Worldbuilding for Masochists worldbuildingformasochists

Massive worlds require massive worldbuilding -- or do they? Sometimes, a narrower, character-centric scope can create a tight and compelling narrative while still crafting an expansive world. Guest Rebecca Roanhorse joins us to discuss how knowing your characters can help you konw your world.
What does it mean to let character lead worldbuilding? How does that define your scope and how much worldbuilding you show the reader? How does this change wth a single versus a multi- POV story? When you let character lead, how do you avoid a world that feels like it was constructed solely to be an obstacle course for that one character to move through? We discuss technique for all this and more!
Sidebar: It's still Hugo voting season! You've got until Saturday, 20th July 2024, 20:17 GMT to vote -- and you can vote as long as you become a Glasgow 2024 member by then. We are again on the ballot for Best Fancast, and we would love your consideration!
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Our Guest: Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times bestselling and Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer. She has published multiple award-winning short stories and novels, including two novels in The Sixth World Series, Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, Race to the Sun for the Rick Riordan imprint, and the epic fantasy trilogy Between Earth and Sky. She has also written for Marvel Comics and games (Echo, She-Hulk, Werewolf By Night, MoonKnight, and Chee’ilth) and for television, including FX’s A Murder at the End of the World, and the Marvel series Echo for Disney+. She has had her own work optioned by Amazon Studios, Netflix, and AMC Studios. 
Find her Fiction & Non-Fiction HERE.
She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pup. She drinks a lot of black coffee. Find more at https://rebeccaroanhorse.com/ and on Instagram at @RebeccaRoanhorse.

"Traditional" fantasy novels often hold themselves to a pre-gunpowder/pre-steampower level of tech. So, what’s fun about setting a fantasy world in an era that has anything from the printing press to cell phones? Guest Hana Lee joins us to explore incorporating the technological into the magical world!
How can the harnessing of magic be similar to or dissimilar from channeling other kinds of power, like electricity? What story-driving tensions and conflicts can arise from eras of rapid change? And what sort of unholy terror might you create if you introduce magitech-bros into a world?
As a sidebar: It's Hugo voting season! And the voting packet is absolutely stuffed with amazing reading, listening, and viewing material. All ballots must be received by Saturday, 20th July 2024, 20:17 GMT -- and you can vote as long as you become a Glasgow 2024 member by then! We are again on the ballot for Best Fancast, and we would love your consideration!
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Our Guest: Hana Lee is a biracial Korean American fantasy author. By day, she makes her living as a software engineer. She's always loved the dark, the gothic, and the occult, so there's usually a picturesque ruin of some kind lurking in the background of her novels. 
Her childhood was spent trekking across the United States, from Southern California to the Midwest and back to the West Coast again. She generally considers her hometown to be Portland, OR, mostly because it's home to her favorite bookstore (Powell's Books). She graduated from Stanford University with her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science in 2018. Her family includes a partner and two ridiculously fluffy cats. They live in sunny Mountain View, CA, a stone's throw from Google HQ. 
Hana's debut novel, ROAD TO RUIN, will be published by Saga Press in spring 2024. 

Making fantasy worlds into living, growing worlds means giving them a history of change and growth and shifts in technology and culture, not to mention governments and borders.  We talk about building history, historical ages and generational shifts, as well as diving into what are the historical ages in the world of the MNG, and how has it grown?
Also! It is Hugo Award voting time! And we would love your consideration for Best Fancast.
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It's been a while since we spent some time in the world of the MNG! So in this episode, we apply some topics from recent episodes as well as some worldbuilding staples to the cultures we've been developing in our ongoing co-created world. We play with nifty biology! We consider the monstrous! We think about love and education and phases of growth!
How does Mirraden conceputalize and use the Gates? What is courtship like in Fjallanir? What legends scare a Griastan? In this episode, we do some applied worldbuiding!
Also! It is Hugo Award voting time! And we would love your consideration for Best Fancast.
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Critters, creatures, and things that crawl -- part of the fun of building a new world is getting to populate it with not just sapient characters, but all the flora and fauna. And sometimes, that means the things you find in the smallest corners and crevices. Guest Premee Mohamed joins us to talk about the role of bugs and other biology in worldbuilding!
Bugs are a critical part of our world, performing so many essential functions that we never think about and that writers often neglect -- so, why is that? Where does our tendency towards squeamishness about bugs overlap with fears of body horror -- and how have SFF stories magnified those fears to create memorable antagonists like Xenomorphs and monsters like Shelob? How can a worldbuilder think about the health of their whole ecosystem, from those itsy-bitsy bugs all the way up to the apex predators -- and if the health of the ecosystem reflects the health of the world, how can that provide some good plot hooks for characters? All this and many, many scientific factoids are packed into this episode!
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Our Guest: Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. Currently, she is the Edmonton Public Library writer-in-residence and an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod. She is the author of the 'Beneath the Rising' series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on her website at www.premeemohamed.com. 

From the Minotaur to xenomorphs to the undead, monsters and their ilk have long been a staple of the sci-fi and fantasy genres. But what exactly is it that makes a monster? Guest John Wiswell joins us to discuss how monsters in fiction often reflect not only our primal fears, but also the people that society seeks to Other. When monsters reflect what a real or fictitious society values and doesn't value, what sorts of things do writers need to consider when placing monsters in their world?
In this episode, we explore how, while monsters can sometimes just be plot obstacles for Our Heroes to overcome, they can also be coded -- intentionally or as a matter of unconscious bias -- in the same ways that disability, poverty, non-heteronormative sexuality, and other marginalized populations get coded. We also pull apart the idea of recontextualizing monsters: As is often said of Frankenstein and his creation -- who's really the monster? Who's the true beast?
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Our Guest: John Wiswell is an American science fiction and fantasy author whose short fiction has won the Locus and Nebula Awards and been a finalist for the Hugo, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. His debut fantasy novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, will be released in spring 2024 by DAW Books.
John's work has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, LeVar Burton Reads, Nature Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, the No Sleep podcast, Nightmare Magazine, Cast of Wonders, Podcastle, Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and other fine venues. His fiction has been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Romanian.
He graduated Bennington College in 2005, and attended the Viable Paradise 17 workshop in 2013. He has multiple disabilities including a neuromuscular syndrome, and thinks healthy people's capacity to complain is very funny. He finds a lot of things very funny and would like to keep it that way.
He is frequently available for interview and for talks at conferences. He has done panels at places such as Worldcon, the Nebula Awards, and the World Fantasy Convention.
He posted fiction daily on this blog for six straight years, and has left every embarrassing and inspiring word of it up to read for free. If you'd like to see a writer develop style, it's all there. You can point and laugh. He probably can't hear you.