to be dangerous that way.

[Dan] Yes.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and talk about Squid Empire.

[Howard] Oh, yes. Danna Staaff. Nonfiction book called Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods. Which is a discussion of… It's a… Well, it's a whole book about cephalopod evolution on Earth. The cephalopods were the first creatures to rise from the seafloor. They invented swimming. Then, at some point, fish invented jaws, and the kings of the ocean became the ocean's tastiest snack. This book walks you through all of that. If you are interested in worldbuilding, the discussion of this, just the way these things interoperate and interlock and unfold is useful. But it is also fun and beautiful.

[Brandon] Awesome. That was Squid Empire.

[Howard] Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods by Danna Staaff.

[Brandon] Awesome.

 

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. How can you take a single culture in a say science fiction or fantasy book and build a bunch of characters who all maybe come from the same background, but all express something very different? The reason I ask this is often times I think our go-to in a fantasy or science fiction book is we're going to have this alien, and that's going to represent this, and we're going to have this fantasy race, and they're going to represent this. Or, this kingdom is the kingdom of merchants, and we're going to bring in a character from the kingdom of merchants. Where, sometimes what you end up doing is then creating a bunch of caricatures or things like this in your world. Digging deep, I found that sometimes, the best thing to force me, as a writer, to stretch and make sure I'm not making each of my races or my worlds or my settings or my kingdoms stereotypes of themselves is to say I need three characters who come from a very similar background with a very similar job who are cousins and who are all distinctive individuals, who offer something very different to the story. This has been a really good exercise for me in forcing my worldbuilding to stretch further, where I'm not just pigeonholing certain people from certain countries into certain roles in the story.

[Howard] I audition characters. I mean, I have a cast of thousands in Schlock Mercenary. I will often tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to be doing a scene. There's a side character here who is this particular race, and I haven't represented that race before. So, here are four different faces, and here are some different backgrounds, and here are some different attitudes. Which one of those… Which of these people gets to be in my story?" Then I pick one who gets to be in the story. The other three are now completely real to me. By keeping them real, by keeping those three real while the fourth is on the page, the fourth feels less like a stereotype to me. I don't know if it works for the readers, because I'm taking a comic strip.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It is actually something I think you do really well. When I pick up Schlock Mercenary, and I get different critters from all around the universe, I often… I will often associate the main character personality with that critter. Then they start acting different and I'm reminded, "Oh, wait. This is a culture of a bunch of different people who all act differently." You've actually really helped me to view this in a Good Way, Howard. So, good job.

[Dan] One thing that I am kind of, just now, really learning the depths of, is the idea that characterization is action. That who a character is has very little to do with where they come from and everything to do with what they choose and what they do. I think actually the hobbits in Lord of the Rings are a great example of this, because from a certain point of view, all four of those hobbits are the same. They're remarkably similar. But if you see one leaping recklessly into danger, it's probably Merry. If you see one screwing around and causing a problem by accident, it's probably Pippin. If you see one making a very grumpy, pragmatic choice, and planning ahead, it's probably Sam. So even though they come from the same place and they all like the same things and, given the opportunity, they will all sing a song in a bar, you know who they are, and they're all very different.

[Mary Robinette] So… I completely agree with you, that the actions are the things that we judge other people by. Since with secondary characters, we don't get to go into their heads. One of the ways that I make decisions about which character is going to do what is that I think about the axes of power, but specifically the way it affects… We've talked about axes of power on previous podcasts. But specifically, the way it reflects our self-identity. Which I find kind of breaks down into role, relationship, hierarchy, and ability. That we have… We are each driven by these things. Each person will have one of those that is kind of their primary driver. So if I have four characters that are all from the same background, then I make sure that each of them has a different primary driver. So, for instance, Elma, her primary driver is… She's very much driven by relationship and sense of duty. Whereas Nicole is very much driven by hierarchy and status. Even though they have exactly… Very similar backgrounds. They're both astronauts. They're both first… Among the first women astronauts. But they're driven by different things. Because of that, they make different choices and do different actions. So, for me, it's about the driver. That's one of the ways that I make… Differentiate… To try to make the world seem richer.

 

[Brandon] That's awesome. We are out of time. Dan, you have some homework for us?

[Dan] Yes. What I want you to do is a little bit of what I did and what I talked about earlier, writing Mirador. Is to take one thing, one kind of science or one kind of magic system, one aspect of your world, and just drill as deep into it as you can. Figure out what all of the ramifications are. I talked earlier about self driving cars. One of the recent discoveries, someone crunched the numbers and realized that it's actually much cheaper for a self driving car to putter around the city until you need it again, rather than park itself. What is that going to do to the city? What is that going to do to the traffic? When you really take the chance to look as deep as you can into one thing, you're going to find a lot of very cool story ideas you had never seen before.

[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

Writing Excuses 14.32: Worldbuilding Gender Roles

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/11/worldbuilding-gender-roles/

 

Key points: How do you worldbuild different gender roles for science fiction and fantasy stories? Start by recognizing that most fiction has a clearly defined binary, male and female. But... Until you have words and categories, you may have trouble perceiving things. Blue, or nonbinary genders. Try reading some things written by different genders. Listen to conversations. Avoid simply reversing roles. Beware exoticizing, objectifying, or fetishizing the unfamiliar. First, do no harm. Don't use changes in gender roles or identity as sprinkles on your sundae. Have you built a society, have you considered the effects, the ramifications? Remember story purpose, and ask yourself if removing this piece will break your purpose for writing the story. Sometimes background affects how we perceive foreground elements, too. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 32.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Gender Roles.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] We're talking about how to worldbuild gender roles. How to approach this topic, which can be a little tricky. You can veer into some problematic areas in this direction. So we want to touch this very carefully, but very sincerely, and talk about how you might go about worldbuilding different gender roles for your science fiction and fantasy stories.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the first things that I think we should acknowledge is that most of us have grown up reading fiction with a very clearly defined binary, male and female. There's some fiction, like Sheri Tepper's Gate to Women's Country or The Left Hand of Darkness where there are things that are being played with. But as we become more aware in the 21st century, we realize that gender is a spectrum. I'm going to use an analogy here that is a visually-based analogy. So bear with me. There's… I listen to Radio Lab and they had this episode on color.

[Margaret] I remember the show.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. This is amazing. The question was why doesn't the word blue appear in Homer's… In the Odyssey, or the Iliad? It's the wine dark sea. The answer is because the word blue doesn't exist yet. At all. There's just no word for blue. It's such a basic color that it's difficult for us to imagine a world in which the word blue doesn't exist. What becomes more difficult to grasp is that the reason it doesn't exist yet is because people weren't perceiving that color as blue. It turns out that when you start analyzing all of the languages, that the order in which words come into the language for color relates to when we begin to be able to reproduce them. So everybody starts off with kind of red and black and white and kind of…

[Margaret] Brown.

[Mary Robinette] And kind of a brownish-green and a greenish-brown. So, anyway. So, they reference this video which I then went and tracked down, where they talked to a tribal people who still do not have the word for blue. Show them this color wheel. To my eye, it's like all of these greens that are exactly the same green and one blue that is very, very clearly blue. They're like, "Which square is different?" Everyone sits down and goes, "Um, that one?" and points to the bottom right or "This one?" And points to the upper left. "That one?" It's like getting the one that is totally blue is totally by chance. Then they show them another wheel which, to my eye, is all this kind of olive green all the way around. They say, "Which one is different?" They all go, "That one." With no hesitation at all, to a square that, to me, looks identical to the others. What they have discovered through all of this is that once you have a word for something, that you're able to define that and put things in that category. Until then, you don't see it. What I've realized is that gender is basically the same thing. We've got… We talk about a spectrum. But it's really kind of an umbrella. It's sort of messy. But there's no… The delineations are delineations that we have created because of language. So what's happening now is that because language has expanded, we have more things we can talk about. Which means that when you are approaching that in your fiction, that starting with a binary is very limiting, and not necessarily as interesting and representative as you can be with your fiction.

 

[Brandon] Well, where would you go… Where someone's starting off with this, what would you suggest? They're just like, "All right, I don't want to represent a binary, I want to do something that is exploring this direction." Where do you go?

[Howard] The simplest path for me was reading things that are written by genders that are not me and that perceive and describe genders differently. My first experience with this not gender who isn't me was David Brin's Glory Season in which he reverses the gender roles that I was familiar with, and does so for biological reasons. I look at that now and I'm able to say oh, he is… He's still making assumptions about the biological determination of gender roles, which is in and of itself inherently problematic in our culture, but by reversing things, he allowed me to see… He helped me to see things completely differently. That was my first step. Are there things that you guys have read that do this well?

[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I found was pronoun.is. This actually came up very recently for me, 'cause I was helping… There's a game that I very much enjoy, and they had set up a binary and then realized that they shouldn't have and were trying to figure out… To course correct. So they wanted some non-binary pronouns. Pronoun.is deals with non-binary pronouns. That's a very useful thing to look at. The other things that I find are looking at Tumblr's and watching people talk about their own lived experience. Own voices? #ownvoices is also very useful. So if you do #ownvoices and #nonbinary, those two things will bring up conversations that you can listen to. It is important, I want to say, that you're listening and not inserting yourself into conversations when you're first trying to kind of understand stuff. But those are places where you can kind of watch people interact. Most of the information that I know has come from people who have been very patient with me to explain things. Which is not the best way to learn things, because it involves emotional labor on someone else's part. Which is why I suggest doing some listening before you sit down and start asking questions.

[Margaret] Doing your basic research to get the 101 questions.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Margaret] Before you do your more advanced field research, in a way. I think it's… It's one of those things where if you're setting out to tell a story, and you deliberately don't want to replicate gender roles as they are found in whatever your home culture is. For everyone at this table, gender roles in…

[Mary Robinette] 21st-century America.

[Margaret] 21st-century America.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, 21st-century white America.

[Margaret] White America, yeah. If you're trying to break away from whatever feels home, normal to you, I think the point that Mary has really made, and what Brandon started us out with is, the temptation is like, "Well, I'll take what we have and I'll flop it. Men will stay home and raise children, and women won't." But right there, you've just replicated the binary and turned it on its head. Taking the opportunity to step into… To put yourself… As we were saying in the earlier episode, into sort of our unknown unknowns. It's not just the opposite of what we have. It's probably closer to your normal then you might want to think it is. What's 90° different from your normal?

[Howard] You have to start somewhere. As I said, talking about the Brin novel, which was thankfully a little more complex than simply reversing it. It was pretty cool what he did. But you acknowledge that there is a first step. Then you want to do more research, and as Mary has said and as I would reiterate over and over and over again, listen to people and listen nonjudgmentally.

[Yeah]

[Howard] Listen to their experience and try to understand how their experiences different from yours, and why their experiences different than yours. Not whether their experiences good or bad in relation to yours.

[Margaret] Yeah. I do want to stress, when I say your normal, I'm using your normal… Because it is subjective, whatever normal is to you.

 

[Brandon] I'm not sure if I have the language to even ask this question correctly, but is there a danger in exoticizing the unfamiliar and then going that direction and falling into clichés and tropes?

[Chorus yes]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. Which is why it's important to do the research and to understand why you're making the choices and also to know… This is why I recommend listening in on Tumblr or Twitter conversations, because this is where people are going to complain about times that they have been objectified or fetishized or exoticized. Where people are, just like doing things that are harmful. That's where people will be complaining about it. Where your least likely to see some of the complaining in a published work, partly just because it's gonna necessarily be behind the times. It's not ideal, but it is useful.

[Margaret] I think that… going into recording this episode, that we were a little sort of all kind of sidling up to this topic a bit. In part, some of that probably comes from the fact that the four of us at this table, we have what, from a classical standpoint, is, we have a good gender balance at this table. But we do all identified as either male or female, as far as I'm aware.

[Howard] We recognize that the entire topic is inherently fraught.

[Yes]

[Howard] Because of how deeply it affects everyone, and how, to borrow a phrase from Mary, how if we write things incorrectly, it's not just that we offend, it's that by reinforcing a stereotype, we can do harm.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I like that. I like the stated goal that as we write things, we want to represent things well, I want to tell a story that is interesting, but above all, I don't want to hurt anyone by telling it wrong.

[Margaret] I think, you don't want to use changes in gender roles or changes in gender identity… You don't want to use that as the sprinkles on top of your sundae.

[Brandon] I was just about to kind of ask that question. Actually, because…

[Margaret] I'll make this exciting, by having five genders! It's like…

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Then I'll have hopefully an interesting question along those lines.

[Mary Robinette] So, the book of the week is Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. This is really… So, first of all, it's a good book and you should just read it. But the main character is a robot… Is a cyborg. In the net… No, it's a robot. The character has a brain, a human brain, that does some visual processing. That's the only thing that the brain does. There are no memories attached to it, there's nothing. The character gets to choose what pronoun is being used. Most people, because it's this in normal battle robot, use he at the beginning. Someone asks, "Is that what you want?" The robot realizes, "Oh. Actually, I can choose that." By choosing she part way through the novel, it changes the relationship that she has with the other main character. It's very interesting and an interesting exploration of the fact that as humans, we desperately want to put things into boxes. Like, a robot has no need of a gender at all. A robot is a robot. But our need to do that, and then the perceptions that we have about the role that that robot then fulfills based on the gender assignment… Or assigning the gender based on roles. It's very interesting what that does, the things that happen to your brain, especially when the gender switch happens. Or the pronoun switch happens. Because… Robot, there is no gender.

[Margaret] Robots.

[Mary Robinette] When the pronoun switch happens. So, it's a wonderful book. It's also just… Let's say there's a lot of ecological terrorism and stuff going on. There's lots of rollicking adventure and explosions. So it's not just hello, gender studies.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mary Robinette] It's really good.

[Brandon] That sounds fascinating.

[Margaret] It reminds me a little bit of… There's a thread in some of the later books in the Parasitology trilogy by Mira Grant where… Spoilers if anybody hasn't read these… Intelligent tapeworms are basically taking over their human hosts. They're tapeworms. Tapeworms do not have a binary gender. There is one of these characters who does not identify with the gender of their current human host. There's another tapeworm who's like, "What is your problem with this? You are a tapeworm. You shouldn't be identifying as male or female and being bothered by whether or not that matches the human body you are in."

 

[Brandon] So I have a question for you. We're going to try this out, we'll see if this works. I am writing a science fiction book which has alien races who don't reproduce or view reproduction in the way that humans do. So I'm going to say what I'm doing here, and I'm going to ask you to point out directions I could go that would be bad or directions I could go that would be good.

[Mary Robinette] It's only 15 minutes long, Brandon.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yes, I know.

[Mary Robinette] People are in a hurry.

[Brandon] We'll see if this works. If it doesn't work…

[Howard] I'm definitely not that smart.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You guys won't even hear this.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, umm… All right. So what I'm writing right now is an alien species where their sexes are Lefts and Rights. They are Left and they are Right. A Left and a Right will combine together and create a new trial personality, that, if they end up liking, and their family ends up liking, they will give birth to that person who will have the memories of those, of that event of being this person for a while. If it is not, they will break the coupling, and it will not. So, for a period of several months, they are one individual together as one. Walking around and interacting, accessing some of the memory and knowledge of the two parents. I have humans interacting with this and really struggling to wrap their brains around it. Where could I go wrong? How would you approach something like this? Any suggestions for me?

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean, the obvious question is what happens when two Lefts are compatible?

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Howard] No. Two Lefts are compatible. Right?

[Brandon] Was that two… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] No. 

[Howard] Who's on first. Sorry.

[Margaret] It's… In a weird way, when you describe it to me, it almost doesn't feel like a stand-in for gender or the biological sexes. It's… You have two halves that are coming together and potentially creating a third being, but it seems like it's not necessarily reading as reproduction, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

[Garbled]

[Brandon] I intended it to be their reproductive cycle. This is how they… This is how new individuals are born. [Garbled]

[Howard] So the two of them combine, and if they decide that they like what has been created here… 

[Brandon] They will split and a baby will be born.

[Howard] Okay. That… The newborn… How do we determine if it's Left or Right? Is that random, is that…

[Brandon] I think that is random.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Which… Does the newborn come out of the Left or the Right?

[Brandon] I think they both have… 

[Mary Robinette] They have to connect…

[Brandon] Yes.

[Margaret] Is it… Just like what… I don't want to ask biologic sort of plumbing related questions here, but why is there a difference between Lefts and Rights?

[Brandon] Lefts and Rights… Hum. Um. Maybe because I'm just going with a binary because I'm used to it?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] Would be my guess. I did want, when this individual is made, you can tell that there's… They are larger than a normal individual and they have… 

[Howard] There's a seam.

[Brandon] There's a seam. I'm probably shading… the only sexual dimorphism, if that's the right term you would have, as kind of a red shade and a blue shade, so that we have kind of this alien different skin color that is kind of a trope in science fiction that I'm trying to play with.

[Margaret] But, I mean, why not have it be being and being, like Mary said, two beings are designated as Right, but why shouldn't they be compatible, or why not have red, blue, yellow, green, aqua? Sort of like, oh, an orange and an aqua have gotten together.

[Brandon] I would say my reasoning for that, and it's totally possible I could have bad reasoning in this. My reasoning for that is it's a lot to take in in a YA novel, and I need to build on some foundations of quick conversation. I'm introducing like eight alien species in this book, so it felt simpler to say they have two sexes that are not anything like the two sexes you are used to.

[Mary Robinette] I guess the thing is as you're talking about it, I'm like, "But why did they have sexes? At all?" Like, why isn't it just these things combine and… 

[Howard] The term you may want is the term that we use in chemistry. You have left-handed and right-handed sugars. They're isomers.

 

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. Is it wrong for me to want that? Just because, in the worldbuilding, that is what I like?

[Mary Robinette] It's not wrong, but it feels like you're defaulting it. That there are more interesting options. That's really… Like, I don't hear anything, as you're talking, going, oh, there's a real problem there. What I hear is that it's not as interesting as I think you could be, and I don't think it would take that many more words.

[Howard] I think the interest is going to stem from how the humans react to what they're seeing. Because the humans are going to be our stand-ins for our interaction with this. If there are difficult questions that you want to ask, about how humans… About this, about our understanding about how this alien culture works, about how their rules may be different whether they're a Left or a Right isomer… I'm already writing your book for you by giving you the word. The way the humans react, I think, is where you can get into the most trouble, because if you have somebody, and you almost certainly will, who is passing judgment, the way in which the narrative treats that person is going to tell the reader how they should feel about non-binary genders. About genders that are different from them.

[Margaret] Well, also, if you have two categories, and in order to have reproduction, two dissimilar categories, individuals of two dissimilar categories get together and create a third, it's going to… I mean, if I were reading that cold, that to me would read as an allegory or an analogy of a gender binary. It's sort of the… It's the thing that eats grass and has long ears and a fluffy tail, goes around and hops. Even if it's on an alien planet, it's kind of a rabbit.

Mary Robinette] I feel like that's kind of what is happening for me is that it still feels like you have a gender binary.

[Brandon] Is it okay, though? Like… I guess okay is the wrong term. If that's the direction I want to explore…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just… I think where I would… What I would say, and this is why I asked what happens if there are two Lefts that want to get together, is the assumption that everyone is comfortable in the body that they are born into?

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Which is not the case. It's not the case with humans. It's often… I don't understand why it would be the case with an alien species. We know that… 

[Margaret] Not to mention it assumes everyone is… Wishes to be compatible with somebody of the opposite handedness.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Then I'm like, the other parts of my worldbuilding stuff are going, well, obviously… I assume that you are able to do more when you are coupled because there must be an additional advantage there. So therefore is there an advantage to being coupled, and do you have difficulty getting work when you are uncoupled? So these are the questions that I'm like… What happens, and what is the incentive to uncouple? If everybody likes this, this individual? Is it that you can only have the child if you uncouple? Like, what are the… There's a lot of societal ramifications that are inherent in this that I'm…

[Howard] No, it's… A concept that gets explored in science fiction a lot is the alien race that shows up and the idea of war or the idea of lying is completely alien to them. A society, a race in which gender… I don't know what the word would be… Where you're not happy with the body you've been born into or created into. A society in which that never happens would be very alien to us. Our interactions with those people, especially the interaction of someone who isn't happy with the body they have, and is interacting with these folks, that could be interesting to explore. That path is fraught because you don't want to say, "See, these aliens are better than us, because they're just happy the way they're born." That's not the message you want to send at all.

[Mary Robinette] Also, I don't think that that would actually be… Like, I find that implausible. Anyway.

[Margaret] That's a planet of hats.

[Mary Robinette] It's a planet of hats. I mean, just because it's… When you look at the behavior of… Granted, these are fictional creatures, but when you look at… Margaret already said it better, it's a planet of hats if everybody's comfortable.

 

[Brandon] Like, when it's… One of the difficulties… I'll say difficulties you run into when doing this is you can do anything. The question… Like, when you say why can't it just be to individuals of any sort couple, I could totally do that. Absolutely. So I have to ask myself why am I not, or why do I want to do it this other way. This is the question when… we come into like is it sprinkles. Right? Is it sprinkles on your cake? When are you just adding these things to add flavor and is that… Can simply be reductive of the way that people see the world and using them to exoticize your story. Which is a dangerous path to go down. But at the same time, science fiction's job, in my opinion, is to start asking some of these questions and say, "Reader, what if we encountered something like this? How do we respond to it?" And this sort of thing. So it's really an interesting sort of tangled problem that is important to approach. Asking yourself where is it a sprinkle, where is it actually part of your story. Where would you say that line is and… Probably not a line, but that continuum. How do you go one way rather than the other?

[Margaret] To me, I feel like… And not to swerve away from the question here, but I think it is a question that's difficult to answer in the abstract. Because it depends on the story you're telling. There's one thing when you're constructing a story specifically to explore or make a statement about the role of gender in our society or potentially in alien society. But that's also… It doesn't mean that any story that has humans or aliens with other than binary gender has to be a story about that. Every story with a queer person doesn't have to be about the struggles and agonies of being queer. Sometimes it's just happening and you're saving the world and it doesn't really matter.

[Mary Robinette] For me, the line… When I see it done badly, it's that they've added this thing and it has absolutely no impact on the society at all. Where the world maps exactly the same. It's like, "No, of course. Women are in charge. This is totally a matriarchy." And yet, our great leaders are all men. All of the courtship rituals are still the man coming to the woman and proposing. It's like, no, if the women are in charge…

[Margaret] All the female characters are really obsessed with the men.

[Mary Robinette] These are… So if there's no effect, that's when I feel like it's just a sprinkle. When I say effect, what I mean is not that it becomes a major plot point, as Margaret was saying. But that it affects the way the character moves through the world. The example that I've used in previous podcasts is I'm 5 foot seven, my husband is 5' 11. So that very small difference between us affects the way we move through the world, in that when we go to get cereal down, he can just reach out and get it. I sometimes have to get a footstool or stand on my toes. It's a small detail. But it does affect the way you move through the world. As someone who is white and a cis woman, I don't ever have to do any defense about when I go to the store, about where I'm shopping. I don't have to do any thinking about what bathroom I use. Never will I have to think about those things. So that affects the way I move through the world. I think that if you have… If you've introduced genders, that there will be people who have opinions about these genders. The gender roles. It's going to affect the way the character moves through the world, if you have actually constructed a society around it. If you haven't, again, it doesn't have to be the plot point, but if you haven't done that, then it is just sprinkles.

[Howard] There is story purpose, where your purpose in writing the story is broken if this piece is removed. I come back to that a lot. Is there a story purpose for this thing that I'm including? There's the concept of the way a background color affects how you perceive the foreground color. You can put things in your story that exist so that we perceive the actual elements differently. Then it's not just background. It's background that influences our perception. That's a… It's complicated to think about, it's easier to picture with one of those optical illusion things with the grays or whatever. But that model works well for me, because sometimes I will say a thing and realize, oh, it's just a background. It doesn't matter to the story. Except its existence makes the story tell differently. Does that make sense?

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Yeah. When Mary was talking, sort of going back to the effect that it has, and I think that also ties to people… Whatever the gender spectrum looks like in the world you're creating, people will have opinions about it. That said, if everybody's opinions aligned to the opinions that you would expect to run into in our 21st century American white society, you probably haven't thought through the ramifications so much. If this is what everyone has grown up with, why is everybody acting like men are in charge… Men are real men, women are real women, people who are neither real men or real women are kind of the auxiliary floating off in the background someplace. That's the place… That's something to be worried about, I think.

 

[Brandon] All right. This has been really interesting. I hope this has been helpful to our listeners. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, I'm going to send you to a spreadsheet we have used before. Which is a spreadsheet about axes of power. We'll link to this in the liner notes. Basically, what I want you to do is take a look at your characters, taking a look at their gender, and think about the axes of power. Like, which is the dominant gender, which is the subordinate gender, where do things line up on that spectrum? So, for instance, in 21st century America, a cis man, which is a man who was born into a male body or with male genitalia. So, a cis man is at the top. He's the dominant. Cis women are farther down. When you get down to the lower end of the spectrum, we have non-binary, trans men, trans women, in terms of the power that they're able to exert in society and the dangers that they encounter just living in the world. So what I want you to do is I want you to take this idea and look at the characters that you have in your story and decide whether or not you are sticking with the default or if you are shifting it. Whichever choice you make, just do it deliberately. Don't do it by accident. That's all I ask. But, as an exercise, break out of your defaults.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.