Category: Worldbuilding

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Futures Brought to Life, brought to life

    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…

  • our experience as slaves to the everything machine can be changed

    Lots of chewy goodies in this thoughtful long thing from Christopher Butler. I need to sit with it for longer, perhaps, before I can get the best of it—it is very much a designer’s view of things, and while Some Of My Best Friends Are DesignersTM, it’s a perspective which, in order to see properly…

  • an apologia for worldbuilding

    We need to have a chat about worldbuilding. (I’m mostly talking to the futures people, here, rather than the literature people… but the latter may find it of interest anyway, so please stick around!) Your man Dré “Daily Design Fiction” Labre posted a little thing about the movie After Yang (which I have not seen).…