How can language help shape your worldbuilding? We're not necessarily talking about conlang here -- that can certainly be part of worldbuilding, but it doesn't have to be, and many works of speculative fiction manage perfectly fine without invented languages. But the words you choose in description and dialogue will also communicate something to your reader.

There are so many ways that words can create the vibes for your world: the aural quality of different languages, choosing character and place names, the cadence and flow of sentences, and the conscious emulation of other genres or eras. We also explore what the conceptual availability of certain ideas, technologies, or worldviews may mean for the vocabulary, idioms, and metaphors of a culture. Being very intentional about word choice can help a writer communicate a location's aesthetic, let a reader know what to expect from a book's tone, help reveal character through dialogue, and even drop information about all your other worldbuilding in quick and subtle ways. And since we are huge word nerds, we delight in examining all of it!

The episode begins, however, with a 15-minute diversion into how much we love Shakespeare, so -- enjoy that! And happy birthday, Bill!

We are also delighted to announce that we are, for the fifth year in a row, a Finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fancast! Anyone who has a WSFS membership for this year can vote, and we would love your consideration. Membership costs $50 and gets you access to the voters' packet, digital versions of almost everything you'll find on the Finalists lists -- novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, poetry, and even audio and video.

[Transcript for Episode 153 -- Thank you, Scribes!]

Sometimes, people will say of a book that "the setting is another character". But what does that really mean, and how can a writer craft it? Ai Jiang joins us to discuss creating worlds and settings that have their own personalities! From the physical geography to the architecture, from the scale of the location to its dynamism, writers can make a lot of choices to make their setting feel unlike any other.

The setting can do a lot to set the mood and tone of a story. Is it bright and peppy, or dark and gloomy? What's the vibe? The overlap between setting and aesthetic can be quite high, communicating a lot to your reader about what they might expect from the story and characters.

We also often talk about how characters are the products of their circumstances -- and that means they're also products of their surroundings! What about the physical space that they exist in, or have existed in during their life, has shaped them?

[Transcript for Episode 152]

Our Guest: Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, The Masters Review, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of A Palace Near the Wind, Linghun and I AM AI. Find her on X (@AiJiang_), Insta (@ai.jian.g), and online (http://aijiang.ca). 

In amazing fantasy and science fiction worlds -- Who's doing the work? Where does the food come from? The clothes? Who does the caregiving? Guest august clarke joins us to discuss the hands and bodies that create a society.

Labor is something that’s often sort of invisible in stories if it’s not explicitly the driving focus of a book – So, why is that? How can authors better incorporate labor into their worlds? Labor intersects with so many other components of a world, after all: ideas about currency and property, concepts of time, religion, social class, technology. With labor touching so much of our characters' lives, where do we use SFF to examine & explore our world’s labor issues, and where can we get creative and try to imagine escaping dominant paradigms?

[Transcript for Episode 151]

About Our Guest: august clarke is here and queer, etc. They have been published in PRISM international, Portland Review, and Eidolon. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction and a Locus Award, Dragon Award, and Pushcart nominee. They researched queerness, labor, and monstrosity at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the indie-bestselling series The Scapegracers, which he writes as H. A. Clarke.

Worldbuilding means getting to “play god” – so how does that take a different shape when you’re part of a pantheon rather than the One True Ruler of your world? Xen, Matt Roen, and Sara Wile, the creative trio behind Midst, a surreal sci-fi fantasy audio drama now produced by Critical Role Productions, join us to discuss co-creating a world and the stories that happen within it!

When working as a team, how do you divide the labor? What's the balance of talents on your team, and how can you best get those skills to flow together? Words, art, sounds, shapes, motion -- all these tools can help to tell a larger story. How is co-worldbuilding for an audio drama like or unlike other forms of cooperative storytelling, like theater, gaming, and immersive experiences? We also discuss the joy of crafting the intricate details of a world and how creating the tiny details can actually communicate a great deal about the worldbuilding.

[Transcript for Episode 150 -- Thanks, Scribes!]

Our Guests: The trio (also known as Third Person) are master world-builders. Their newest series in the Midst Cosmos, UNEND, takes listeners on a cosmic journey with an unconventional crew aboard a mysterious, supernatural ship—a story with the adventurous, space-western spirit of Firefly. The story combines psychological depth, moral ambiguity, and unexpected humor, brought to life by their unique collaborative process. They divide creative roles—Xen (sounds), Sara (pictures), and Matt (words)—yet approach every stage of worldbuilding as a team.

The Midst Cosmos is the surreal, reality-bending, sci-fantasy setting of our three standalone series: Midst, Moonward: A Midst Roleplaying Story, and our new addition UNEND.

Talking place several decades after the events of Midst and Moonward, UNEND focuses on a supernatural ship and a remarkable crew set forth on an expedition to explore the highest heights, deepest depths, and furthest reaches of the known cosmos. But their journey is fraught with peril as they discover truths and realities far stranger than any of them could ever have imagined.

You can listen to all three series now on your favorite podcast app and on the Midst Podcast YouTube channel! OR if you want to unlock bonus content like music, art downloads, AMAs with the narrators, AND support the story, we invite you to Join the Fold at Midst.co!

What happens when the world your characters -- or your readers -- first find themselves in turns out to be not quite what it appears? Marina Lostetter joins us to explore the different ways that a writer can play with an unreliable world. Maybe it means a story of scientific discovery that reshapes how their characters perceive their place in the universe; maybe it means a story where information has been deliberately suppressed and has to be fought for; maybe it's a world where knowledge has simply been lost and must be recovered. It could even mean a world that is, itself, changing as the story goes on!

What are the challenges for on-boarding readers to an unreliable world? How is it different in a story that starts in what seems to be our modern real world and then reveals the Matrix or a portal universe versus a story that begins in a fantasy world, so that the author has to get the reader up to speed on that before they can start introducing the world's secrets? What role does self-mythologizing play at both the personal and the societal level? How about the pressure of a character maintaining a lie, either for themself, someone else, or their whole nation? Building these things may mean thinking about your world in layers of who knows what -- and how easy or difficult it is to peel back those layers.

We also wrangle with the difficulty in combining an unreliable world with an unreliable narrator. Characters lying to teach other is one thing -- but a narrative lying to the reader or viewer is a riskier choice! It can be beautiful when done well -- but it can also be a breach of trust that impairs the overall story.

[Transcript for Episode 149]

About Our Guest: The open skies and dense forests of the Pacific Northwest are ideal for growing speculative fiction authors–or, at least, Marina would like to think so. Originally from Oregon, she now resides in Arkansas with her spouse, Alex. In her spare time she enjoys globetrotting, board games, and all things art-related. Her original short fiction has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, Uncanny, and Shimmer Magazine.  Her space opera trilogy NOUMENON and the stand-alone space adventure ACTIVATION DEGRADATION are available from Harper Voyager.  The first two books in her first dark fantasy trilogy, THE HELM OF MIDNIGHT and THE CAGE OF DARK HOURS, are out from Tor. In addition, she has written tie-in materials for Star Citizen and the Aliens franchise. She is represented by DongWon Song of the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and she skeets on Bluesky as @MarinaLostetter.

In honor of Valentine's Day, the season of Carnivale, and our own amusement, we bring to you this extra-long episode, where we heat things up and get a little down and dirty with our worldbuilding. What role does sex play in the world you're building -- and how do you depict that?

This comes up a lot, obviously, in romantasy and other related subgenres, but even if that's not what you're writing, sexuality and gender dynamics are still part of whatever world your characters inhabit! So what's the dominant paradigm of sexual relations in your world? How sex-positive or puritanical are they? How queernorm? How monogamous or expansive in their ideas of relationships? What physical attributes, clothing styles, or acts do they find particularly sexy? And how accepting or judgmental are they of desires that fall outside that paradigm?

We also wrangle with the craft of how to portray these things on the page. How do you decide what amount of "on-screen" spice feels right for this particular story? How explicit do you get, and what words do you choose for that? And even in non-sexy scenes, how much word count do you spend on cluing readers in to the ways in which your world's sexual mores might not match their assumptions?

[Transcript for Episode 148]

Mythological retellings have been having A Moment in fiction for a few years now. So, why do we do that? Kritika H. Rao joins us to explore the power and agency inherent in recontextualizing mythology for a modern readership! What is it that we reclaim or rediscover in retelling these stories for ourselves? And, on the other end of the scale, how can the retelling of ancient stories sometimes be weaponized and politicized for a specific purpose?

When it comes to respinning our world's mythology for a novel, authors may find themselves caught somewhere between the constraints of readers' expectations and the abundant freedom that the myths themselves may present. Myths frequently do not adhere to the supposed rules of either storytelling or worldbuilding: things happen because they happen, or because gods, and plot threads don't always resolve as we would expect them to elsewhere.

And if you're building your own pantheon and mythology for your fantasy world, how do you go about that? What kinds of things would the people in your society choose to tell stories about? What are the things they most want to explain to themselves and use as a vessel to pass along their values and traditions? Just as we examine the role of myths in our own history and society, we can apply that examination to our invented worlds as well!

[Transcript TK]

Our Guest: Kritika H. Rao is a speculative and children’s fiction author, who has lived in India, Australia, Canada, and The Sultanate of Oman. Whether writing for younger audiences or adults, Kritika’s stories are influenced by her lived experiences, and explore themes of self vs. the world, identity, and the nature of consciousness. When she is not writing, she is probably making lists. She drops in and out of social media; you might catch her on Instagram @KritikaHRao. Visit her online at www.kritikahrao.com. 

The world a character exists in shapes their identity on many axes of power and privilege. So how do those various scales affect the emotional stakes of the story they find themselves in? Guest Sophie Burnham joins us to discuss building a world that suits the characters you have in your head!

As a writer who starts with character first, Burnham answers questions about their world after they know who their characters are and what dynamics drive them. If that's your style, how do you then build a world that makes sense for them to exist in -- whether they're in sync with the dominant paradigms of their world or in conflict with the systems that rule them? How do you determine things like class structure, technology levels, clothing, and more? How do the world's problems and the characters' problems intertwine and inform each other? Worldbuilding can be an excellent way to define the obstacles that face your character--and the solutions they find for them!

[Transcript TK]

Our Guest: Sophie (they/them) is the author of the Ex Romana trilogy. The first novel, Sargassa, is now available wherever books are sold.

They have been a participating writer in—and the script doctor behind—multiple studio film and television projects. They’re a recovering theatre kid with a BFA in Acting from Syracuse University. Sophie lives with their dog on an island in Rhode Island, which is not an island.

And obviously the answer is yes! But in this episode, we answer your questions! We talk about the "rules" and common advice of worldbuilding -- and the ways in which we merrily ignore, redefine, or defy them. We pull apart some techniques related to the craft of communicating worldbuilding to a reader and how to achieve balance within a story. We do some shop talk about the publishing world. And we give you our very important opinions about unicorns.

We also do a little recap of 2024! From novels and novellas to getting the Traveling Light anthology out to meeting up in Scotland, we did some things! What will come in 2025? Well... Keep listening to the podcast, and you'll find out along with us!

[Transcript for Episode 145]

How do the people in your world learn things? Lessons learned might come from formalized institutions, but knowledge might also get passed down through families, through guilds and trade organizations, or through the wisdom whispered in a character's ear by the trees. A world's literacy rate will define a lot about how information gets transmitted, preserved, or altered over time. So who controls the access to information, and how do they enforce it?

We also poke at the perennially persistent trope of the magical school. How is magical education similar to or different from other forms of education in your society? Is it mandatory, to help control the danger that magic might present to society, or is it a privilege reserved for a very few? How about magical R&D -- How do people discover or develop new magic?

[Transcript for Episode 144]