Sev­eral weeks ago I lis­tened to a pod­cast of Aliette’s short story enti­tled Immer­sion.  Immer­sion is a smart deeply lay­ered piece of fic­tion that spoke to me on so many lev­els, and judg­ing by the com­ments made at the Clarkesworld web­site, it touched many oth­ers as well.  Imag­ine how happy I was that Aliette agreed to write this guest post.

Aliette de Bodard

I want to talk about world­build­ing. It’s a sub­ject that’s been on my mind a lot lately; it’s the basis for much of Sci­ence Fic­tion and Fantasy–to cre­ate new worlds and play­ing grounds against which the sto­ries can unfold [1]. The thing is, about world­build­ing just as much as fic­tion, is that it doesn’t hap­pen in a vac­uum, and for two reasons.

The first is the most obvi­ous one: world­build­ing, which is done by the writer, pro­duces a world that is under the con­trol of the writer.

Some of the fea­tures of this world are a con­scious deci­sion: I can decide to make a world deeply inequal­i­tar­ian to women in order to explore what it would mean for women’s rights. But other fea­tures aren’t. Oth­ers sim­ply reflect the writer’s views and beliefs: for instance, I have trou­ble envi­sion­ing worlds in which fam­ily doesn’t loom large, because I believe that fam­ily is impor­tant; and my worlds always tend to have zones where cul­tures min­gle and merge and fight each other, because it’s also part of my fun­da­men­tal beliefs that cul­tures will always inter­act in that fash­ion, and also that such zones are more inter­est­ing to me as a writer than other parts of the universe.

The world you build is shaped by your beliefs; and while some of those beliefs are per­sonal and deeply con­sid­ered, oth­ers are much less con­sid­ered. Oth­ers are sim­ply reflec­tions of the society/sub-society you move through. Take, for instance, my faith ver­sus my deep dis­like and cyn­i­cism of nation­al­ism. One is a process that was weighed and con­sid­ered and reflected upon, and I’m gen­er­ally aware of it when I’m writ­ing. The other is a knee-jerk reflex–because I’ve always been told, as I was grow­ing up, that nation­al­ism caused the dis­as­ters of the 20th Cen­tury from the World Wars to colo­nial­ism, and it’s a belief that is shared by main­stream French soci­ety.
The sec­ond rea­son is also obvi­ous: fic­tion impacts the world.

Let’s clar­ify this: I don’t believe that I, as an indi­vid­ual, can write a book that will cause mea­sur­able shifts in opin­ions and in actions; or even that my work as a whole will have that effect. I’m not that arro­gant. What I’m refer­ring to is the mass effect: the cumu­la­tive weight of books that all present the same vision of the world and that, by doing so, rein­force it. If all the books that you read and media that you con­sume all depict sex­ism as per­fectly accept­able, and women as hys­ter­i­cal over-emotional peo­ple; then they will also, some­where and on some level, cre­ate a lit­tle switch in your brain that goes, “oh, but sex­ism is per­fectly OK, and women are hys­ter­i­cal” (espe­cially, but not only, if you’re not a woman). Sim­i­larly, if all the books that you read present Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ties in the US as being obsessed with hier­ar­chi­cal author­ity and gen­er­ally infe­rior to forward-thinking white peo­ple, then there’s a great chance you’ll inte­grate some of that description–it can range from swal­low­ing that depic­tion whole and gen­uinely think­ing all Chinese-Americans are like that, or hav­ing doubts but uncon­sciously inte­grat­ing it as a trope in your reper­toire; or worse than that, being Chinese-American and still end up inter­nal­iz­ing the sheer racism of this pre­sen­ta­tion [2]. Again, let me clar­ify: I’m not say­ing fic­tion brain­washes you, or that it’s out­right pro­pa­ganda (though it can be); but sim­ply that the repeated pre­sen­ta­tion of a world­view causes peo­ple to inte­grate it into their thought pat­terns, one way or another.
There is also another, even more obvi­ous impact of books: they can hurt peo­ple. The worlds they present can make peo­ple feel excluded–reduced to the role of walk­ing clichés, of scream­ing women ready to be res­cued, of Amer­i­can Indi­ans mag­i­cally in tune with nature, of East Asian peo­ple being geeky and good at math and obsessed with aca­d­e­mic suc­cess… (and please don’t think that, as a writer, you can get away with “oh, but if you’re not happy, you should check out other books”. All too often, there are pre­cious few books that meet the cri­te­ria of, say, being set in Cam­bo­dia, or fea­tur­ing a main char­ac­ter who is, say, French-Algerian).

All of these together mean that writ­ers have respon­si­bil­i­ties. That they should think about what they’re putting into their worlds and where it’s com­ing from; and of where it’s going and what effect it will have on readers.

In par­tic­u­lar, there’s the prob­lem of how to derive inspi­ra­tion. It’s a com­mon (and human) process to derive SFF soci­eties from exist­ing ones, and mix and match bits and pieces from a vari­ety of places and times–what I call the patch­work process. Again, it’s a process that makes a lot of sense, because it’s hard to com­pletely make up some­thing from scratch (and some­thing that’s indeed com­pletely made up runs the risk of hav­ing no con­nec­tion to how things map out in real­ity). You take a caste soci­ety from India, and put it together with a man­darin exam­i­na­tion sys­tem like in China; and add a blood­thirsty reli­gion sim­i­lar to the Aztecs into the mix. Or you set your story in a world exactly like China, except that it has drag­ons. Or you imag­ine how mod­ern Viet­nam could give rise to a space-faring soci­ety.
The prob­lem is… in most cases, the sources of that inspi­ra­tion are still vis­i­ble. And this then becomes prob­lem­atic if you’ve fudged it too much but haven’t filed off the ser­ial num­bers enough. This can hap­pen if you’re set­ting a near-future story in India (where obvi­ously you can’t file off ser­ial num­bers too much, but have to use a caste sys­tem that can’t have evolved too much from the cur­rent one); or if you’re set­ting a fan­tasy in a his­tor­i­cal British Raj India (again, it’s hard to file off ser­ial num­bers). But there are more sub­tle occur­rences: if f your caste soci­ety is a car­i­ca­ture of the Indian one, but has kept the basic con­cepts and is still prac­ticed by peo­ple with Indian-sounding names on space sta­tions, then your inspi­ra­tion is trans­par­ent to every­one, and this can be a prob­lem. Like­wise if the pseudo-Chinese in your fan­tasy are all mar­tial arts mas­ters or mys­ti­cal sages. Thing is, you’ll say, “it’s just fic­tion, I made it all up, it doesn’t mat­ter”. But it does mat­ter. It does affect peo­ple. It can and does hurt.

There’s a line. Or sev­eral ones. There is a dif­fer­ence between get­ting your details wrong when you’re depict­ing a present-day or near-future India, and when you’re depict­ing a fan­tasy world derived from India: it’s obvi­ously much less dam­ag­ing to get things wrong in a fan­tasy world (at least as far as I’m con­cerned. Other people’s opin­ions might dif­fer), because there is less pre­tence of stick­ing to things that exist. Like­wise, there is obvi­ously a huge dif­fer­ence between a deriv­a­tive uni­verse per­pet­u­at­ing hor­ri­ble cul­tural appro­pri­a­tion (a book set in a his­tor­i­cal China entirely pop­u­lated by karate mas­ters, nin­jas and dragon-hunters [3]), and a uni­verse that puts together enough patch­work and bits and pieces to cre­ate some­thing entirely new and not appro­pria­tive (like Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Dark­ness, or even Kate Elliott’s Cold Steel, which is an alter­nate his­tory hugely depart­ing from our world and dif­fer­ent enough to avoid the deriv­a­tive issues). Prob­lem, of course, is it’s not a line. It’s a mov­ing and weav­ing tar­get; and every­one will have dif­fer­ing opin­ions of where to put it.

I have no easy answers, or glib pro­nounce­ments of truth. I don’t want to dis­cour­age world­build­ing, or to say that it’s a bad thing. Just that, like all things, it has heft and weight. Than it means things, and not only to you as a writer, but to the peo­ple you reach out to. And I think it’s a good and worth­while thing to be aware of the prob­lems behind world­build­ing, and to at least do your level best to avoid them.

(with thanks to Kate Elliott, for start­ing the discussion)

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[1] It’s also a sig­nif­i­cant com­po­nent of main­stream fic­tion, but that’s another sub­ject mat­ter alto­gether!
[2] I’m not Chinese-American. I picked the exam­ple because it’s likely to be well-known by read­ers, but I’m not speak­ing for that com­mu­nity, of course (that said, I have per­sonal expe­ri­ence of inter­nal­iz­ing racism against Asians, so I do know what it feels like and what the risks of such fic­tion are).
[3] Let me explain the basic con­cept of Asian drag­ons. To all intents and pur­poses, they occupy a spot in the mythol­ogy akin to angels. They’re benev­o­lent and pow­er­ful and grant prayers (and rain). They are NOT evil beast­ies that need to be hunted down and slain by knights. Those drag­ons slain in Chinese/Vietnamese sto­ries are gen­er­ally exe­cuted on the orders of Heaven and because they trans­gressed, not because some humans got a sword and a desire to prove their manhood.

*****

Aliette de Bodard, writer of fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion (and the very occa­sional hor­ror piece). Aliette has won the BSFA Award for Best Short Fic­tion, as well as Writ­ers of the Future. She has also been nom­i­nated for the Hugo, Neb­ula and Camp­bell Award.

Her Aztec mystery-fantasies, Ser­vant of the Under­world, Har­bin­ger of the Storm, and Mas­ter of the House of Darts, are pub­lished byAngry Robot, world­wide.  The omnibus is now avail­able at Ama­zon.

Her short fic­tion has appeared or is forth­com­ing in a num­ber of venues, such as Inter­zone, Realms of Fan­tasy, Asimov’s, and The Year’s Best Sci­ence Fic­tion.

She lives in Paris, France, in a flat with more com­put­ers than she really needs, and uses her spare time to indulge in her love of mythol­ogy and history–as well as her love of cooking.

As a Franco-Vietnamese, Aliette has a strong inter­est in non-Western cul­tures, par­tic­u­larly the Aztecs, Ancient Viet­nam and Ancient China, and will gladly use any excuse to shoe­horn those into her short or long fiction.