Category: Worldbuilding
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The Magrathea Protocol, parts B3 and B4: further outward through the model
B3—out of the model: one story, many texts Moving outward through the model one step further, we can note that the story is not exhausted by the text: think of the way in which a text zooms in or out on the spatial or temporal detail of a story at various points along its plot-line.…
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The Magrathea Protocol, parts B1 and B2: the narratological labyrinth
B—the narratological labyrinth My starting point is, I think, fairly uncontroversial: all futures are narratives, of one sort of another. So, how do narratives work? For those who like to know where ideas originate, everything I’m discussing in this section is based on the narratological theory of Mieke Bal. I am using it as lightly…
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The Magrathea Protocol, part A: we’re all worldbuilders now
A—we’re all worldbuilders now (or: justifying a narratology of futures) Early drafts of this essay—and others before it!—were attempts to- explain the differences between different forms of futuring: narrative, experiential, &c. That aim informs the essay you are now reading, too, but through those drafts it became apparent that the easiest way to explore those…
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a fundamental shift in our understanding of where ecofiction might productively occur
Some interesting thoughts at LARB from one Martin Dolan on open-world games like the new Zelda as ecofictional media. I haven’t played any of the Zelda games—and as I remarked to Jay Springett a while back, I sometimes feel like the only person in the universe who has never been involved with that franchise, though…
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Futures Brought to Life, brought to life
That post on worldbuilding I wrote a little while back was fairly well received, which was gratifying—it’s always nice when people like a thing you wrote, of course, but it’s nicer still when the point you felt you were trying to make has been taken in the spirit in which you felt you were making…