I really loved this recent podcast with NK Jemisin and Ezra Klein wherein they do an abridged world building exercise – and while I’m loathe to just summarize someone else’s great ideas, I think I’d like to try and synthesize a point that they make here, or orbit around and perhaps don’t say quite explicitly.
Part of Jemisin’s world-building gifts is a really acute internal model of how the real world works – so that every time, in this world-building exercise, that Klein proposes a queer little quirk in the imagined world, Jemisin has an inference for it. If you have a people with tails, it’s because they must have lived in trees once. If you have people in a desert, part of their economy is going to be really advanced water-efficiency technologies. If, however, you have oppositional societies both in some degree of water scarcity, the society will face a lot of pressure to flaunt their abundance of water, using water gratuitous ways to tell the social story of how they’re superior to their neighbors.
Klein, coming from the world of journalism, hears all this inference and notes that his profession and Jemisin’s are perhaps more similar than he’d thought – that she must be a real student of human societies to develop the kind of sharp mental model of how the world works that she has, that she uses to inform her fantasy.
To which I’d just like to add the following implication – perhaps gratuitous but I felt underemphasized – that this implies something fascinating about how speculative literature functions as social critique, even when it doesn’t appear to be speaking to the real world at all. In building a world, one asks the question(s), “What would our world look like if we changed just X, Y, Z” – and we’re not making the answer up from whole cloth. We’re using a mental model we have of how this world works to predict the answer. If your mental model of the world is deeply Darwinist, you would make very different predictions about how a world with two advanced intelligent species might function than if you come from a Creationist kind of spiritual worldview, e.g.. In that sense, every speculative fiction is an implicit argument FOR the mental model that the author has of the real world. It’s all political in the sense that its predictions are based on a set of real-world political precepts.
Lots of other pearls in this podcast, and worth listening to if you like thinking about fiction or just how societies work.