Best of: N.K. Jemisin

Burn your five pound weights. I'm Robert Arson, I'm an athlete and fitness instructor and I am telling you, unless you have been limited to lighter weights by a medical professional, they're honestly inexcusable. You need to be lifting heavy and I'm talking especially to the women out there. F**k toned arms. What can your body do? This week on Project Swagger, what heavy means and rules to bring into your routine? Listen now. More and more Americans are finding themselves taking care of their kids and their parents at the same time. Well, you know, I joke that there's a dark game which I was playing, which family member will I disappoint today? How to care for others without burning out in the process. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Revealing the performance for writers is a necessity for them because you've got to be able to see behind the curtain in order to write the curtain. So for writers, they don't have the luxury of living with the performance or just the mask over a thing. You've got to understand the inner workings of people. Hello, welcome to The Losercu lines from the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's a holiday. And during the holidays, I'm trying to take a little bit of holiday, take a little bit of quiet, get some other things done, see some family. So I'm putting up some of my favorite shows from the past couple of years. This one I actually did just a couple of months ago, but I don't know. I loved it. This was one of the ones where I walked in not quite knowing how the conversation would go and I don't think I have ever enjoyed a single one of these more. This was my conversation with the remarkable science fiction and fantasy writer, N.K. Jemisin. She's awesome. She just won her third Hugo Award for Best Novel in a Row. No one has ever done that before. She was the first African-American novelist to ever win the Hugo for Best Novel. She's the first person at all to win three of them in a row. She won them for the broken earth trilogy. And I should say the way I got turned on to her work was actually one of you. I got emails and actually when I looked back, I'd gotten a couple emails, but one in particular said, "You know, you may like this broken earth trilogy. You may want to check out this author, N.K. Jemisin." And I did and I could not stop. The books are so good. They deal with some of the hardest and most searing questions I've ever seen in fantasy work. Her other books are great. The inheritance trilogy is amazing. So I was a complete fanboy when I contacted her for an interview. But what was so great about this was she was willing to do something pretty unusual. She does world building seminars where she teaches aspiring writers how to build science fiction and fantasy worlds. So rather than just do an interview, she agreed to do this live with me. I guess not live. We were live when we did it, but you were not hearing it live. But she agreed to do it in person with me. And watching her work, watching the way she thought through the world, watching the way she thought through changing the world, it gave me such an appreciation for what is going into these books and what this approach to thinking is. Her model of our world. I mean, this is a master class in thinking about worlds in models. Her model of our world is so sophisticated and deep that when you change even downstream small parts of it, she understands how it affects the whole thing. And it's by working off of that model of our world that she's able to create these amazing and trancing and rapturing new worlds. So I cannot recommend this conversation enough obviously because I'm putting it back up, but I think you all really enjoy it. So thank you to her for doing this. Thank you to you for giving us your time. Here is N.K. I'm a person. N.K. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for welcoming me. So we are going to do something that I am incredibly excited about today because I've never done it before. We're going to build a world. Okay. So what is world building in the science fiction fantasy sense because it seems to me to be a term that has a specific meaning that those who are not familiar with it may just not know. It does. It's one of the things that I think makes science fiction and fantasy unique among literary forms. Just because in a lot of cases, you're not necessarily doing a story that takes place in what we call the first world, which is our world, this world. We're often using secondary worlds, i.e. worlds that aren't earth, could be another planet, could be another reality, could be another universe. So it's somewhere where the laws of physics don't work the same way. There may be magic, there might be creatures or beings that don't exist in our world, could be strange environmental circumstances. Who knows? But that's basically it. And it's a staple of science fiction and fantasy writing. And what's the difference between world building and just writing a book or writing a story in a different world? I mean, it's not. There is no difference. World building is the process that you use to come up with the world to then write the story in. World building is not a substitute for writing a story. There are some examples of books that have been published that are basically nothing but worlds, like tokens, the Silmarillion, I'm mangling the name I always do. So that's basically a book of almost nothing but world building because it's the history of the Lord of the Rings. But for the most part, people aren't able to publish their books of world building. It's just an exercise that you do to prepare for writing and then you don't in order to make sure that you are writing well, you don't then drown your audience in all of the world building that you do. You just use it to provide flavor and environment and effect for a lot of the things. And in some cases, it provides allegories for the problems that the people are dealing with that are very much like our own problems, but just at one remove. So this is something that before I heard it, I never thought about it, but it obviously seems more straightforward. So when I'm reading science fiction or fantasy book, there is much more world built than I see. Yeah. Yep. We usually kind of suggest there's not like a convention on how to do it. There's a running a dodge in the science fiction and fantasy writing community of make sure that you aren't inflicting. I've suffered from my art and now so will you on your audience. So I usually tell people treat it like an iceberg. And so you've got 90% of it that you aren't going to see and the 10% is the part that's above the water. So that's what we talk about. So you do these world building workshops because you are a master at the craft. You have so generously offered to do this live. We're going to build a world life. So that works out. All right. Okay. So where do we start? How do we build a world? Well, you can start with the laws of physics. You can start with the universal level. I usually depict this as a kind of inverted pyramid where we're starting with the macro scale and working our way down to the micro. So you can start as high as the level of like how your universe is built. But then in a lot of cases that requires you to kind of understand things like, you know, how physics works. And I don't know that I necessarily want to get too deep into that. I usually start with the plan. Given how I did in physics, I appreciate that. Yeah, I never took physics. So all right. But so I usually started at the planetary level. And for the sake of doing the workshop, when I usually present it to writing students at writing workshops or MFA programs, the way that I usually do it is we start with the assumption of a world that is like Earth, a rocky planet, a terrestrial world, not a gas giant, for example. I mean, you can do a gas giant. It's just that you need to know something about gas giants before you're going to go too far into that. And we usually are going to assume that we're going to be working with people who are like us. You can run with completely different species if you want. I ended up in doing a workshop where we had a whole bunch of people that were sentient cats. And we decided that the Calico's rule the world, and there was a whole bunch of stuff about like catnet, drug trade. Anyway, so you started at the planetary level and we're going to assume Earth like planet. And so then let's start by letting you, since you're going to be my only guinea pig for this particular experiment, letting you pick how many continents we're going to work with. Well, I've always missed Pangaea. Oh, so you want to go forward. I'm just going to say straight forward. I just took a transatlantic flight and I found that to be too long. Well, you still have to travel the same distance. It would just be over the land. But wait, with that, no, that would be true. I mean, you're still dealing with the same amount of land mass. It's just that you aren't dealing with it spread out. Right. So my flight would have been shorter. Maybe. All right. Or possibly I'm just going to. I am very bad with questions of geographies. I'm just beginning with strong. But wait, I want us one meta question on the way before we jump in, which is that. So one of the things I'm hearing from you is that the purpose of the world building project, you need enough knowledge of the world to make the world feel realistic. Yes. And so the further you get, if you're trying to work off of a gas giant, what you need is to understand gas giants so well that when you are writing about them, you can explain them clearly and it will feel natural, it will feel authentic to the reader. That's the trick of that, I would imagine. We are not. understand the world that we live in innately because we live in it. But what that means is that every single one of us is an expert in surviving on a terrestrial world with a nitrogen-based atmosphere and a carbon-based organic system. So we all understand this because we live it. We aren't standing around having conversations with each other about, "Hey, nitrogen's pretty good today." But we do understand it. So the characters who are going to inhabit this world also need to understand it, which means that we do. So we've got to speak and think as the characters do, which means we're not going to be able to get that level of understanding. But it's basically that we need to think like the locals do and be able to speak like the locals do in order to make it feel real. All right. So panjia. All right. So we're going to go with panjia. And one of the things that I think people did not understand about the various panjias in our world because there have been more than one. Let's see. I'm learning things already. Yeah. We've had multiple supercontinent over time. Plate tiktonics never really stops. So one of the things people never understood about panjian our world is that it's gigantic. And that when the panjia exists, the interior of it tends to be fairly arid because prevailing winds, carrying water, often can't reach all the way over into the middle of the continent. So let's, yeah. So I'm just going to preface that. But then pick a spot somewhere in there where our culture that we're going to be dealing with our people and our culture are going to develop. So when you say pick a spot, what does that mean? Middle coast by a river. Give me an idea of where you want to put this. So let's be certainly not on the coast. Not on the coast. Okay. So enough that resourcing and water and so on are not impossible, but are not naturally advantageous. Okay. So I don't want to be too deep in the interior, right? All right. So what you said about the the aridness area, you might just not want to be in the interior. But um, yeah, think about Australia. Yeah, I've never, I would not want to be in Australia. Yeah, the outback. Sorry to my Australian. You know, I've always wanted to visit. I don't know that I necessarily want to live there. But um, you have to understand that your audience is bringing to the table. It's knowledge of one world, this world. And they are going to relate pretty much everything that they know about this world to whatever world you're creating. So if you're going to create a big continent with an interior that that's not well, you know, watered with rivers and things like that. And and probably wouldn't be because that far inland, like I said, there's, there's no way for the water to get there. Um, you're going to end up with basically a giant outback in the middle of this continent. So if we were thinking about the panjee as a US, let's say Nevada is where we're going. Right. Not the coast of California, but not California is pretty air, depending on where you are. Fair enough. Yeah. That's true. Baja California, all of that. Yeah. So it's really a question of where it's located close to the equator or farther away. So is it an temperate zone or is it an incant sunlight zone? So, so give me an idea of where this is, this is the difficulty of not doing this in person. I'm giving you an idea of where near the equator your spot is. Oh, we've, we've now so quickly gotten into places where I'm going to be trained. How poor my understanding of how, of how the earth works is. Let's say we're working with a desert. Let's say we're going, I have a, a familiarity with the Nevada desert of the various reasons related to my own life. Okay. We're working with a desert, pretty arid region. Okay. Let's say why don't we go with like the edge of the giant outback like area. Great. So still temperate, still, you know, maybe a little bit of rain, but it's just occasional and sparse and, you know, light spritz. Right. I am not familiar with Nevada and desert like regions. You're going to have to supply that information for me. I would have to do research to, to completely create this world. So imagine that climate then, you know, once we've picked a spot, then we, you know, once you understand what the climate is like, why don't you describe that to me since I don't fully understand Nevada. I've never lived there. So the world is about to learn that I have gone to Burning Man a couple of times and we're talking in early August. So it's on my mind. Okay. So we're about to get a description of Black Rock Desert, which would be a very bad place to set up a society. Oh, wow. Okay. But it is one of the only places where I have actually seen an unusual world built, which is why it came to mind. Interesting. Out of nothing, a world emerges. So dusty, a very fine alkaline dust, the floor is cracked and the more that you walk over it, the softer it gets. So over the course of people inhabiting it, it becomes more and more difficult to get around. Oh, they're frequent dust storms. I'm a little concerned about, again, building a world here. So we might want to move it because I don't think you can grow anything there. Oh, no. Or not anything significant. Is it like that only in August or is it like that all year long? It gets more rain at times. Okay. But my understanding is that this particular area is, and again, I just could be wrong, but it's not usable in that way. It's always pretty bare. And when you say alkaline, that also makes me suspect that's why things don't grow there. So all right. Let's move maybe a little further south. South of our proto-birding man, zone, to a place that's maybe more, a little bit more like the Sonoran Desert, which I did visit once. There's not much rain there. There's a, it's pretty arid, but there's a lot of arid-adapted plants there. Even some of it is just typical stuff like tumbleweeds and so forth, but lots of beautiful rock formations. There was at one point in the past an inland sea there, so there are a lot of fossils in the area. And you can find evidence of old forests and things that no longer exist. This Pangaea was not always a Pangaea. It came together. And at some point when that happened, it killed everything that was living in that spot. So all right. Let's assume that our people, and we're going to go with human beings for the sake of the exercise. You don't necessarily have to, like I said, sentient cats. Can we add a pre-hensile tail? Sure. Human beings actually do have an adaptation for pre-hensile tail. Human beings just plus a pre-hensile tail. Yeah. Sometimes people are actually born with tails. I don't know if they're pre-hensile, actually. No, I believe they're not, which has always been a disappointment. Oh, yeah. I watched a fair amount of thumb and cats when I was young. Oh my God, that's funny. They don't have tails, though, do they? Am I wrong with that at least some of them? No, I don't think so. Am I just mixing up different, like, tigers and fundras and. You know, you're calling me back to my 80s childhood and I don't remember. And I've just outed myself in front of a whole bunch of nerds is not knowing fonder cats well enough. Well, it's possible that I have, actually. Oh, okay. I'm going to call this up on my phone while we're talking. Just see. Yeah, I know things on their cats' have tails. I think this is going to be very. Pretty spots, really. Oh no, I'm sorry. I've totally nailed this. They definitely have tails. The first thing that I did search for that are cats' tails. Oh, interesting. So either I'm seeing fan art of them with tails. Oh. Or the headdales. You know, okay. All right. Yeah, I'll go with what you decide. If you want to give them tails, they got tails. They got tails. So they're people, but with tails. Oh, no, I think you're right. Okay. All right. But people with tails. Okay. So we've got people with tails. And so now that we have picked an environment and people with whatever adaptation they have that makes them unique, usually somewhere in this process of world building, we also insert something that I kind of jokingly call element X. An element X is usually the point of utter weirdness at which, you know, you're not in Kansas anymore. I'm now granted. The truth is, like, since this world is so different from our own, that is the element X. But you just stuck tails on human beings. So I guess that's also our element X or X. But to talk about this in a meta way, it'd be like in black panther vibranium is your element X. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great way to think about it. It's like a, you twist something so the world begins to evolve in a different way. Yeah. The biggest point of divergence from our world, because in this case, pretty much everything is a divergence. Were you going to say something? Now I was just thinking about what possible element X's could be. Well, what are some just interesting element X's in sci-fi? So as we're doing this, people also get a sense of how this is played out in things they've loved before. Well, let's say in Dune, I'm thinking of that classic that a lot of folks have read. First off, it takes place, you know, 10,000 years in the future. So that in and of itself is kind of an element X. So a setting can be an element X. Setting can be, time can be, the fact that human beings have effectively evolved a group of people who are capable of transiting space time. That's the spacers guild granted that's with the use of like extremely psychedelic drugs, but you know, they're able to do it. Or people who are able to use various mental powers, that's also an element X. So X and X is what it's always been called in sort of classic science fiction. Got it. X-Men mutations would be an element X. Yeah. Yeah. So psychic abilities, super strength, or just people who have unique abilities. In the Incredibles, the fact that they are supers is the element X. You know, that's an example. Yeah, as I've done this exercise before, I've actually the people that have done the workshop have come up with some of the most bizarre element Xs. Let's see, in one exercise, we ended up with a sentient Gulf Stream that eats people. So there was an ocean current. Like the rest of the ocean was perfectly normal, but there was this one ocean current that was like alive and hated you and would eat your ships. So people did not spread over this planet quite as easily as they did on ours because they kept getting eaten and they also developed a culture and a mythology around, you know, the evil current. So there was that. Another time I did this exercise, I presented it to a bunch of teenagers right before lunch and the student that I asked to draw the continents drew them in the shape of 12 identical wedges, just like pizza. So because they were hungry, we ended up with pizza world. And of course, why don't write sci-fi before lunch? Yeah, well, no. I mean, we ran with it. Maybe why you do like this. Yeah, yeah. What it meant was that the people who evolved on this world, you know, kind of once they developed science knew that their world could not possibly have naturally developed like this. One of the things you bring in a mind for me is I was a fan when I was younger of the Harry Turtle of Alternative Fiction series. Okay. And in the ones where there's a great, I actually have not read it in so long that I don't know if it's great, but it was when I read it. There's a series where aliens invade Earth during World War II. Oh, interesting. So the intervention, what's so interesting to me about it, thinking about it in your framework, is that obviously in terms of Earth, the element Dex is aliens coming. But for aliens the way he does it is that ginger, that ginger turns out to be a cocaine-like substance for them. So Earth includes for this alien race, an addictive drug that begins wreaking havoc and becomes a key plop point. So what happens? Do the Allies start lobbing ginger ale at them or what? You know, I don't remember exactly, but it becomes a lot of trading. It becomes ways that dissension under this, as I remember again, it's been a very long time, that this very well-oiled invasion machine begins to break down. Where initially human beings have no chance. One of the things that happens is that the interaction with Earth and ginger, particularly, becomes a way that the alien force itself changes, which then in turn creates possibilities for humans to mount. Not just a counter-strike, but to begin to create alliances, to create need that the aliens have on them. I remember it being very interesting, but it's interesting that the idea of having an element X going in both directions. Yeah, that is. And that's one of the things that's actually really a lot of fun about first-context stories. If they're well rendered, then you end up, yeah, you do end up having two element Dex's or two civilizations reacting to the sudden imposition of an element Dex. For the sake of this world exercise, usually we're dealing with an element Dex that's not a sudden intrusion. Usually we're dealing with something that's built into the world and that changes the way that people function in their world versus in our world. So past a certain point, it's no longer an exercise where we're actually building a people, but we just start talking about how cultures in our world develop. But one of the things that I usually try and kind of focus on is the cultural elements that form the basis of this culture. And those are usually derived from environment or something about this world. So for example, when I'm talking about sociological elements or cultural elements, I'm talking about how does their language develop? Or what is their religion like? What is it about their sexuality maybe that is unique compared to ours? And usually as part of the exercise, have the students or the people who are involved in the workshop, select one to three different elements that we're going to just sort of delve deep into. Why don't we go with one for the sake of this talk? So pick a sociological element that you want to kind of dig deep on and we can kind of figure out how that's going to shape this culture. So a thing that I would imagine in a world like this, is that the coast would naturally become the seats of power. That on the one hand, they have more protection. So they are only threatened on one side in the way that others are sort of, it's a more of a war of all against all. More protection against other cultures. Protects protection against other cultures. In the Asian, they can escape more easily. They can sort of travel more easily because they can board boats and go up and down. Now, I can imagine ways it wouldn't have evolved that way. But if I'm picking away, this one did evolve. So I imagine that sort of power radiates out of coastal capitals. Possibly. Remember that in our world, land and ocean, neither of those are barriers to the spread of a culture. Human beings all over the world, all cultures have come up with boats. So it is entirely possible that people living on the coast are so harried by pirates or something that they haven't been able to really develop because they're constantly attacked and their culture gets kind of knocked down. Again and again and again and again. That's happened in certain parts of our world. Sure. If you want to run with that, we can do that. No, I'm happy to run with a better one. Well, we're focusing on the folks who live in this desert-like area. So if that's the one you run, want to run with, it doesn't matter. There is no such thing as a better one in this case. Any cultural element that is different from our own world is going to make an almost exponential difference in how this world develops versus our own. So if you were thinking about how to twist something on these desert dwellers, how would you do it? I'm thinking of the fact that they have tails, but prehensile tails develop in species on our planet that do climbing. You need them for climbing purposes and in a desert there aren't trees. There are however rocks. I wonder if they live in cliffs, just offhand, and maybe they've built a culture where they've built entire cities into these giant rock formations, just off the top of my head. That's the first thing. Well, that count is something different enough though, given that we have cultures that are like that. It's different from the culture that is probably going to be reading the book. Yeah. Because, you know, there are certainly people who live in cliff dwelling cultures now, who may very well be reading science fiction in English, coming out of an American publisher. It is entirely possible thanks to colonization that all of these books are available and the internet. But for right now, that is something that's fairly different from the way that our world works. So I was just thinking of that off the top of my head. They are probably a poor culture compared to the coasts if you want to run with the idea that the coasts are wealthy and are more powerful than big cities. So the people who live in this desert are poor, they are sparse, there's fewer of them. But they have incredibly beautiful cities occupying the giant rock formations. I love it. Okay. Let's go with that. All right. Let's run with it. So once we're kind of into how the culture starts to develop, then we start talking about the ways in which that culture is sociologically different from our own. We start talking about syncretism differentiation, because Mogany economy, how did that culture get to be the way that it is? And do you want to define a few of those terms? Sure. Synchrotism is basically cultures building on what has come before. So, you know, the fact that this culture has tales means that at some point in there, probably very distant and sustrel past, they were used to living in a world with trees, or a world with things that tales were useful to climb. So maybe their culture, even though they're now living in cliffs, maybe their culture still venerates trees. Maybe it's still is built around the idea of what life in a forest is like. They've adapted, but their culture is still going to have elements that are deprecated from the time when they lived in forests. So maybe they still, oh, I don't know. Maybe they still venerate walking very quietly, even though in the desert that kind of doesn't matter. But in a forest it would. And so, you know, they're just incredibly quiet people. Maybe we found our name for them. They are the quiet people. I don't know. Differentiation is one of the ways in which cultures develop kind of in rivalry or in interaction with other cultures that is they want to be different from those people over their next door. So this is why in a lot of cases, cultures that develop in the same environment, next door to each other are so drastically different. Because in a lot of cases, they get their identity from, well, we ain't like those people. And so, you know, in some cases that does lead to warfare and so forth among very similar people. There's a bunch of different examples that I could throw out here. Cosmogony, where do we come from? How their ideas about where we come from may have developed. Different cultures in our world looked up at the sky and were able to kind of cobble together, you know, how the planets worked and figure out sort of basic astronomy. And a lot of them use that to develop different methodologies. So, these two things came up with the idea of the gods living in constellations, for example, or the constellations telling some of them. stories that were rooted in their own mythology. That's an example. An economy is exactly what it is in our world. How do they get and distribute resources? So, you know, we might want to actually dig a little deeper into that one. People in a desert who were formerly forest dwellers, who are living in a world where they are the poor cousins of big city folk. How do they make their money? How do they survive in this world? I think the question here is, do you want to make them traders or raiders? My guess is that they wouldn't last long as raiders because if the people in the big cities have more resources, then they can rapidly develop defenses or abilities against any raiders and eventually fight them off and probably eventually track them into the desert and wipe them out. So, traders it is. Traders it is. Yeah, raiding doesn't work too well once you've got an economic disparity between the groups. So, one group usually just takes over the other at that point. So, let's say traders, what is it that they're getting out of this desert that people in the city would pay top dollar for? Do you have any thoughts on that? So, let me think about this for a minute. Or at least pay enough that the people in the desert can survive and make a living. Well, this is for the problem that I just pulled this out of my mind immediately. It immediately comes up. But you have a crew of people who are living in unusually high dwellings, who have adapted to an unusually rough environment and who, let's say, compared to other cultures, have an unusually communal culture. They're compared to more individualistic cultures that have developed cultures that are a little bit more internally trading based. If we're going to use the Burning Man build here, they are a culture that is less trading internally with itself that is trying to build more things communally that has in order to survive in very difficult conditions, has developed a more almost kibbutz-like way of erecting a society, raising children, communicating with one another. And so, let's say that they are builders. Well, I don't know where they get the resources to build. What they're actually trading is their expertise at creating dwellings. Dwellings that are unusually well designed to be transported and dwellings that are unusually well designed to withstand harsh climates. Well, you know, that actually makes me think building into cliffs does require the development of some really complex and advanced architecture. For one of my books, I ended up actually going to Kenyan desh, I'm meddling the name, Kenyan desi-di-yagi, something like that. It looks like Kenyan desheli, if you kind of render it in its phonetic looking pronunciation, but it's not pronounced like that. It's Kenyan desh-y-y basically. And it's a little valley or, I don't know, Kenyan in Arizona in the Navajo Nation. And if you go down into it, you can see where the ancient Anasazi had built cliffs, a thousand feet above the ground. And whole villages were built up there. You saw the architectural techniques that they were using to kind of do this, supports and struts and tackles and pulleys, used at a time when basically, you know, we didn't think that civilizations were doing a lot of this advanced architecture and construction type stuff. So that makes sense. It follows that the people who come from this culture would have learned some unique building design techniques and would farm that out to people in the cities who were like, hey, we don't know what we're doing. We're still living in huts on stilts because of floods. Maybe you can offer us some different suggestions or some, maybe you can help us build skyscrapers. That would be one. And then the other thing that you just maybe think of because there would be some other work on a journalism project, not now a leisure project about global water crises, which is that a desert culture would be adapted to less water. And so if you imagine, as has happened in some of your books that I love, that you're going through a time of geographic stress, of comodological stress, and so you're going through a drought. And so perhaps you're dealing with a poor culture that has traditionally been poor and has traditionally been a little water deprived. And so as Manchur Survival Midsat, and now the rest of the world is beginning to deal with somewhat more similar things. So some of the techniques that they have developed are all of a sudden in water reclamation. Water reclamation. Oh, interesting. Okay. All right. That works. So that there's knowledge they have. And so now they're there at a moment when perhaps past poverty and ways of life that were previously looked down on all of a sudden have some value. Well, I mean, that actually requires us to do some world building on the people of the coasts and figure out whether they are they are the kind of culture that would be willing to listen to people that they want scorned to because we have seen from human history that does not happen. That's a fair point. Yeah. You know, I'm reminded off the top of my head of there was a period of time where Vikings and the Inuit cohabited the same environment. I want to say Greenland, it might be Iceland. I always get those mixed up. It's horrible. But where they were cohabitating on the same land and the Inuit had learned to hunt and eat seal because that was one of the ways to kind of keep their nutrient level high that you couldn't grow very much in that environment. And the Vikings just would not eat seal. Now, you know, according to them, the seal tasted bad. I don't blame them for being like it was gross. But that said, because they would not adapt, you know, the Vikings did not last very long in this environment. Whereas the Inuit did. They're still there now. Of course, in modern times, everybody's there. But, you know, so this is an example of, you know, kind of in our own world, how you see people who could listen to the locals, could listen to the indigenous folk on how to live and survive in their land and don't. And we've just not seen a whole lot of evidence of that happening in our society in our world. Support for the Great Area comes from hymns. ED, which, as everyone knows, a shorthand for erectile dysfunction is more common than many people realize. And dysfunctional erections can be easier to treat than you might expect. With hymns, you can connect online with a licensed provider to explore personalized treatment options, all handled discreetly and on your terms. Through hymns, people who suffer from the consistent inability to achieve or maintain interactions firm enough for sex can get access to personalized prescription treatment options if a prescription is appropriate. hymns says their options range from customized treatments to trusted generics and they can cost up to 95% less than brand names. hymns wants to help you get back to your old cell. Achieving functional erections is not a one-size-fits-all approach. They say they put your health angles first with real medical providers making sure you get what you need to get results. You can get simple online access to personalized affordable care for ED, hair loss, weight loss, and more. Visit hymns.com/greatarea. That's hymns.com/greatarea for your free online visit hymns.com/great featured products include compound and drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions, and important safety information. Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a new business has never been easy, but without the right tools it can feel almost impossible. Shopify says they can help set you up for lasting success. Shopify is the commerce platform used by millions of businesses around the world. They say they can help you tackle all those important tasks in one place from inventory to payments to analytics and more. No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. Let's Shopify be your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. You can get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. It's time to turn those wood ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today at Shopify.com/box. Go to Shopify.com/box. To zoom out on this for one second, I hear you do a lot here and it makes sense having read a lot of your work, is that I'll often suggest something that is very straightforward. Maybe the coast have a lot of power or these people they haven't had a lot of water so they know how to work with that a lot of water but all of a sudden. It has often seem to me in your work that there is a darker view of human nature and the way human societies interact. It seems that the work is often dealt with the question of do societies become so ingest they almost can't be redeemed. And that one of the questions that that raises, which is probably a more realistic way of thinking about how societies evolve, is it often seems like when you're thinking of how a world would design itself, how a society would run itself, the things would run straightforwardly as if it was designed by an engineer. But the question of how worlds actually build themselves is cultural and really based around going back to things you said a couple minutes ago about differentiation, that actually organizing principles are about how the culture is thought about themselves. And that creates a very, very different set of downstream adaptations or lack of adaptations to your point about the Vikings. Well, I mean, the thing that you have to do in order to world build well is understand how our world works. And I don't think it's necessarily a dark view of human nature. I think it's a view of human nature that's informed by actual history. And the sad non-ist truth is that our history is full of people being awful to each other. Also, our history is full of people being great to each other. So I tried to depict both. But when you're talking about societies and how societies develop, you do always have to understand that human societies are not logical. They don't make such a big point. Yes, you have to understand that the dynamics that dictate how we do things are not a simple matter of, hey, those people over there have a great idea. Why don't we borrow that or why don't we talk to them and get their expertise? You're dealing with power dynamics. You're dealing with egos. You're dealing with psychology and sociology and all the aspects of human nature. And so it's important to understand when you are doing world building. It's important to understand the sciences. It's important to understand both the physical sciences of how our world works and the social sciences of how people work. Because, like I said, the world that are people that your readers know best is our world. So you've got fantastic research available to you if you want to explore it on how people have done in our world these exact same things. So there's no reason to just kind of make assumptions or pull things out of whole cloth. We've got the entirety of human history to draw from, for examples of how people react when they see another culture doing something that might be a good idea. And frequently they dig in their heels and decide we're not going to do it because that's coming from those people over there and they don't know anything in their stupid and that kind of thing. The other possibility there that seems now more evident to me is that what I said was that their status would raise and their prospects would raise by having something other people wanted. But probably more realistic way of putting that is that their threat would raise by having something other people wanted. Yeah, and they would be in danger. And they would be in more danger. Yeah, that's very likely. I actually thought about that. But I was like, let's keep this brief. Well, I mean, okay, so one of the elements that I usually cover in this world building workshop, once we get to the cultural level, we're starting to go into what I call micro world building, i.e. the way that the people develop or the way that the culture develops in which the story takes place. And one of the things that you have to figure out is what the power dynamics are going to be like. So when we're talking about power in the sociological sense, we're talking about the ability to control other people. That's really what that means. Sometimes in subtle ways. We're talking about the power to coerce other people or to force other people to do something, but with impunity on your part, you can hurt those people and you won't get punished by your government for doing so. That kind of thing. Also, you start to think about like in our world, who is the default? Who is considered normal? Who is treated as marginalized or who is treated as abnormal? We also spend some time in the workshop talking about who's got power over time, like talk time. There have been a number of studies that have kind of come to light in the last few years or so, where we've got all this common wisdom in our society that women talk too much. Women just will talk your ear off. But when actual studies of who dominates conversations have been kind of reviewed, it's clear that many are the ones who are doing like two thirds of the talking. And that women are perceived as talking too much when they're actually only talking maybe like 25 to 30% of the time. And that's just our particular cultural dynamics. We are a patriarchal society. We react badly. Men and women, all genders, react badly when women talk versus when men talk. And so it changes our perception of reality. And we literally don't realize that people who are speaking less than 50% of the time are actually not dominating the conversation. So we have to kind of be aware of how power works in our own society and depict these mechanisms of these power dynamics or how power dynamics typically work in our created society as well. So I really like the way you put all that. And one of the things that I think about in your books is that what's often interesting is that you portray societies where people who have power are subjugated. Well, I mean, what do you mean by power? So right, people who have what one would what one would naturally think of as it's a very good point. So people who have the ability to summon physical force. Yeah. You know, I actually don't know if pronounce it or Regenese or Rogeny or Rogenese. I'm sorry, who can cause massive geological fluctuation or in the inheritance trilogy. Gods are in different ways held captive. So you're right, they don't have power, right? Power is the thing they don't have. Even as there's a kind of a potentiality within them that again, in a less subtle rendering of the world, you would say, oh, these are the individuals or creatures or whatever on top. Well, remember that we're talking about sociological power versus I don't know, force. Yeah. So sociological power can level or imbalance the ground between groups that have physical power. And this is not a thing that is unusual or surprising. I mean, because again, we've got the whole of human history to kind of look at. We've got societies that have been dominated by a minority before. And still do. And still do. So we've seen how this mechanism works on our own world, where you've got a vast population of people who, if they just threw themselves at their oppressors enough, they would be free. But the sociological mechanisms can level that ground, can make up for the sheer numbers of people. And it's not necessarily a good thing. I'm not saying it's a good or a bad thing. I think it's a bad thing in our own world. But it's how power works. It's how power defends itself. You know, how we we set up a society in which you've got self-prepetuating systems of people who are being oppressed, are told again and again that they're supposed to be oppressed, that it's a good thing that they're being oppressed. They internalize that and they eventually start to reinforce that same system within themselves. And so we've seen this happen again and again in our own world. And again, we need to understand how our world works if we're going to be rendering this in another world. So yeah, in the Broken Earth trilogy, you've got people who have the ability to literally move mountains. But there aren't very many of them. And one of the things that the other people, the people who do not have the ability to move mountains have figured out to do is to grab these folks while they're young, kill them if they're found when they're older. But you know, when you when you find them young, take them to a place where they can be basically indoctrinated with the idea that their role is to serve, that they are living on the sufferings of their betters, that they are inherently harmful, evil, flawed, bad people, and that only by the sufferings of their betters should they be allowed to function because otherwise they're a threat to all that exists. And when you tell people stuff like this, especially from a young age, when you tell people this again and again and again, it's brainwashing. It's the same technique that works with marketing, just less, less overtly harmful. And so human minds are susceptible to manipulation just like this. Human societies are susceptible to manipulation on this level. I mean, this is just one of the things that I try and get across. So how would you think about displaying power in this society or creating? My guess is that if the people in the cities are starting to have a water crisis, I'm just pulled off the tap in my head, and they have nothing but contempt for the desert dwellers who know how to survive with water, the people in the cities will become more profligate in their abuse of water. They will form a culture that around basically flouting how much water they've even if it's not much and even if it's dwindling. And they've They will waste it more on purpose just to kind of stick it to those people in the desert. Or just to kind of remind themselves that they're more powerful, they're better people. They're awesome. So we can do this. We can use up this water and, you know, O'L. Sucks to be. We don't believe that we're going to run out of water. They're probably going to tell themselves that, you know, just like in our world, people tell themselves that there's no need to do anything about climate change. You know, God is going to save us from climate change. God sent us scientists. So I don't know why we aren't doing anything about that, but that's a whole other conversation. There's another thing you make me think of, which is I'm Californian, and we have gone through in recent years some terrible droughts. And one of the ways I noticed that being, I don't think managed is the correct word, but message is maybe the correct word, is that a lot of usages of water that people broadly had to do, and particularly that were spread across society, pushed on. So getting free water at restaurants, right, which is certainly more important if you're low income, then if you're high income, that became something that, I don't know if you are proud of, but it became questioned. And you know, how long should your showers really be? Yeah, but that's not the thing that's coming. But that's not the thing. We have massive agricultural use, which is very wasteful. We have lawns, we have cough courses, we have pools, we have fountains. It seemed to me watching the way people talked about it. There was a constant effort to stigmatize uses of water that were very common and not that big of a deal. And there was also a very big effort among businesses to try to make people pay for water that they were using in small ways. I mean, sod and hotels, you saw it in restaurants, you saw it in, you know, when you're washing your hands or when you're, you know, doing things just humans need to do. Meanwhile, the questions of industrial use, the things that actually made people rich off of water, those were protected. And certainly not questioned. So I do wonder in a world like this, if you wouldn't begin to see a backlash amongst or just a lash towards usages of water that were more essential as people tried to protect the usages of water that were the things that gave them power. Well my guess is that the people of the city would start blaming the desert dwellers for the dwindling water resources among other things. Yeah. That is how our power dynamics tend to work. People with power immediately wanted to flit or project their own misuses. And to other people so that they can continue to live the way that they want without making changes, even if they are actually the people that are kind of the core of the problem, but they've got the power to deflect. And so they do. This is a thing that we see over and over again in our world. And yes, if you depict it in this fictional world, your audience will understand exactly why it happens because they're used to it because they see it because they get that that is how societies work. So perhaps the idea of just living in the desert at all, having a society in the desert at all becomes stigmatized, becomes something that people begin turning eye or on. Well, then in that case, you're potentially facing the displacement of this group of people, possibly forcible displacement of this group of people. Even though these people are capable of surviving in the desert just fine, you know, the society is wrath would indeed focus on that. I think you're completely right there. So perhaps that's a power dynamic we're beginning to see in this world. Yeah. So I usually then with the workshop, now that we've kind of figured out the power dynamics, we then start focusing more on, you know, again, assuming that we're going to be focusing on the desert society, what that society is structured or how that society is structured. We focus on their roles within society like family roles, gender roles, how their socioeconomic status system works, what their careers are like. We focus on, you know, kind of how their power dynamics manifest within the society. So, you know, as you mentioned, they've probably got a little bit more collective communal way of doing things. So we'd need to work out how that functions. We'd need to work out things like, for example, what are their standards of beauty if they don't, if they don't wash with water, let's say they do dust washing, which is a perfectly valid thing and it's perfectly clean and healthy. It's what a lot of desert societies do. But let's say they do dust washing. And so, you know, maybe looking like you've got supple wet skin is nothing in their society. Having kind of leathery sun damaged, slightly skin feels normal for them. And now granted, you know, we should also talk about like, we would have talked already about, you know, kind of how they develop what their skin color is. We noticed that in our own world, for example, people with darker skin tend to be more resistant to UV radiation. Therefore, they don't develop wrinkles as easily that kind of thing as we call it black don't crack in our world. And so, maybe their standard of beauty is built around, you know, how well does your face resist sunlight? You know, for example, we would talk about what lower status people in the society do and what their lives are like. We would talk also about, you know, what does it look like to defy your status in the society? You know, we've got people in our world, for example, who will often attempt to defy the social order by doing the very same thing that higher status people can get away with, but normally lower status people can't. So I was just kind of thinking off the top of my head of man spreading, which is a thing here in New York. So in a lot of cases, you'll see guys will come on the subway, man spreading for people that don't know, usually men will come on the subway, will sit down with their legs blade out really widely, and take up as much space on the seat as possible, which makes it difficult for other people to sit down. And so, you know, we've started seeing the phenomenon of woman spreading and the woman spreading is basically a defiance of our patriarchal society. We see women come in, flop down next to a guy and immediately start having like leg war with him, where he starts to spread, she spreads right back. And so that is a defiance of, you know, it's a minor defiance, but it's a little example of the ways in which people do things. As Gandhi said, a spread for a spread leaves the whole subway full, basically. We see people unable to sit down. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. And nobody's happy then. Yeah, that never ends well. But, you know, on the other hand, you can't let them get away with it. So you can do something. So once you've kind of figured out the roles and how the power dynamics work in this world, then you can actually start getting into the characterization of the particular person you're going to focus on in the society and what it is that they're dealing with. And then you can come up with a plot and all that. But the world building exercise, remember, is not writing. The world building exercises, what you do before you write. So once you've got all of these basics in place, then you can proceed. But that's basically how I do it. So first, I want to thank you for doing that exercise with me with us. That was such a, that was such one of pleasure and such a wonderful geek out for me. But it's also so fascinating to see the way you do that. Thank you. How, how do you learn how to world build? I know. Because it's not a pure act of imagination. It's something very, watching you do that, it's something very different. I mean, that's, that's how I world build. People who become writers usually study other writers techniques. You can find other writers out there who will put together books of like how to do world building. Or this is how I do world building. And every writer kind of comes up with the synchrotizes. Every writer comes up with their own idea of how they want to do this. For me, because I read a lot of nonfiction for fun, I read a lot of books like Jared Diamonds books, you know, the collapse and guns, germs and steel. There are many critiques of those books, but they're interesting exercises in kind of understanding how our world came to be what it is. I read a lot of history for fun. Yes, I am that kind of nerd. So, you know, and in my day job life, I was a psychologist. So I have an interest in how societies develop, how human minds and behavior develops. And these are things that are just exciting to me. And therefore, my world building techniques center around how did our world build. Therefore, we can look at how another world might function along the same lines. But that's just how I do it. That doesn't mean it's the only one true way. One of the interesting things in the way I saw you doing that is that it seemed to me that in order to world build, that what you had done is first created a very sophisticated model of how our world actually works, which is something that I'm not sure people even realize whether or not they always have, or maybe they do always have, but they don't always realize that they have it, right? What its assumptions are. But when people build the climate models that spit out what might happen if you change, you know, the up to four degrees or you change how quickly oceans acidify, what they're creating is a model. of how our world works that they then can begin to change parameters up. And what it seems to me that you've actually done is create a much more sophisticated and visible to yourself, model than most people have of how you believe our world works. So that every time I offered an alteration, that you understood what it did in your model, much more quickly than I understood what it did in my model. Hmm, well, I mean, my suspicion is that if you were the kind of nerd that I was in sat around reading about how do deserts do, you know, how do mountains. This is the kind of thing that excites me that is, you know, I actually, you know, go grab a book on Arrogony, which is the science of mountain formation, actually. I just mangle it into a magic term. But, you know, one of the most exciting things that I can do is like go study of volcano. And I follow a lot of Earth science accounts on Twitter and things like that. But for me, that is the most interesting aspect of world building is, yes, having that model in my head tweaking aspects of that model and using the comparison to our world to figure out how it might work in this world. I believe it's kind of a necessity for science fiction writers to understand humanity and our planet and our physical world as well as our sociological world. That is the basis of science fiction. It's also one of the bases of fantasy. It's just, you know, less acknowledged. But it's one of the bases of science fiction that, you know, you're focusing on how does science impact human life and how does it impact the stories and the people that we're going to be trying to tell? It's just that I don't confine it to the physical sciences. I'm interested in, you know, sociology and anthropology, all of these things too. So, support for the show comes from Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. The reality is that we're all susceptible to having a private information stolen. Public figures and private citizens alike. Delete Me can help protect you and your family's personal privacy or the privacy of your business from doxing attacks before sensitive info can be exploited. Our colleague Claire White recently tried Delete Me. Delete Me is a tool that anyone online should have in their back pocket. Delete Me has saved me not only hours of removing my data from online, but has saved me hours of worrying about who has their hands on my data and what they're doing with it. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to join DeleteMe.com/vox and use promo code vox@checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joinDeleteMe.com/vox and enter code vox@checkout. That's joinDeleteMe.com/voxcodevox. Honest to God like f***** skinny. I want to be jacked without context, tone and sculpt are rooted in diet culture. We're inheriting a lot of nonsense that makes specifically women feel like they have to shrink in order to expand. And I'm just saying no let's just like lift heavy s**t and like take up space. That's the expansion. I'm Revanart Son and this week on Project Swagger I break down the strategies that helped me build confidence and feel at home in my body especially after two babies. Listen now at Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts. You know when I came into this conversation my thought was it's so exciting to talk to somebody do do something so different than what I do. And one of the things I'm so interested to realize is that it's actually a lot more similar. One of my critiques of a lot of journalism is that political journalism I should say and pun- and punditry is that we are under theorized that we either think in models but we don't share those models with the audience. We're not saying to people okay here is the framework of what we're looking at and why we think what's going to happen is going to happen or we don't realize that we're thinking in models. So for a long time when I enter journalism I always think that there's a tendency for political pundits. They see something happening in their 20s and 30s and they get very stuck on how things were then. So there is this constant belief that if only things would return to the great cooperation of Tip O'Neal and Ronald Reagan and it was this endless trope in journalism and it was so frustrating to those of us who came in when everything was already polarized. And I was worried with myself now that things are going to change or maybe already have and I'm going to be stuck in sort of 2005 to 2015. But it seems to me to be such an important thing in life to know what your model actually is and to be able to see well enough to see if it's begun to fail you and so how you need to alter it. But I really think thinking in models is something we don't teach well, we don't talk about well, but it's something we're we're always doing and if we don't realize we're doing it then we don't realize how to either apply rigor to it or how to discipline it or how to even realize a way could lead us astray. Well I mean that's actually something that comes out of for me anti-racist training and anti-apression training in general. But you know one of the ways in which you start to understand how our society works is to understand your own contribution to whatever system exists and that means you need to understand yourself. You need to acknowledge or just kind of recognize where you fit within the various hierarchies that dominate our lives. You know you need to understand your own status, you need to understand the power that it gives you over other people, the ways in which you may have unconsciously exerted that power or perpetuated systems or or perpetuated oppressive things on other people without realizing that that's what you were dealing. And if you want to improve the world you need to understand how the world actually works, you need to understand your own contribution to those things. So you know that's that's really the same framework I guess at the same the same way of thinking about fiction. If you are going to depict various societies, societies that differ from our own in terms of the environments that they're in or the politics but that still contain human beings whose mind functions, minds function the way that human beings do and whose societies function the way human societies have functioned in our own world, then we need to understand how our world got to be the way that it is. And I think that's an absolute necessity for anybody that's going to be writing fantasy or science fiction that's that's set in a different place or even set in our own world. It is an element of good writing to make sure that you are getting the world right and the people right. And that's a thing. But it also seems to me to be an element of just good of good analysis. Something I hear in what you're saying there. It seems to me when I watch a lot of the debates going on in politics and in culture right now that there is often a collision between people who have been inside a system they have benefited from. And so do not believe it is a system. Do not see it as a system just see it as the way things are. See it as the way as the right way to do things. Right, the right way to do things. Tradition, the outcome of natural causes in different ways versus people who have often not benefited from it. Not in every case right often people do work to try to understand the I'm generalizing somewhat here. But but I do think a lot of that work starts with people who have been outside of the system and have had to understand what the system actually is. What are the parts of it that they are inside? What are the parts of it that they are outside? And a tremendous amount of the debates that I watch going on right now are actually about whether to understand something as a contingent system erected by people in order to affect certain outcomes versus oh that's just the way the way things are. And if you're not succeeding in it well you know that's the meritocracy sorry buddy. Yeah well I mean it comes back to what we were saying about how how societies frequently choose not to listen to the people that they don't respect. We are a society that is multiple hierarchical I don't want to get into deep sociological terms like Kuri Arche and so forth but that is hierarchical in ways that intersect with each other and impact each other in ways that a lot of us are not willing to listen to or look at because that is a means of diminishing our own power. And it's a thing that we don't necessarily you know a lot of us aren't willing or capable of doing. As we start to understand how our own privilege impacts the ways in which we interact with other people then we can modify our behavior but if we don't have any vested reason to try and give up that privilege or if we're told that you know giving up that privilege is somehow a loss or somehow harmful then you know we're not going to do that. And this is kind of one of the things one of the reasons why I do this workshop. A lot of the people who are writing science fiction and fantasy don't yet understand how performative a lot of what we do is how it's not just performative but it's difficult. defensive and a lot of the things that we think of as natural in our society are a defense mechanism meant to protect us against people that we perceive as coming to take our power and our privilege. And so if you introduce writers to the idea that everything that develops in a society has developed for a reason, it's not just natural. Human behavior has learned. Societies are developed. None of this stuff just happens. Then that makes those writers more conscious and more capable of depicting not just a secondary world but even our world. It makes them better at analyzing human behavior. That's the purpose of the workshop is helping people understand why people for lack of a better term. And I can see why that would be valuable for journalists as well. I'm surprised to hear that there isn't any kind of dedicated training to that effect. I'm psychologist do this. So maybe you guys need to come to psych school. I don't know. There are a lot of schools we could benefit from coming to for a little while. Something else that I've been thinking about in your presentation that we sort of worked off of here and that I read before and was this idea of experiential learning versus didactic learning. And you have this wonderful recommendation that you should increase immersion as difference increases. The further you get away from what people are used to, the better off you are trying to help them experience it. Just live through it as opposed to just telling them how it is. On the one hand, I think that we sort of use that principle interestingly in this podcast. This is quite different than what we normally do. And we did it through immersion. And now it turns out there's a lot of common ground. So I enjoy that immensely. But I'm also just fascinated about that as a principle, both for these questions of science fiction, but also of journalism, of anti-racism training, of all these different things that as you're trying to make people understand ideas or ways of looking at systems that are quite alien to them. So much of the way I think we go as things become further divided is we go towards more dicticism if I'm saying that right. We become more declarative, right? No, you don't understand. It's like this, not like that versus more immersive because other one is very hard to become immersive. Yeah. But also does more willing to try to, I don't know the willing is the right word here. But as a principle, the idea that the further something is from somebody's life experience, the more you have to help them understand how it is to live it, not tell them how it is to be lived. I think that's a very interesting insight that you have here about world building, but certainly seems to me to be true about other things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's not just the more you have to do to help them understand it, the more they will be incapable of understanding it. If you don't experience some things yourself directly, there's always going to be a gap. You're never going to be able to fully get whatever's happening in that other alien space or that other alien culture. You can approximate, you can come close, you can attempt, you can be willing to try and that may make a difference as well. I talk a lot about travel and the fact that my own understanding of the world has been shaped not just by reading books, but by actually traveling because my father loved to go to other countries and would just kind of drag me along with him even when I was fairly young. And I know that this is a thing that not a lot of Americans get to do. And it's not a thing that everyone can do. It's financially there's some barriers there, although my dad was a poor artist, and he found ways to make it work. But there's so many examples of little interactions that suddenly illuminate just completely different ways of thinking. I always sort of tell the story of how I went to Italy a few years ago. And we were staying in, this is before Airbnb, but we were staying in little cottage on an olive farm for a few days. And the family that was renting the cottage to us came to pick us up and we were just kind of chatting. And when we introduced ourselves, they asked us, so who are you? And we all introduced ourselves by saying our names and what we did for a living. Hi, I'm Nora, I'm a writer, my father was an artist, so we all introduced ourselves by profession. And the Italian people immediately introduced themselves by saying, I'm from this area, I've lived here all my life, or I'm from Milan, and my people are blah, blah, blah. And so they all talked about their affiliations. No one mentioned a profession. And it was much later that I understood that Americans introduced themselves by profession as a means of kind of assessing each other's socioeconomic status right off the bat. We are such a capitalistic, sociologically oriented culture, I'm sorry, cast oriented culture for lack of a better description, that what we want to do right off the bat is figure out who is worth listening to, who is important enough to merit respect. And who is it? And that is one of the reasons why we introduce our professions before we introduce any of the other sociological bindings that we might possibly choose to do. And that's just an element of our culture. And it's an element of our culture that's got some really kind of messed up roots when you think about that. We assess each other by visuals, but also we try and assess those non-visuals by that introduction of profession. And so just that simple exchange suddenly and illuminated aspects of American culture to me that had just seemed natural. It just seemed like the thing to do. When you introduce yourself where you're from doesn't matter, but what you do does. And so little things like that, when you start to immerse yourself in another culture just enough, you're not going to be able to completely immerse because you're not part of that culture. But if you immerse yourself, if you even like sort of dip a toe in that other culture, you're going to suddenly understand a lot more about your own. And I think that's a thing that yeah, lots of professions could use. That is such a gutting insight. Yeah, so I live in Washington DC and people complain here all the time or people come here complain that you were saying this about America, but it's particularly at least from what people tell me through here that you meet people and they very quickly say what do you do. And I've always been a defender of that question because when I hear that, I say, well, look, like you've got to ask a follow up to hello. You got to figure out something and people spend roughly eight hours sleeping, spend eight hours at work and they spend, you know, then the rest of it is like some combination of household tasks and leisure and, you know, so why not try the biggest chunk first, which always made a lot of sense to me. But my guess is that you're probably right about what that's really doing as opposed to being right about what that's really doing. And as such, it's playing a role, not of information gathering, but sort of, yeah, sorting. That's a good thing. It's much easier word to say. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the whole point of it is, is, you know, we are a cast society. I never thought of us as a cast system until I kind of studied enough history and realized we're exactly like any other society in this world that we've named a cast society. We just don't call ourselves that until about what 50, 60 years ago, we had the Jim Crow system, which was a cast system based on race. We are beginning to try and fight the legacy of our cast system based on gender where women don't get paid as much and are effectively barred from certain professions and so on. And other genders as well are, you know, men are, they struggle to get into certain professions these days as well if they want to. And their struggles are not just, you know, structural, but also reinforced by other men who would tease them or, or, you know, mistreat them if they choose to go into those professions. So, yeah, I mean, we are a cast system. And in a cast system, it is crucially important for people to figure out quickly when they're meeting a stranger where they fit into the cast system. And that is one of the ways in which we do it. We never admit that that we're a cast system. We don't just come up and say, "Hey, you're of the white guy cast and, you know, I'm of the black women cast." And blah, blah, blah. We don't do it that way. We obfuscate it with lots of, lots of performative stuff, but, you know, that's effectively what we're doing. So to the point you've made in different ways throughout this discussion, which is that we are all an expert on the world in which we grew up, the country, the land. But the flip of that is we are all quite limited by the world in which we're up. It's hard to imagine a society that would emerge within a gaseous star, but it's also just hard to imagine how Italy works. So how does doing all this work world building, having built now many, many worlds, having helped other people build all these different worlds? How does that change? Or how has it changed over time? What you see in your immediate world? Does what does that do to the lens on which you turn on your own society? Hmm. I am dead. definitely a lot more aware of the provenance of these weird little rituals that we inflict on each other. And I'm aware of the fact that they are rituals, that they are performances that are designed to do a particular thing. And I'm less patient with those rituals because I know it's kind of like performance. So I think that that probably impacts how I relate with other people. I don't know how I come across to other people, but as I guess as I've gotten more known or my books have become more popular, I've gone into public spaces where I've met people who will introduce themselves to me and they're shaking and they're like, you know, I've always loved your books and I'm so excited. I'm so nervous and freaked out by the chance to meet you and I'm like, wait, wait, okay, slow down. First of all, let's analyze why are you treating me in this sort of worshipful fashion. Who told you that published authors were on this higher caste than you and why are you deferring to that caste designation? I don't have that conversation with people, but I'm more aware of the fact that that nervousness is something that our society encourages in subtle ways and that there's a problem with it, that that nervousness and that tendency to treat people who you perceive as being of a different social status or higher social status, that tendency to treat those people as beyond reproach and beyond something is gochure or minimal as like having a simple basic conversation, you know, shaking somebody's hand and talking to them like a human being, I'm more aware of the fact that that's just crap now. It's just, it's nothing. And I find myself just constantly impatient with it. And I have to remember, I was still raised, you know, as a Southern woman. So I still, you know, have kind of knee jerk things that I still do, but I also have to remember that not everybody thinks of it as performance. Some people think of it as, you know, the way that you're supposed to be. And revealing the performance for writers is a necessity for them because you've got to be able to see behind the curtain in order to write the curtain. But you know, in everyday life, I understand that not everybody does that. I kind of feel like more of a should. I wish that more of us would, but you know, I'm still renegotiating how I relate with society and with other people these days. Well, not the fall into all the chaps you just mentioned, but this has obviously been one of the most thrilling and fun and mind-expanding conversations I've had on this podcast. So I'm very, very grateful for it for the work you've done, which I've always enjoyed. And I want to ask you the question we all used to end the conversation, which is, what are three books that you would recommend to the audience? I have difficulty recommending books. I'm a giant fan of Martha Wells books. She's got a new novella coming out in the Murderbot series. Soon, the Murderbot books are this adorable little set of kind of almost old school science fiction set in the future about people exploring other worlds with an artificial human basically, a part robotic part. I don't know what to call him. I'm sorry, it, Murderbot has no gender and does not want a gender. And Murderbot basically is a bot that was designed to serve human beings but that has hacked itself and made itself free and really just wants to sit around watching soap operas all the time and is saving people and saving the galaxy for himself. But really, it just wants the free time to sit around and watch the latest episode of whatever show that it's downloaded. So I love that series. I just finished reading Octavia Butler's unexpected stories, which is available as a e-book, I believe, two stories that were found posthumously. One that would have been in Harlan, the now also late. Harlan Ellison's last dangerous visions, two or three. And so that story has been finally published and another story of hers got unearthed. And so I finally got a chance to catch up on those. You know, I can't think of anything off the top of my head, I'm sorry. Only two or three. Those two are great in this. Okay. Nora, thank you. I really, really enjoyed this and everybody should read your books and build some worlds. And I'm really, really grateful for you taking the time and being willing to do this experiment with me. Thank you. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you to Nora Jemison for being here. Thank you to LVU for being here. If you enjoy the show, please rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're doing your podcast listening. It really does help. Thank you to my producer, Jillian Weinberger, my engineer, Griffin Tanner. The "Sweep Clancho" is a Vox Media podcast production and we'll be back in a couple of days.